Chapter 5

Thus we may lay down as our fundamental proposition that a hieroglyphic form of writing is better fitted to, and must properly, in the period of its natural development, accompany the imaginative processes of mind. Or, since imagination to our literal thought implies in some degree the fanciful (though wrongly so in essence), we might perhaps better say that that form of writing is the fit attendant and exponent of those functions of mind which cognize the inner meanings of the facts of life directly, rather than those which study them through the correlation of their phenomena. And also, that the development by any people of an alphabetic out of a hieroglyphic system, does not imply a greater advance in linguistic perfection on their part, but indicates a corresponding mental and inner change of attitude towards ideas and things, and a different conception of the self as related to them all.

It is not at all necessary to assume that the knowledge gained by one method is deeper or more exact than the other. True science may exist as fully under one set of circumstances as the other. If we will take the type of the so-called most primitive form, the monosyllabic--the Chinese, we shall find all this evidenced in the clearest manner. To note but one illustration, a study of the scientific and philosophical ideas involved in and conveyed by the word _k’ung_, for Space, ether, the fundamental substratum of sound or vibration, as well as the “interetheric” central point of balance and power, will disclose an understanding that has nothing to fear from modern comparisons.

And the very fact that Chinese has had to depend on placement of its monosyllables to express all the relations for which speech is called upon, instead of relying on changes of form, seems to have, and indeed has so stimulated the development of pure linguistic power that the language is actually as perfect and clear a medium of cultured and learned intercourse, as is the Sanskrit, the supreme type of the so-called most developed form, the inflectional. And by reason of its possession of the ideographic element it has a vividness which the Sanskrit has not. No language can be a highly developed one which does not provide in some way for the expression of all possible needed relations between the three fundamental postulates of life and activity--the self, the action and the world; and Chinese does this in spite of its monosyllabic structure by the development of its syntax of position. And it should be remembered further that Chinese syntax, in strict correspondence to the genius of the language, is not the same formal thing that syntax is with our inflectional tongues, but includes, or rather is primarily based on the _harmonic adjustment of the inherent basic ideas of or within the words_. The Chinese monosyllables are then not the naked separate things they are in the dictionary, but the whole phrase or sentence is on the contrary as much a unit as one of ours; and often more so.

This integral unity of the whole sentence or expression, dominated by a perspective of ideas rather than of forms, which is achieved in Chinese by the elaboration of placement, is also characteristic of the structure of the languages of the American continent; but, these languages being polysyllabic, the vividness and unity are attained by a method described as Incorporation, whereby the accessories of relation are so included in or attached to the leading word that the whole expression assumes the form and sound of a single word. And a similar process takes place with the various elements of a compound sentence. So that although this one of the divisions of language approaches very closely to the Inflectional in its external forms, it yet has held to the vividness and essential characteristics of the ideographic method. And it is a point of the utmost importance for the decipherment of the Maya glyphs, to note as has been stated before, that their syntax of combination must follow that of the spoken language, which we know.

There is one broad line of division marking all the languages and civilizations of the world--the line between the ideographic and the literal; it marks the use of hieroglyphic or of alphabetic writing, and it denotes a culture so widely different from ours, modes of thought so distinct, views of life and man’s relation to it one might almost say so opposite to ours, as to point unmistakably to a most distant past, and a former world-culture probably as wide-spread in its day as is now ours--or more so. And it is one of the strangest and most remarkable of the phenomena we are considering, that the two divisions have overlapped each other in time to such a degree that whereas we have in Sanskrit, the most perfect type of Aryan, or inflectional languages, the oldest of them all; on the other hand we have in Chinese an equally perfect linguistic medium of the other type, kept alive into our own times.

When we consider the development and status of the American civilizations which have been revealed to us, and especially when we have once opened our minds to the possibility that world-civilizations different in their time from ours in ours, may for all we know have existed and been blotted out ages ago, leaving linguistic traces, and perhaps perpetuating cultural remnants in a few parts of the earth, it is impossible not to recognize the breadth of the problem we are considering. All over the American continent at the time of the Discovery we see cultures and systems whose time had come. Back of most of the North and South American tribes we find the remains of mighty and utterly extinct civilizations--only their dim memory left. In the centers of higher culture from Mexico to Peru we see the ancient civilization brought further down to our own times; but there also, in process, all the incidents of break-up and an expiring greatness. Internecine strife, invasion from outside, changes of center, are all going on, and all marked by a _steady decrease_ in everything that means civilization. Of the ancient mathematical and astronomical knowledge a corner of which is revealed to us by the Maya glyph remains, only a distorted fragment appears in the Mexican, where also hieroglyphs have yielded to a cruder rebus-writing. The stately and incomparable compositions and architecture of Palenque, Copan and Quiriguá have yielded to the ball courts and local strifes of Chichen Itza--all this following the very course of changing historical succession preserved in the Chronicles. The later the date, the lower in every case the culture; this is impossible not to recognize, nor have we traces of any different course of events. Of course we see the rise of the Aztec nation, a small cycle, but like the Gothic upon the Roman, it comes at the end of the general American break-up--an incursion of barbarians settling on and preserving for us fragments of the culture that preceded them, just as has happened over and over again all over the world. And the same with the Incas in Peru. And yet even the Mexican culture demands our high respect, comparing favorably with European of the same period. Indeed it was actually far ahead of the latter in matters of education and many points of polity.

But in spite of its seeming greatness, its heart and energy were gone, just as with Peru, and both yielded to what on the face seems a miracle, but was only the expression of that force which was preparing the American continent for a new race and civilization, still now only in its beginnings. The Mayan empire had already broken up. And even as we write, the archaeological history of the other hemisphere is being repeated here; on the heels of Manabi comes the Chimu Valley, and soon it will be with America as with Egypt--one will not be able to print an up-to-date work on its early history, for new discoveries will carry it back further, and to greater scope, before the previous ones can be edited and gotten to press. Compare the few pages of earliest Egypt in Sharpe’s history, with Flinders Petrie’s work of a decade or so ago, and that with the situation today.

It is a simple fact that decipherment and publication all over the world can no longer keep pace with discovery; and the time has come for archaeology to begin to survey these remnants, engineering works that would tax any modern nation with all our appliances, vast ruined cities, one above the other, innumerable languages and writings, the traces of peoples whose very names are lost to history--as a whole, and to ask itself how long it must have taken for all these works to be accomplished, let alone for the birth and decay of the civilizations that supported them, and gave environment for the development of such technical skill as could finish the enormous bulk of the Great Pyramid with an accuracy beyond the fineness of our best instruments to measure. For not only mere bulk is to be considered--though there is enough of that scattered over the earth to keep all the possible available craftsmen of the world a wholly incommensurate time achieving them, but the ability to conceive and carry out such works. What _sort_ of people leveled Monte Alban for its crown of pyramids, dreamed and executed the stucco modelings of Palenque, built the temple of Boro Budur in Java, cut the Bamian statues of the Hindû Kush, and so on, and so on, for page after page? If they had such appliances as we have, they must be ranked at least in our class for having them; if they did them without our great engines, what sort of men were they? And if they could do these things without our appliances, is it not a fair inference that they could easily have made the tools, or others better perhaps?

One fact is becoming more prominent with every advance of archaeology over the world, a fact of the greatest linguistic interest, namely that ancient civilizations and empires, as a whole, _lasted longer_ than ours of today. Consider how many different and successive empires Europe has had in the last 2000 odd years, _our_ history; and how long each of our cultures has lasted. All of them put together would go into one of these older periods, and have plenty to spare. Passing over what may be the real meaning and bearing of this fact on the problem of universal history and human evolution, and the position of our race today, the linguistic considerations which follow are most interesting.

If the fundamental thesis of language as a human activity is its direct correspondence to and expression of all the inner motives and forces of the users, we have here a key to the survival to our day, an unknown period past its own time, of the Chinese type.

Of the development, modification and decay of languages we have ample material in our own times for study, the periods over which the modifying forces operate being an equal measure of the periods of national activity and change. And, what is perhaps not always sufficiently recognized, we have an elaboration of the formal elements going on under very different impulses, at different periods of the life of the language. The time has come in the history of a people for it to play a greater part on the world’s stage: some danger has threatened the national life and aroused its energies, or other causes have worked to quicken the mental and spiritual life; an Elizabethan era is ushered in, frequently by a forerunner, a Chaucer, and the language responds, its forms develop and are perfected. Or else some fitting or amalgamating force comes in from outside, the life of the people is widened, new blood enters in every sense, and the forms of the language respond. Or perhaps, when they may seem to have come to the tether end of things, and men’s minds turn back to older, even prehistoric times, seeds long buried and forgotten in the nature spring up, and a true national Renaissance follows. In these cases the change and elaboration of forms is a symptom of new life; the vehicle is being molded and expanded to fit the growing thought.

But it is not always so. There comes a time when the outgoing force, the activity of life, wanes and, after a greater or less period of settled conditions, a period of proper use and government of the regions occupied, a change sets in. And then we may have again the wholly deceptive phenomenon of linguistic amplification; but it is the false activity of decay. The energy has turned in and begun to feed upon itself. The national impulse has changed from achievement to gratification, more and more sources are drawn upon to minister to its enjoyment, and that enjoyment becomes an art; forms of every kind are subtly refined in its service, and linguistic forms with them. And this is then the very period when all these material, formal elements are pointed to with pride as the evidence of culture and progress. The thought-life of the nation has lost itself in the conflict and confusion, in the distractions of the forms into which it has molded the matter its creative force had entered.

We have thus in nations and languages, as in individuals, the phenomena of birth, growth, use, and a quick or a slow death, all marked by various degrees and signs of health or disease, and _every one at root a moral question_. These are the facts of general average, quite corresponding to those that form the bases for life insurance tables. But, as with these latter, not only are there variations for inheritance, class, locality, and so on, but there are here and there cases of out and out exception--which from all we can see must be assigned to some external force in operation on the individual. We call them “freak” occurrences, only because we cannot see the wider law or causes at work. When we meet them in sufficient numbers, we make new tables to cover them as far as we can, again in general only. Other causes still elude us, though they must have a fountain somewhere.

We have, as great exceptions to our general averages, two opposite phenomena. One is the sudden inexplicable and dazzling rise on the world’s stage of a totally insignificant people, the other the seeming arrest for long periods of time of the normal processes of even incipient decay. And touching the latter point, it is strange indeed that in two such widely different cultures as those of Iceland and China we should find the same law apparently at work; the periods are vastly unlike in actual, but not so in relative duration. We have no way of properly placing the maintenance of Icelandic and Chinese as they have been other than by simply laying down the existence of what we may call a Law of Retardation, whose ultimate causes we cannot fathom or classify, but which will stand as an opposite phase of the Law of Stimulation, which is more frequent in operation, but is equally unexplained.

If we will now regard the languages and cultures of the world, we will find all the phases of linguistic and cultural activity, operative with about the same degree of rapidity, all over both hemispheres, save in places protected by our Law of Retardation. We will find the rate of changes and successions generally far less rapid the farther back in time we go; and finally we will find a special and marked acceleration on both sides of the Atlantic during the last thousand years, all incident to the placing of a new race in America.

So for the facts as we find them. They point to the descent of past American civilizations from a past period of continental, or far more probably, of world-wide extent. For who can imagine that people great enough to build as these did, should not also have navigated? Why should we assume in the face of other experiences, that Maya dates and calculations mean nothing, except on the general principle that they did not know as much as we do, and were doubtless liars? Bailly proved over a hundred years ago that Hindû exact astronomical observations must date back at least 5000 years, and that they were in possession of minutely accurate tables[61-*] long before Europe was. And the rotundity of the earth was certainly known both to them and the other great nations of antiquity.

Archaeology is today pushing back the dates of fixed and acknowledged history almost to the date given by the Egyptians to Solon for the submersion of the great Atlantean island; and if we can but read the Maya glyphs, and open _that_ door, another twenty years from now may show us beyond all possible dispute evidences in every part of the earth belt of a contemporaneous culture, different from and precedent to the Aryan.

* * * * *

I have so far in this monograph, based upon and having to do as it has with the Maya glyphs, their interpretation and their place in the linguistic field, limited myself to an analysis and consideration of the facts presented to us by those linguistic and cultural data we have actually before us. But there is one further problem which is suggested by it all. It is this: Where, in point of time and place, is the change in the world’s linguistic and cultural life from ideographic to literal to be sought for, and what is its rationale? Separated from us by such an enormous period of time as it is, I still cannot believe that some view of it cannot be had. There are various facts of Old World history and language, partly of prehistoric Europe, partly of Asia, an analysis of which would extend this paper too far into other fields; but apart entirely from the question of myths or traditions, there are various actual observed phenomena both of language and writing, especially in Central Asia, which do not fit into any of the ordinary theories, and which do suggest this, as a simple linguistic conclusion. In point of locality, at least, the conclusion agrees with the usual “Aryan home” theory; but as far as concerns this latter it must be remembered that however fully it demonstrates the unity of the Aryan race, beyond that fact all questions of dates and even of the state of civilization at the time, are not matters of history as yet for us, but only of theory--as to which our present “perspective” may be once more as faulty as it has often been heretofore.[62-*]

I believe that this center of transition lay somewhere in Central Asia, to the north of the great Himâlayan range. That this region was a sort of alembic, a melting-pot (as America is today) for various peoples of an ancient world-wide culture, as broad at least in its scope as the term Aryan is today. That this culture displayed the ideographic traits we have discussed, and that it has left more or less definite traces at different places in the world. That it covered the two Americas, in whatever continental form they may then have existed, leaving us there “les débris échappés à un naufrage commun.” That coincident with a new and universal world-epoch, as wide in its cultural scope as the difference between the ideographic and literal, there was finally formed a totally new vehicle for the use of human thought, the inflectional, literal, alphabetic. That this vehicle was perfected into some great speech, the direct ancestor of Sanskrit, into the _forms_ of which were concentrated all the old power of the ancient hieroglyphs and their underlying concepts. For Sanskrit, while the oldest is also the mightiest of Aryan grammars; and no one who has studied its forms, or heard its speech from educated native mouths, can call it anything but concentrated spiritual power. That the force which went on the one hand into the Sanskrit forms, was on the other perpetuated on into the special genius of Chinese, in which, as we know it, we have a retarded survival, not of course of outer form so much as of method and essence. And in Tibetan, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, I suspect that we have a derivative, not from either Chinese or Sanskrit as we know them, but by a medial line from a common point.[63-*] Of course the time for such changes must have been enormous; but whatever it was, it was no greater in its realm as time, than were the mental differences in theirs. And they both are equally human data.

Certain other facts point to the American or Atlantic source and center of this ancient epoch. They are briefly that all around the Mediterranean basin we find traces of a vanished culture, unknown to our history, and living only in tradition and some archaeological remains. And of this culture various investigators, each approaching it from his particular favorite locality, have constructed for us as many different “Empires,” by theories each supported by various details of analogies. One calls them Tartars, another Hittites, another Pelasgians, and so on. And all of them, in each of the theories, have as a fact a great many unexplained characteristics, different from those of our historical nations. Some of these characteristics, most markedly the Basque, but also not a few at greater distance, have definite American similarities. It might not be a far guess that these fragments represent an eastward movement, which later in the history of the Aryan development met and was pushed back westward again by the fully formed and dominant Aryan race from its Central Asian center. This is the future province of Archaeology.

* * * * *

And I am convinced that the widest door there is to be opened to this past of the human race, is that of the Maya glyphs. The narrow limitations of our mental horizon as to the greatness and dignity of man, of his past, and of human evolution, were set back widely by Egypt and what she has had to show, and again by the Sanskrit; but the walls are still there, and advances, however rapid, are but gradual. With the reading of America I believe the walls themselves will fall, and a new conception of past history will come.

FOOTNOTES:

[41-*] See _Memoranda on the Chilam Balam Calendars_, C. P. Bowditch, 1901. The obscurities of the Chronicles render the questions connected with Ahpula’s death exceedingly difficult. For instance, the immediate context in the books of Mani and Tizimin make the date 1536, as given in numerals, an impossible one. But, if the date as given in _Maya terms_ is to be accepted at all (and it certainly is too specific to be rejected), then by the long count such a date _must_ have been either 1502, 5350, or 12,786 years after the date of Stela 9, Copan. Mr. Bowditch favors the lower figure, chiefly because it is the lower, and thus puts Stela 9 at A. D. 34. To get this date the longest possible distance from Ahpula’s death to the end of the katun must be used--that is, “6 tuns short” must be taken to mean “almost 7 tuns short.” I can only say here that if, in correcting the figures 1536, as demanded by the immediate context, we make the simplest possible correction, and put them one katun earlier, 1516, and then take as the unexpired time to the end of the katun the shortest of the three terms given as possible, or 5 tuns 139 days, bringing the end of Katun 13-Ahau on Jan. 28, 1522, we not only bring the end of Katun 11-Ahau within the year 1541, as is most positively stated by the practically contemporary Pech Chronicle, but we also bring in line nearly all the important events of the Chronicles, from the fall of Mayapan, ca. 1450, the coming of the Spaniards, and the smallpox, in 11-Ahau (1521 to 1541), the conversion to Christianity in 9-Ahau, down to Landa’s death (1579) in 7-Ahau; as well as many outside references. Any other combination requires harsher emendations somewhere else. But the above choice of the term of 5 tuns 139 days, thus seemingly called for, means that Stela 9 at Copan is dated, by the long count, 5350 years before Ahpula’s death, or B. C. 3824. Whether this is right, is a question for the future.