Note 5. (Page [53])

The Wallam-Olum (painted records) of the Leni Lenape Indians have often been called into question as regards their authenticity, but the evidence of Lederer, Humboldt, Heckewelder, Tanner, Loskiel, Beatty, and Rafinesque, all of whom professed to have seen them, rather discounts such unbelief in their existence. They consisted of picture-writings, or hieroglyphs, each of which applied to a whole verse, or many words. The ideas were, in fact, amalgamated in a compound system, and bear exactly the same relation to written language as the American tongues did to spoken language; that is, they were of an agglutinative type, a linguistic form where several words are welded into one. There are several series, one of which records the doings of the tribes immediately subsequent to the Creation. Another series relates to their doings in America, and consists of seven songs, four of sixteen verses of four words each, and three of twenty verses of three words each “It begins at the arrival in America,” says Rafinesque (“The American Nations”), “and is continued without hardly any interruption till the arrival of the European colonists towards 1600.” But this second series is a mere meagre catalogue of kings.

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Table of Contents

[PREFACE][3]
[THE POPOLVUH][5]
[The First Book][9]
[The Myth of Vukub-Cakix][11]
[The Second Book][15]
[The Third Book][23]
[The Fourth Book][27]
[COSMOGONY OFTHE “POPOL VUH”][29]
[Kiché and Mexican Mythology][34]
[THE PANTHEON OFTHE “POPOL VUH”][36]
[The Vukub-Cakix Myth][41]
[Book II. commented upon][42]
[The Harrying of Xibalba][46]
[Book III. commented upon][50]
[Early Spanish Authors and the “PopolVuh”][53]
[Evidence of Metrical Composition][54]
[BIBLIOGRAPHICALAPPENDIX][57]
[I][57]
[II][59]
[NOTES][61]
[Note 1. (Page 8)][61]
[Note 2. (Page 8)][61]
[Note 3. (Page 9)][62]
[Note 4. (Page 13)][62]
[Note 5. (Page 53)][63]

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