of the year. This period of twenty days was properly their
unit of time reckoning. It is true they had smaller divisions,<66> but
for all practical purposes, they were ignored. As none of these tribes
possessed the art of writing, they had to represent these days by means
of hieroglyphics. The following table shows the Mexican and Maya
days, the meaning of each, and the pictorial sign by which they were
represented. We must notice that the Maya hieroglyphics look more
arbitrary, more conventional than the Mexican. This is interesting,
because some of our scholars now believe the Mayas were the inventors of
the calendar. Their hieroglyphics, therefore, as being the older of the
two, should appear more conventional. In the Mexican hieroglyphics for
the days, we can still trace a resemblance to the natural objects they
represent; in the Maya hieroglyphics, this resemblance has disappeared.

It is not out of place to theorize as to the facts already mentioned.
The first thing that strikes us is that they should have chosen twenty
days for a unit of time. There must have been some reason lying back of
this selection. It would have been more natural for them to have chosen
a number of days (say thirty) more nearly corresponding to the time
from one new moon to another. Whether we shall ever learn the reason for
choosing this number of days is doubtful; but Mr. Bandelier has given us
some thoughts on this subject, which, though he is careful to state
are not results, but mere suggestions, seem to us to have some germs of
truth, the more so as it is fully in keeping with Indian customs.

He points out that many of the names for these days mean the same as the
names of the gens in the more northern Indian tribes. Thus seven of the
days have the same meaning as the names of seven of the nine gens of the
Moqui tribe in Arizona. He, therefore, suggests that the names of these
twenty days are the names of the twenty gens of the aboriginal
people from whom have descended the various civilized tribes under
consideration. Indeed, this is expressly stated to be the method
of naming the days adopted by the Chiapanecs, one of the tribes in
question.<67>

As soon as the people commenced to take any observation at all, they
would perceive that it took just about eighteen of these periods of
twenty days to make a year. So the next step appears to have been the
division of the year into eighteen months. These months received each a
name, an