“Yantac thun yetel paiche tu pachob, he hunppel thune hunppel bin haabe, uaix cappele cappel bin haabe, uaix oxppel thuun, ua canppel thuune, canppel binbe, uaix oxppel thuun baixan; he paichee yan yokol xane, ua hunppel paichee, hoppel haab bin; ua cappel paichee lahunppiz bin; uaix hunppel paichee yan yokol xane, ua yan hunppel thuune uacppel bin be; uaix cappel thuune yan yokol paichee uucppel bin be; ua oxppel thuun yan yokole, uaxppel binbe; uaixcanppel thun yan yokole paichee (bolonppel binbe); yanix thun yokol (cappel) paichee buluc piz; uaix cappel thune lahcapiz; ua oxppel thuun, oxlahunpiz.”

“They (our ancestors) used (for numerals in their calendars) dots and lines back of them; one dot for one year, two dots for two years, three dots for three, four dots for four, and so on; in addition to these they used a line; one line meant five years, two lines ten years; if one line and above it one dot, six years; if two dots above the line, seven years; if three dots above, eight; if four dots above the line, nine; a dot above two lines, eleven; if two dots, twelve; if three dots, thirteen.”48-1

The plan of using the numerals in Maya differs somewhat from that in English.

In the first place, they are rarely named without the addition of a numeral particle, which is suffixed. These particles indicate the character or class of the objects which are, or are about to be, enumerated. When they are uttered, the hearer at once knows what kind of objects are to be spoken of. Many of them can be traced to a meaning which has a definite application to a class, and they have analogues in European tongues. Thus I may say “seven head of”—and the hearer knows that I am going to speak of cattle, or sheep, or cabbages, or similar objects usually counted by heads. So in Maya ac means a turtle or a turtle shell; hence it is used as a particle in counting canoes, houses, stools, vases, pits, caves, altars, and troughs, and some general appropriateness can be seen; but when it is applied also to cornfields, the analogy seems remote.

Of these numeral particles, not less than seventy-six are given by Beltran, in his Grammar, and he does not exhaust the list. Of these piz and pel, both of which mean, single, singly, are used in counting years, and will frequently recur in the annals I present in this volume.

By their aid another method of numeration was in vogue for counting time. For “eighty-one years,” they did not say hutuyokal haab, but can kal haab catac hunpel haab, literally, “four score years and one year.” The copulative catac is also used in adding a smaller number to a bak, or 400, as for 450, hun bak catac lahuyoxkal, “one bak and ten toward the third score.” Catac is a compound of ca tac, ca meaning “then” or “and,” and tac, which Dr. Berendt considered to be an irregular future of talel, to come, “then will come fifty,” but which may be the imperative of tac (tacah, tace, third conjugation), which means to put something under another, as in the phrase tac ex che yalan cum, put you wood under the pot.

It will be seen that the latter method is by addition, the former by subtraction. Another variety of the latter is found in the annals. For instance, “ninety-nine years” is not expressed by bolonlahutuyokal haab, nor yet by cankal haab catac bolonlahunpel haab, but by hunpel haab minan ti hokal haab, “one single year lacking from five score years.”

§ 7. The Calendar.

The system of computing time adopted by the Mayas is a subject too extensive to be treated here in detail, but it is indispensable, for the proper understanding of their annals, that the outlines of their chronological scheme be explained.

The year, haab, was intended to begin on the day of the transit of the sun by the zenith, and was counted from July 16th. It was divided into eighteen months, u (u, month, moon), of twenty days, kin (sun, day, time), each. The days were divided into groups of five, as follows:—

The months, in their order, were:—

As the Maya year was of 365 days, and as 18 months of 20 days each counted only 360 days, there were five days intervening between the last of the month Cumku and the first day of the following year. These were called “days without names,” xma kaba kin (xma, without, kaba, names, kin, days), an expression not quite correct, as they were named in regular order, only they were not counted in any month.

It will be seen, by glancing at the list of days, that this arrangement brought at the beginning of each year, the days Kan, Muluc, Ix and Cauac in turn, and that no other days could begin the year. These days were therefore called cuch haab, “the bearers of the years” (cuch, to bear, carry, haab, year), and years were distinguished as “a year Kan,” “a year Muluc,” etc., as they began with one or another of these “year bearers.”

But the calendar was not so simple as this. The days were not counted from one to twenty, and then beginning at one again, and so on, but by periods of 13 days each. Thus, in the first month, beginning with 1 Kan, the 14th day of that month begins a new “week,” as it has been called, and is named 1 Caban. Twenty-eight of these weeks make 364 days, thus leaving one day to complete the year. When the number of these odd days amounted to 13, in other words when thirteen years had elapsed, this formed a period which was called “the katun of days,” kin katun, and by Spanish writers an “indiction.”

It will be readily observed by an inspection of the following table, that four of these indictions, in other words 52 years, will elapse before a “year bearer” of the same name and number recommences a year.

A cycle of 52 years was thus obtained in a manner almost identical with that of the Aztecs, Tarascos and other nations.

But the Mayas took an important step in advance of all their contemporaries in arranging a much longer cycle.

This long cycle was an application of the vigesimal system to their reckoning of time. Twenty days were a month, u or uinal; twenty years was a cycle, katun. To ask one’s age the question was put haypel u katunil? How many katuns have you? And the answer was, hunpel katun, one katun (twenty years), or, hopel in katunil, I am five katuns, or a hundred years old, as the case might be.

The division of the katuns was on the principle of the Beltran system of numeration (see page 40), as,

Literally these expressions are, “dividing the second katun,” “dividing the third katun,” xel meaning to cut in pieces, to divide as with a knife. They may be compared to the German dritthalb, two and a half, or “the third a half.”54-1

The Katun of 20 years was divided into five lesser divisions of 4 years each, called tzuc, a word with a signification something like the English “bunch,” and which came to be used as a numeral particle in counting parts, divisions, paragraphs, reasons, groups of towns, etc.54-2

These tzuc were called by the Spaniards lustros, from the Latin lustrum, although that was a period five years. Cogolludo says: “They counted their eras and ages, which they entered in their books, by periods of 20 years each, and by lustros of four years each. The first year they placed in the East [that is, on the Katun-wheel, and in the figures in their books], calling it cuch haab; the second in the West, called Hijx; the third in the South, Cavac; and the fourth, Muluc, in the North, and this served them for the Dominical letter. When five of the lustros had passed, that is 20 years, they called it a Katun, and they placed one carved stone upon another, cemented with lime and sand, in the walls of their temples, or in the houses of their priests.”55-1

The historian is wrong in saying that the first year was called cuchhaab; that was the name applied to all the Dominical days, and as I have said, means “year bearer.” The first year was called Kan, from the first day of its first month.

This is but one of many illustrations of how cautious we must be in accepting any statement of the early Spanish writers about the usages of the natives.

There is, however, some obscurity about the length of the Katun. All the older Spanish writers, without exception, and most of the native manuscripts, speak of it distinctly as a period of twenty years. Yet there are three manuscripts of high authority in the Maya which state that it embraced twenty-four years, although the last four were not reckoned. This theory was adopted and warmly advocated by Pio Perez, in his essay on the ancient chronology of Yucatan, and is also borne out by calculations which have been made on the hieroglyphic Codex Troano, by M. Delaporte, in France, and Professor Cyrus Thomas, in the United States.56-1

This discrepancy may arise from the custom of counting the katuns by two different systems, ground for which supposition is furnished by various manuscripts; but for purposes of chronology and ordinary life, it will be evident that the writers of the annals in the present volume adopted the Katun of twenty years’ length; while on the other hand the native Pech, in his History of the Conquest, which is the last piece in the volume, gives for the beginning and the end of the Katun the years 1517-1541, and therefore must have had in mind one of twenty-four years’ duration. The solution of these contradictions is not yet at hand.

This great cycle of 13 × 20=260 years was called an ahau Katun collectively, and each period in it bore the same name.

This name, ahau Katun, deserves careful analysis. Ahau is the ordinary word for chief, king, ruler. It is probably a compound of ah, which is the male prefix and sign of the nomen agentis, and u, collar, a collar of gold or other precious substance, distinguishing the chiefs. Katun has been variously analyzed. Don Pio Perez supposed it was a compound of kat, to ask, and tun, a stone, because at the close of these periods they set up the sculptured stone, which was afterwards referred to in order to fix the dates of occurrences.57-1 This, however, would certainly require that kat be in the passive, katal or kataan, and would give katantun. Beltran in his Grammar treats the word as an adjective, meaning very long, perpetual.57-2 But this is a later, secondary sense. Its usual signification is a body or batallion of warriors engaged in action. As a verb, it is to fight, to give battle, and thus seems related to the Cakchiquel tresilloat, to cut, or wound, to make prisoner.58-1 The series of years, ordered and arranged under a controlling day and date, were like a row of soldiers commanded by a chief, and hence the name ahau katun.

Each of these ahaus or chiefs of the Katuns was represented in the native calendars by the picture or portrait of a particular personage who in some way was identified with the Katun, and his name was given to it. This has not been dwelt upon nor even mentioned by previous writers on the subject, but I have copies of various native manuscripts which illustrate it, and give the names of each of the rulers of the Katuns.

The thirteen ahau katuns were not numbered from 1 upward, but beginning at the 13th, by the alternate numbers, in the following order:—

13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2

Various reasons have been assigned for this arrangement. It would be foreign to my purpose to discuss them here, and I shall merely quote the following, from a paper I wrote on the subject, printed in the American Naturalist, Sept., 1881:—

The important question remains, how closely, by these cycles, did the Mayas approximate to preserving the exact date of an event?

To answer this fairly, we should be sure that we have a perfectly authentic translation of their hieroglyphic annals. It is doubtful that we have. Those I present in this volume are the most perfect, so far as I know, but they certainly do not agree among themselves. Can their discrepancies be explained? I think they can in a measure (1) by the differing length of the katuns, (2) by the era assumed as the commencement of the reckoning.

It must be remembered that there was apparently no common era adopted by the Mayas; each province may have selected its own; and it is quite erroneous to condemn the annals off-hand for inaccuracy because they conflict between themselves.

§ 8. Ancient Hieroglyphic Books.

The Mayas were a literary people. They made frequent use of tablets, wrote many books, and covered the walls of their buildings with hieroglyphic signs, cut in the stones or painted upon the plaster.

The explanation of these signs is one of the leading problems in American archæology. It was supposed to have been solved when the manuscript of Bishop Landa’s account of Yucatan was discovered, some twenty years ago, in Madrid. The Bishop gave what he called “an A, B, C,” of the language, but which, when applied to the extant manuscripts and the mural inscriptions, proved entirely insufficient to decipher them.

The disappointment of the antiquaries was great, and by one of them, Dr. Felipe Valentini, Landa’s alphabet has been denounced as “a Spanish fabrication.”61-1 But certainly any one acquainted with the history of the Latin alphabet, how it required the labor of thousands of years and the demands of three wholly different families of languages, to bring it to its perfection, should not have looked to find among the Mayas, or anywhere else, a parallel production of human intelligence. Moreover, rightly understood, Landa does not intimate anything of the kind. He distinctly states that what he gives are the sounds of the Spanish letters as they would be transcribed in Maya characters; not at all that they analyzed the sounds of their words and expressed the phonetic elements in these characters. On the contrary, he takes care to affirm that they could not do this, and gives an example in point.62-1 Dr. Valentini, therefore, was attacking a windmill, and entirely misconstrued the Bishop’s statements.

I shall not, in this connection, enter into a discussion of the nature of these hieroglyphics. It is enough for my purpose to say that they were recognized by the earliest Spanish explorers as quite different from those of Mexico, and as the only graphic system on the continent, so far as they knew it, which merited the name of writing.62-2

The word for book in Maya is huun, a monosyllable which reappears in the Kiche vuh and the Huasteca uuh. In Maya this initial h is almost silent and is occasionally dropped, as yuunil Dios, the book of God (syncopated form of u huunil Dios, the suffix il being the “determinative” ending). I am inclined to believe that huun is merely a form of uoohan, something written, this being the passive participle of uooh, to write, which, as a noun, also means a character, a letter.63-1

Another name for their books, especially those containing the prophecies and forecasts of the priestly diviners, is said to have been anahte; or analte. This word is not to be found in any of the early dictionaries. The usual authority for it is Villagutierre Sotomayor, who describes these volumes as they were seen among the Itzas of Lake Peten, about 1690.64-1

These books consisted of one long sheet of a kind of paper made by macerating and beating together the leaves of the maguey, and afterwards sizing the surface with a durable white varnish. The sheet was folded like a screen, forming pages about 9 × 5 inches. Both sides were covered with figures and characters painted in various brilliant colors. On the outer pages boards were fastened, for protection, so that the completed volume had the appearance of a bound book of large octavo size.

Instead of this paper, parchment was sometimes used. This was made from deerskins, thoroughly cured and also smoked, so that they should be less liable to the attacks of insects. A very durable substance was thus obtained, which would resist most agents of destruction, even in a tropical climate. Twenty-seven rolls of such parchment, covered with hieroglyphics, were among the articles burned by Bishop Landa, at Mani, in 1562, in a general destruction of everything which related to the ancient life of the nation. He himself says that he burned all that he could lay his hands upon, to the great distress of the natives.65-1

A very few escaped the destructive bigotry of the Spanish priests. So far as known these are.—

1. The Codex Tro, or Troano, in Madrid, published by the French government, in 1869.

2. What is believed to be the second part of the Codex Troano, now (1882) in process of publication in Paris.

3. The Codex Peresianus, in the National Library, Paris, a very limited edition of which has been issued.

4. The Dresden Codex, in Kingsborough’s Mexico, and photographed in colors, to the number of 50 copies, in 1880, which is believed to contain fragments of two different manuscripts.

To these are, perhaps, to be added one other in Europe and two in Mexico, which are in private hands, and are alleged to be of the same character.

All the above are distinctly in characters which were peculiar to the Mayas, and which are clearly variants of those found on the sculptured beams and slabs of Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Palenque and Copan.

It is possible that many other manuscripts may be discovered in time, for Landa tells us that it was the custom to bury with the priests the books which they had written. As their tombs were at times of solid stones, firmly cemented together, and well calculated to resist the moisture and other elements of destruction for centuries, it is nowise unlikely that explorations in Yucatan will bring to light some of these hidden documents.

The contents of these books, so far as we can judge from the hints in the early writers, related chiefly to the ritual and calendar, to their history or Katuns, to astrological predictions and divinations, to their mythology, and to their system of healing disease.

§ 9. Modern Maya Manuscripts.

As I have said, the Mayas were naturally a literary people. Had they been offered the slightest chance for the cultivation of their intellects they would have become a nation of readers and writers. Striking testimony to this effect is offered by Doctor Don Augustin de Echano, Prebend of the Cathedral Church of Merida, about the middle of the last century. He observes that twelve years of experience among the Indians had taught him that they were very desirous of knowledge, and that as soon as they learned to read, they eagerly perused everything they could lay their hands on; and as they had nothing in their tongue but some old writings that treated of sorceries and quackeries, the worthy Prebend thought it an excellent idea that they should be supplied, in place of these, with some —— sermons!67-1 But what else could be expected of a body of men who crushed out with equal bigotry every spark of mental independence in their own country?

The “old writings” to which the Prebend alludes were composed by natives who had learned to write the Maya in the alphabet adopted by the early missionaries and conquerors. An official document in Maya, still extant, dates from 1542, and from that time on there were natives who wrote their tongue with fluency. But their favorite compositions were works similar to those to which their forefathers had been partial, prophecies, chronicles and medical treatises.

Relying on their memories, and no doubt aided by some of the ancient hieroglyphical manuscripts, carefully secreted from the vandalism of the monks, they wrote out what they could recollect of their national literature.

There were at one time a large number of these records. They are referred to by Cogolludo, Sanchez Aguilar and other early historians. Probably nearly every village had one, which in time became to be regarded with superstitious veneration.

Wherever written, each of these books bore the same name; it was always referred to as “The Book of Chilan Balam.” To distinguish them apart, the name of the village where one was composed was added. Thus we have still preserved to us, in whole or in fragments, the Book of Chilan Balam of Chumayel, of Kaua, of Nabula, etc., in all, it is said, about sixteen.

“Chilan Balam” was the designation of a class of priests. “Chilan,” says Bishop Landa, “was the name of their priests, whose duty it was to teach the sciences, to appoint holy days, to treat the sick, to offer sacrifices, and especially to utter the oracles of the gods. They were so highly honored by the people that usually they were carried on litters on the shoulders of the devotees.”69-1 Strictly speaking, in Maya, chilan means “interpreter,” “mouth-piece,” from “chij,” “the mouth,” and in this ordinary sense frequently occurs in other writings. The word balam—literally, “tiger,”—was also applied to a class of priests, and is still in use among the natives of Yucatan as the designation of the protective spirits of fields and towns, as I have shown at length in a study of the word as it occurs in the native myths of Guatemala.70-1 “Chilan Balam,” therefore, is not a proper name, but a title, and in ancient times designated the priest who announced the will of the gods and explained the sacred oracles. This accounts for the universality of the name and the sacredness of its associations.

The dates of the books which have come down to us are various. One of them, “The Book of Chilan Balam of Mani,” was undoubtedly composed not later than 1595, as is proved by internal evidence. Various passages in the works of Landa, Lizana, Sanchez Aguilar and Cogolludo—all early historians of Yucatan—prove that many of these native manuscripts existed in the sixteenth century. Several rescripts date from the seventeenth century—most from the latter half of the eighteenth.

The names of the writers are generally not given, probably because the books, as we have them, are all copies of older manuscripts, with merely the occasional addition of current items of note by the copyist; as, for instance, a malignant epidemic which prevailed in the peninsula in 1673 is mentioned as a present occurrence by the copyist of “The Book of Chilan Balam of Nabula.”

These “Books of Chilan Balam” are the principal sources from which Señor Pio Perez derived his knowledge of the ancient Maya system of computing time, and also drew what he published concerning the history of the Mayas before the Conquest, and from them also are taken the various chronicles which I present in the present volume.

That I am enabled to do so is due to the untiring researches of Dr. Carl Hermann Berendt, who visited Yucatan four times, in order to study the native language, to examine the antiquities of the peninsula, and to take accurate copies, often in fac-simile, of as many ancient manuscripts as he could discover. After his death, his collection came into my hands.

The task of deciphering these manuscripts is by no means a light one, and I must ask in advance for considerable indulgence for my attempt. Words and phrases are used which are not explained in the dictionaries, or, if explained, are used in a different sense from that now current. The orthography is far from uniform, each syllable is often written separately, and as the punctuation is wholly fanciful or entirely absent, the separation of words, sentences and paragraphs is often uncertain and the meaning obscure.

Another class of documents are the titles to the municipal lands, the records of surveys, etc. I have copies of several of these, and among them was found the history of the Conquest, by Nakuk Pech, which I publish. It was added to the survey of his town, as a general statement of his rights and defence of the standing of his family.

My translations are not in flowing and elegant language. Had they been so, they would not have represented the originals. For the sake of accuracy I have not hesitated to sacrifice the requirements of English composition.

§ 10. Grammars and Dictionaries of the Language.

The learned Yucatecan, Canon Crescencio Carillo y Ancona, states in his last work that there have been written thirteen grammars and seventeen dictionaries of the Maya.72-1

The first grammar printed was that of Father Luis de Villalpando. This early missionary died in 1551 or 1552, and his work was not issued until some years later. Father Juan Coronel also gave a short Maya grammar to the press, together with a Doctrina. It is believed that copies of both of these are preserved. Beltran, however, acknowledges that in preparing his own grammar he has never seen either of these earlier works.73-1

In 1684, the Arte de la Lengua Maya, composed by Father Gabriel de San Buenaventura, a French Franciscan stationed in Yucatan, was printed in Mexico.73-2 Only a few copies of this work are known. It has, however, been reprinted, though not with a desirable fidelity, by the Abbe Brasseur (de Bourbourg), in the second volume of the reports of the Mission Scientifique au Mexique et à l’Amerique Centrale, Paris, 1870.

The leading authority on Maya grammar is Father Pedro Beltran, who was a native of Yucatan, and instructor in the Maya language in the convent of Merida about 1740. He was thoroughly conversant with the native tongue, and his Arte was reprinted in Merida, in 1859, as the best work of the kind which had been produced.74-1

The eminent antiquary, Don Juan Pio Perez contemplated writing a Maya grammar, and collected a number of notes for that purpose,74-2 as did also the late Dr. Berendt, but neither brought his work to any degree of completeness. I have copies of the notes left by both these diligent students, as also both editions of Beltran, and an accurate MS. copy of Buenaventura, from all of which I have derived assistance in completing the present study.

The first Maya dictionary printed was issued in the City of Mexico in 1571. It was published as that of Father Luis de Villalpando, but as he had then been dead nearly twenty years, it was probably merely based upon his vocabulary. It was in large 4to, of the same size as the second edition of Molina’s Vocabulario de la Lengua Mexicana. At least one copy of it is known to be in existence.

For more than three centuries no other dictionary was put to press, although for some unexplained reason that of Villalpando was unknown in Yucatan. At length, in 1877, the publication was completed at Mérida, of the Diccionario de la Lengua Maya, by Don Juan Pio Perez.75-1 It contains about 20,000 words, and is Maya-Spanish only. It is the result of a conscientious and lifelong study of the language, and a work of great merit. The deficiencies it presents are, that it does not give the principal parts of the verbs, that it omits or does not explain correctly many old terms in the language, and that it gives very few examples of idioms or phrases showing the uses of words and the construction of sentences.

I can say little in praise of the Vocabulaire Maya-Francais-Espagnole, compiled by the Abbé Brasseur (de Bourbourg), and printed in the second volume of the Report of the Mission Scientifique au Mexique et à l’Amerique Centrale. It contains about ten thousand words, but many of these are drawn from doubtful sources, and are incorrectly given; while the derivations and analogies proposed are of a character unknown to the science of language.

Besides the above and various vocabularies of minor interest, I have made use of three manuscript dictionaries of the first importance, which were obtained by the late Dr. Berendt. They belonged to three Franciscan convents which formerly existed in Yucatan, and as they are all anonymous, I shall follow Dr. Berendt’s example, and refer to them by the names of the convents to which they belonged. These were the convent of San Francisco in Merida, that at the town of Ticul and that at Motul.

The most recent of these is that of the convent of Ticul. It bears the date 1690, and is in two parts, Spanish-Maya and Maya-Spanish.

The Diccionario del Convento de San Francisco de Merida bears no date, but in the opinion of the most competent scholars who have examined it, among them Señor Pio Perez, it is older than that of Ticul, probably by half a century. It is also in two parts, which have evidently been prepared, by different hands.

The Diccionario del Convento de Motul is by far the most valuable of the three, and has not been known to Yucatecan scholars. A copy of it was picked up on a book stall in the City of Mexico by the Abbé Brasseur, and sold by him to Mr. John Carter Brown, of Providence, R. I. In 1864 this was very carefully copied by Dr. Berendt, who also made extensive additions to it from other sources, indicating such by the use of inks of different colors. This copy, in three large quarto volumes, in all counting over 2500 pages, is that which I now have, and have found of indispensable assistance in solving some of the puzzles presented by the ancient texts in the present volume.

The particular value of the Diccionario de Motul is not merely the richness of its vocabulary and its numerous examples of construction, but that it presents the language as it was when the Spaniards first arrived. The precise date of its compilation is indeed not given, but the author speaks of a comet which he saw in 1577, and gives other evidence that he was writing in the first generation after the Conquest.