The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

Many intricately derived meanings of the name Maya have been offered. The most obvious, however, is the direct translation. Ma means “not” and ya means “emotion,” “grief,” “tiresome,” or “difficult.” The combination means, “not arduous,” “not severe.” We know that the Mayas frequently alluded to their country as the Land of the Deer and the Land of the Wild Turkey— U-Lumil-Ceh, U-Lumil-Cutz. “Maya,” therefore, may quite likely have been descriptive of the region as a pleasant, comfortable place of residence. Juan Martinez, who knows the Indian and the language, present and past, as no one else, once said to me: “Work and grief are synonymous to the native mind. Work is grief to the Indian; therefore a land of no grief and no sorrow may well mean a land of no work.” However, any explanation of the derivation of so ancient a name is little more than surmise.

According to one myth, the Mayas came over the sea from the east, under the leadership of a hero-deity, Itzamna; hence the name “Itzas” as applied to a part, at least, of the Mayas. In the Maya books Itzamna is represented as an old man with one tooth and a sunken jaw. His glyph or sign is his pictured profile, together with a sign of night, the sign of food, and two or three feathers.

The more credible legend refers to an immigration from the west or north, under a chieftain named Kukul Can. There are reasons for believing that this legend may be founded upon fact. It is mentioned in several of the most ancient of the surviving Maya records and in the testimony of a number of well-versed natives at the time of the Conquest. Farther up the coast, north of Vera Cruz, is another branch of the Maya family called the Huastecs, while in Central America, through Honduras, Guatemala, and even in Costa Rica, are present-day Maya tribes and ruins of ancient Maya civilization. Also, there is a close similarity between the Kukul Can legend and the Aztec annals, indicating a common origin. Everything points to the probability of a remote great migration of their common ancestors from the north.

The Aztec tradition is particularly interesting and describes the arrival by boat of several different tribes at the mouth of the Panuco River, which spot the Aztecs called Panatolan, meaning “where one arrives by sea.” The expedition was headed by the supreme leader, Mexitl, chief of the Mexicans, with whom were other chieftains and their followers. They traveled on down the coast as far as Guatemala, and some turned back and settled at various places along the shore. On this journey an intoxicating drink was originated by one Mayanel, whose name means “clever woman.”[1] There is a possibility that “Maya” is derived from her name. At any rate, one tribal chief, Huastecatl, imbibed too freely and cast aside his garments while intoxicated. His shame was so great when he realized what he had done that he gathered his tribe, the Huastecas, and returned with them to Panatolan and settled there.

Landa says in his book that some old men of Yucatan related to him the story, handed down for many generations, that the first settlers had come from the east by water. These voyagers were ones “whom God had freed, opening for them twelve roads to the sea.” If there is any truth in this tradition, these progenitors may have been one of the lost tribes of Israel. An interesting side light on this hypothesis is the distinctly Semitic cast of countenance of some of the ancient sculptures and murals found at Chi-chen Itza and in other old Maya cities. The dignity of face and serene poise of these carved or painted likenesses is strikingly Hebraic.[2]

While we are in the field of conjecture, we may as well consider the old Greek myth of the lost continent of Atlantis. From the geological point of view, it is not impossible. The whole of Yucatan is low and was once the bottom of the sea, as is indicated by its surface rock and sand. Furthermore, the stretching out of the Antilles as though to form a bridge with the Azores, and the shallowness of the intervening Atlantic Ocean, lends plausibility to the idea that there may have been a cataclysmic upheaval of the ocean-bed during some past era, and not long ago, geologically speaking—an upheaval which created the land of Yucatan and caused what was land to the eastward to sink beneath the level of the Atlantic. What is more natural to suppose than that in some prehistoric period the lost continent of Atlantis did exist and proved an easy means of passage between Europe and America?

The mist-enshrouded history of the migrations of ancient people, the crossing and recrossing of their pilgrimages and of their blood, is a fascinating study, but one which tells us comparatively little that may be crystallized into fact. And so, in these various speculations as to the origin of the Mayas, no theory contains enough weight of evidence to warrant the assumption that it is the right one. It is, however, pretty clearly established from the ancient Maya writings and legends that there were two main immigrations, the greater one coming from the west or north and the lesser one from the east.

Emerging at last from the purely legendary, we reach the middle ground where the history of the Mayas is still unrecorded but where the word of mouth, as handed down from father to son, is more precise and has some relation to definite dates. Then we suddenly step over the threshold into the historical era.

The first recorded date, which corresponds to 113 b.c., is on a statuette from the ancient city of Tuxtla, and there is some doubt as to whether our reading of this date is correct. The next inscription corresponds to 47 a.d., and here we are on sure ground. A monument in northern Guatemala contains a date prior to 160 a.d., at which point the ancient Maya Codices take up the history of the race and carry it on to the time of the Conquest. And even at this early time, the Mayas had hieroglyphic writings and were skilled in stone-carving and the erection of massive works of architecture. With the written Chronicles, the many hieroglyphed stones,—“precious stones,” I like to call them,—and the history of progress as indicated by the different periods of architecture and sculpture, we are able to verify and correlate most of the subsequent dates.

The written Maya records, without which our task of piecing together anything of their history would be almost impossible, are among the most interesting and valuable remains of this bygone civilization. The records are of two kinds. The first, the Codices, are the original texts, written in hieroglyphics. The second, the Chilan Balam, are written in the Maya language but with Spanish characters, and are chiefly transcripts from the more ancient records.