[793] Hist. Nations Civilisées, i. 37, 150, etc. Popul Vuh, introd., sec. v. Bancroft relates the Votan myth, with references, in Nat. Races, iii. 450. Brasseur identifies the Votanites with the Colhuas, as the builders of Palenqué, the founders of Xibalba, and thinks a branch of them wandered south to Peru. There are some stories of even pre-Votan days, under Igh and Imox. Cf. H. De Charency’s “Myth d’Imos,” in the Annales de philosophie Chrétienne, 1872-73, and references in Bancroft, v. 164, 231.
[794] Native Races, ii. 121, etc.
[795] Bancroft (v. 236) points to Bradford, Squier, Tylor, Viollet-le-Duc, Bartlett, and Müller, with Brasseur in a qualified way, as in the main agreeing in this early disjointing of the Nashua stock, by which the Maya was formed through separation from the older race.
[796] Enforced, for instance, by one of the best of the later Mexican writers, Orozco y Berra, in his Geografía de las lenguas y Carta Ethnografica de México (Mexico, 1865).
[797] Tylor, Anahuac, 189, and his Early Hist. Mankind, 184. Orozco y Berra, Geog., 124. Bancroft, v. 169, note. The word Maya was first heard by Columbus in his fourth voyage, 1503-4. We sometimes find it written Mayab. It is usual to class the people of Yucatan, and even the Quiché-Cakchiquels of Guatemala and those of Nicaragua, under the comprehensive term of Maya, as distinct from the Nahua people farther north.
[798] Nat. Races, v. 186.
[799] Brinton, with his view of myths, speaks of the attempt of the Abbé Brasseur to make Xibalba an ancient kingdom, with Palenqué as its capital, as utterly unsupported and wildly hypothetical (Myths, 251).
[800] Perhaps by Gucumatz (who is identified by some with Quetzalcoatl), leading the Tzequiles, who are said to have appeared from somewhere during one of Votan’s absences, and to have grown into power among the Chanes, or Votan’s people, till they made Tulan, where they lived, too powerful for the Votanites. Bancroft (v. 187) holds this view against Brasseur.
[801] Perhaps Ococingo, or Copan, as Bancroft conjectures (v. 187).
[802] As Sahagún calls it, meaning, as Bancroft suggests, Tabasco.