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The dwarfish race is certainly easily distinguishable from the descendants of the giants that tradition says once upon a time existed in the country, whose bones are yet found, and whose portraits are painted on the walls of Chaacmol’s funeral chamber at Chichen-Itza.
The ornament hanging on the breast of Chaacmol’s effigy, from a ribbon tied with a peculiar knot behind his neck, is simply a badge of his rank; the same is seen on the breast of many other personages in the bas-reliefs and mural paintings. A similar mark of authority is yet in usage in Burmah.
We are told that three children were born to Isis and Osiris: Horus, Macedo, and Harpocrates. Well, in the scene painted on the walls of Chaacmol’s funeral chamber, in which the body of this warrior is represented stretched on the ground, cut open under the ribs for the extraction of the heart and visceras, he is seen surrounded by his wife, his sister NIC, his mother Zoɔ, and four children.
The Maya artists seem to have used mostly vegetable colors; yet they also employed ochres as pigments, and cinnabar we having found such metallic colors in Chaacmol’s mausoleum. Mrs. Le Plongeon still preserves some in her possession. From where they procured it is more than we can tell at present.
We see it in the figures represented in the act of worshiping the mastodon’s head, on the west façade of the monument that forms the north wing of the palace and museum at Chichen-Itza. We see it repeatedly in the mural paintings in Chaacmol’s funeral chamber; on the slabs sculptured with the representation of a dying warrior, that adorned the mausoleum of that chieftain.
When I opened Chaacmol’s mausoleum I found, as I have already said, two stone urns, the one near the head containing the remains of brains, that near the chest those of the heart and other viscera. This fact would tend to show again a similar custom among the Mayas and Egyptians, who, besides, placed with the body an empty vase symbol that the deceased had been judged and found righteous.
Du Chaillu asserts that the Ashangos, those of Otamo, the Apossos, the Fans, and many other tribes of equatorial Africa, consider it a mark of beauty to file their front teeth in a sharp point. He presents the Fans as confirmed cannibals. We are told, and the bas-reliefs on Chaacmol’s mausoleum prove it, that the Mayas devoured the hearts of their fallen enemies.
The mausoleum of Chaacmol, interiorly, was composed of three different superposed apartments, with their floors of concrete well leveled, polished and painted with yellow ochre; and exteriorly was adorned with magnificent bas-reliefs, representing his totem and that of his wife dying warriors the whole being surrounded by the image of a feathered serpent Can, his family name, whilst the walls of the two apartments, or funeral chambers, in the monument raised to his memory, were decorated with fresco paintings, representing not only Chaacmol’s own life, but the manners, customs, mode of dressing of his contemporaries; as those of the different nations with which they were in communication: distinctly recognizable by their type, stature and other peculiarities.
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