The British Museum recently acquired the collection of pottery and other relics discovered by Mr. Hubert Myring in the Chimcana Valley of Peru and stated by him to be at the lowest estimate 7000 years old. Yet this pottery shows the highest possible degree of skill, while the subjects represented prove that the artists had the materials of a highly cultured and complex civilization to draw upon.
In Ecuador Dr. Marshall H. Saville of Columbia University discovered many tombs, and the objects collected show that the district was densely populated by a highly civilized people.
Writing from New Orleans, May 13, Charles F. Lummis of Los Angeles records his excavations at Quiriguá, Guatemala. A trackless jungle had to be cleared, and numerous monuments of heroic size were found; one was twenty-six feet above ground and sixteen feet below and weighed about 140,000 pounds. The greatest discovery was a palace which must have been magnificent. It was surrounded by columns and the frieze was covered with carved heads.
The ruined temples of Palenque, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, etc., have often been described. The mysterious hieroglyphics of the Mayas have yet to be deciphered; and when they are we shall have another epoch-making revelation like that following the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion.
Dr. Heath, a writer on Peruvian Antiquities, gives an account of the incredible size and quantity of the ruins, from which the following is selected. (See Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, Nov. 1878)
The coast of Peru extends from Tumbez to the river Loa, a distance of 1233 miles. Scattered over this whole extent there are thousands of ruins ... while nearly every hill and spire of the mountains have upon them or about them some relic of the past; and in every ravine, from the coast to the central plateau, there are ruins of walls, cities, fortresses, burial vaults, and miles and miles of terraces and water-courses.... Of granite, porphyritic lime and silicated sandstone, these massive colossal cyclopean structures have resisted the disintegration of time, geological transformations, earthquakes, and the sacrilegious destructive hand of the warrior and treasure-seeker. The masonry composing these walls, temples, houses, towers, fortresses, or sepulchres, is uncemented, held in place by the incline of the walls from the perpendicular, and by the adaptation of each stone to the place designed for it, the stones having from six to many sides, each dressed and smoothed to fit another or others with such exactness that the blade of a small penknife cannot be inserted in any of the seams thus formed.... These stones ... vary from one-half cubic foot to 1500 cubic feet of solid contents, and if in the many many millions of stones you could find one that would fit in the place of another, it would be purely accidental.
Speaking of the terraces, he says:
Estimating five hundred ravines in the 1200 miles of Peru, and ten miles of terraces of fifty tiers to each ravine, which would only be five miles of twenty-five tiers to each side, we have 250,000 miles of stone wall, averaging three to four feet high—enough to encircle this globe ten times.
The mention of hieroglyphs yet undeciphered, which may any day prove the key to a new revelation of history, receives apposite illustration in an article in the Los Angeles Times (Sunday magazine edition) for May 14. This describes the discovery of several cylinders, resembling the clay cylinders of Babylonian civilization, which have been deciphered; and it is thought that these may prove the Rosetta stone of American Egypt. They are about three inches long by an inch and a half in diameter, hollow, the walls a quarter of an inch thick. The clay has turned to stone, thus being preserved, and the inscriptions repeat hieroglyphs known to correspond to familiar phrases.
The account in which this occurs is that of a discovery made by Prof. William Niven, a field archaeologist of Mexico City; and his statements as to the age and value of his finds are confirmed by Dr. Edward E. Seler, head of the National School of Archaeology of the Republic of Mexico. The latter authority declares the ruins and relics to be the evidences of a civilization new to archaeology, though bearing some resemblance to the ruins of the Tigris and Euphrates. This center of civilization lies about forty minutes' ride from Mexico City, under the suburb of Azcapotzalco.