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Stephens in the account of his first view of the ruins at Palenque: “We saw before us a large building richly ornamented with stuccoed figures on pilasters, curious and elegant; trees growing close to it, and their branches entering the doors; the style and effect of structure and ornament unique, extraordinary, and mournfully beautiful.” In a description of the walls around an interior court of a building at Uxmal, we have this tribute to the artistic skill of the decorators: “It would be difficult, in arranging four sides facing a court-yard, to have more variety, and, at the same time, more harmony of ornament.”
The ruins differ entirely from Copan and Palenque. Here no statues, carved figures, or hieroglyphics are seen. It is therefore supposed that these cities are of a much older date, and built by another race. The most magnificent and perfect remains in the country are those of Uxmal, about fifty miles south of Merida, the principal city of Yucatan.
The wooden lintels, which are common in Yucatan, do not appear in the other ruins, and there is a difference in the style of ornamentation between those at Palenque or Copan, for instance, and those at Uxmal, but every where the architecture is regulated by the same idea, the differences indicating nothing more than different periods and different phases of development in the history of the same people.
I have quoted what Charnay says of it in his description of Mitla. At Palenque, as at Mitla, the oldest work is the most artistic and admirable. Over this feature of the monuments, and the manifest signs of their difference in age, the attention of investigators has lingered in speculation.
Beyond it, in the distant past, is a vast period, in which the civilization represented by Palenque was developed, made capable of building such cities, and then carried on through the many ages during which cities became numerous, flourished, grew old, and gave place to others, until the long history of Palenque itself began.
Then come the more highly finished teocalis of Yucatan and Mexico and Peru; the pyramidal mounds of Maui, one of the Sandwich Islands; those existing in the Fejee and other islands of the Pacific; which, in China, we find converted into the high, porcelain, gradated towers; and these again converted into the more imposing temples of Cochin-China, Hindostan, Ceylon so grand, so stupendous in their wealth of ornamentation that those of Chichen-Itza Uxmal, Palenque, admirable as they are, well nigh dwindle into insignificance, as far as labor and imagination are concerned, when compared with them.
Under the circumstances supposed, how wisely skepticism could talk against a suggestion of this kind at Copan, Mitla, or Palenque! and how difficult it would be to find a satisfactory answer to its reasonings!
Some of these Guatemala structures show a quite extraordinary resemblance to those at Angkor in Cambodia. Mitla and Palenque are in Mexico and are equally remarkable. The latter is still difficult to get to.
The most formidable of these torrential rivers is the Nizao which flows into the Caribbean Sea near Point Palenque.
If a consecutive history of the ancient people of Central America and Mexico were ever written, it has been lost. Probably nothing of the kind ever was written in the manner which we call history, although there must have been regular annals of some kind. The ruins show that they had the art of writing, and that, at the south, this art was more developed, more like a phonetic system of writing than that found in use among the Aztecs. The inscriptions of Palenque, and the characters used in some of the manuscript books that have been preserved, are not the same as the “Mexican Picture Writing.” It is known that books or manuscript writings were abundant among them in the ages previous to the Aztec period. They had an accurate measure of the solar year and a system of chronology, and many of their writings were historical. Among the Mayas, and in other communities of the same family, writing was largely used in the time of the Spaniards. It was common also among the Aztecs, but they used “picture writing.” Las Casas wrote on this point as follows: “It should be known that in all the commonwealths of these countries, in the kingdoms of New Spain and elsewhere, among other professions duly filled by suitable persons was that of chronicler and historian. These chroniclers had knowledge of the origin of the kingdoms, and of whatever related to religion and the gods, as well as to the founders of towns and cities. They recorded the history of kings, and of the modes of their election and succession; of their labors, actions, wars, and memorable deeds, good and bad; of the virtuous men or heroes of former days, their great deeds, the wars they had waged, and how they had distinguished themselves; who had been the earliest settlers, what had been their ancient customs, their triumphs, and defeats. They knew, in fact, whatever pertained to history, and were able to give an account of all past events. *
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