RUINED TEMPLE AT UXMAL.
After a cut in Ruge’s Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 357.
The ruins of Chichen-Itza make part of the eastern group of the Yucatan remains. As was not the case with some of the other principal ruins, the city in its prime has a record in Maya tradition; it was known in the days of the Conquest, and has not been lost sight of since,[1046] though its ruins were not visited by explorers till well within the present century, the first of whom, according to Stephens, was John Burke, in 1838. Stephens had heard of them and mentioned them to Friederichsthal, who was there in 1840 (Nouv. Annales des Voyages, xcii. 300-306). Norman was there in February, 1842 (Rambles, 104), and did not seem aware that any one had been there before him; and Stephens himself, during the next month (Yucatan, ii. 282), made the best record which we have. Charnay made his observations in 1858 (Ruines, 339,—cf. Anciens Villes, ch. 18), and gives us nine good photographs. The latest discoverer is Le Plongeon, whose investigations were signalized by the finding (1876) of the statue of Chackmool, and by other notable researches (Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1877; October, 1878).[1047]
FROM CHICHEN-ITZA.
After a cut in Squier’s Serpent Symbol. There are two of these rings in the walls of one of the buildings twenty or thirty feet from the ground. They are four feet in diameter. Cf. Stephens’s Yucatan, ii. 304; Bancroft, iv. 230.
FROM CHICHEN-ITZA.
A bas-relief, one of the best preserved at Chichen-Itza, after a sketch in Charnay and Viollet-le-Duc’s Cités et Ruines Américaines (Paris, 1863), p. 53, of which Viollet-le-Duc says: “Le profil du guerrier se rapproche sensiblement les types du Nord de l’Europe.”