Volume 1

The conquest of Mexico / [W.H. Prescott.] edited by J.F. Kirk.

  • William Hickling Prescott
Date:
1916
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The conquest of Mexico / [W.H. Prescott.] edited by J.F. Kirk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    method of distributing the years into cycles, and of reckoning by means of periodical series, instead of numbers. A similar process was used by the various Asiatic nations of the Mongol family, from India to Japan. Their cycles, indeed, consisted of sixty, instead of fifty-two years ; and, for the terms of their periodical series, they employed the names of the elements, and the signs of the zodiac, of which latter the Mexicans, probably, had no knowledge. But the principle was precisely the same.1 A correspondence quite as extraordinary is found between the hieroglyphics used by the Aztecs for the signs of the days, and those zodiacal signs which the Eastern Asiatics employed as one of the terms of their series. The symbols in the Mongolian calendar are borrowed from animals. Four of the twelve are the same as the Aztec. Three others are as nearly the same as the different species of animals in the two hemispheres would allow. The remaining five refer to no creature then found in Anahuac.2 The resemblance went as far as it could.3 The similarity of these conventional symbols, among the several nations of the East, can hardly fail to carry con¬ viction of a common origin for the system as regards them. Why should not a similar conclusion be applied to the Aztec calendar, which, although relating to days, instead of years, was, like the Asiatic, equally appropriated to chronological uses, and to those of divination.4 I shall pass over the further resemblance to the Persians, shown in the adjustment of time by a similar system of intercalation ; 5 and to the Egyptians, in the celebration of the remarkable festival of the winter solstice ;6 since, although sufficiently curious, the coincidences might be accidental, and add little to the weight of evidence offered by an agreement in combinations, of so complex and artificial a character, as those before stated. Amidst these intellectual analogies, one would expect to meet with that of language, the vehicle of intellectual communication, which usually exhibits traces of its origin, even when the science and literature, that are embodied in it, have widely diverged. No inquiry, however, has led to less satisfactory results. The languages spread over the western continent far exceed in number those found in any equal population in the eastern.7 They exhibit the remark¬ able anomaly of differing as widely in etymology as they agree in organisation ; and on the other hand, while they bear some slight affinity to the languages of the Old World in the former particular, 39i
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