itive five days _unlucky_.

Besides this solar year they had a sideral or sothic year, composed of
365 days and 6 hours, which corresponds exactly to the Mayas[TN-25]
sacred year, that Landa tells us was also composed of 365 days and 6
hours; which they represented in the gnomon of Mayapan by the line that
joins the centers of the stela that forms it.

The Egyptians, in their computations, calculated by a system of _fives_
and _tens_; the Mayas by a system of _fives_ and _twenties_, to four
hundred. Their sacred number appears to have been 13 from the remotest
antiquity, but SEVEN seems to have been a _mystic number_ among them as
among the Hindoos, Aryans, Chaldeans, Egyptians, and other nations.

The Egyptians made use of a septenary system in the arrangement of the
grand gallery in the center of the great pyramid. Each side of the wall
is made of seven courses of finely polished stones, the one above
overlapping that below, thus forming the triangular ceiling common to
all the edifices in Yucatan. This gallery is said to be seven times the
height of the other passages, and, as all the rooms in Uxmal, Chichen
and other places in Mayab, it is seven-sided. Some authors pretend to
assume that this well marked septenary system has reference to the
_Pleiades_ or _Seven stars_. _Alcyone_, the central star of the group,
being, it is said, on the same meridian as the pyramid, when it was
constructed, and _Alpha_ of Draconis, the then pole star, at its lower
culmination.

But if, as the Rev. Joseph A. Seiss and others pretend, the scientific
attainments required for the construction of such enduring monument
surpassed those of the learned men of Egypt, we must, of necessity,
believe that the architect who conceived the plan and carried out its
designs must have acquired his knowledge from an older people,
possessing greater learning than the priests of Memphis; unless we try
to persuade ourselves, as the reverend gentleman wishes us to, that the
great pyramid was built under the direct inspiration of the Almighty.

Nearly all the monuments of Yucatan bear evidence that the Mayas had a
predilection for number SEVEN. Since we find that their artificial
mounds were composed of seven superposed platforms; that the city of
Uxmal contained seven of these mounds; that the north side of the palace
of King CAN was adorned with seven turrets; that the entwined serpents,
his totem, which adorn the east facade of the west wing of this