THE MAYA CIVILISATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 76, 29 March 1924, Page 14

THE MAYA CIVILISATION.

(To the Editor.) Sir.,—The recent discovery of extensive ruins of massive masonry in British Honduras is fitted, as you remark, to stimulate interest in the problems of Central America's ancient civilisations. There seems to be little doubt that the

Maya people were among the most advanced, and that they were a wellorganised, populous nation, possessed of much learning. The ruins now found are but a frajjnent of the vast city dwellings they built. It is, I think, a mistake to refer to those people as

"Indians"—a term that has been applied j to all the aborigines of the Western ' World, founded on the original error of Columbus, who imagined ( that he had found his way to India. Most likely, the Mayas were of Egyptian origin. Some twenty odd years ago I read of the remarkable discovery in Yucatan of heavy stone buildings by a French explorer, M. Le Plongeon. His account was verified by photographs that he took, including one that showed houses of solid masonry, and of great height, but overgrown by dense bush—the trees being apparently about 00 feet high. The front of the buildings had sculptured lettering in some unknown tongue, which M. Le riongeon set liimsclf to study. He claimed to have found the key to the language, and provided some alleged translations. The alphabet, according to him, was a pictorial one, and told in vivid symbols the circumstances that led to the establishment of the Mayas in Central America. In brief, what he deduced from the alphabet and the ] inscriptions was that the Mayas formerly inhabited the sunken continent of Atlantis; that a tremendous convulsion of Nature, accompanied by floods and dashing waves, had destroyed the land in which they dwelt; that a remnant of the people escaped destruction and found their way to Central America, where they multiplied, founded homes, and built up a new civilisation. To my mind, the most interesting problem connected with the Mayas is that of their possibly Atlantean origin. Many people are sceptical about Atlantis, and I confess that I at first thought M. Le Plongeon had exercised his imagination in constructing his theory of the Mayas' language and his interpretation of their inscriptions, in order to make theni fit in with the traditions that have come to us regarding the lost continent. The traditions* are based on apparent fact. A celebrated Roman author has left us the record that there was a book describing that continent and its destruction, but the book was destroyed in the great fire that burnt up the contents of the library at Alexandria. A theory has been advanced, that Atlantis was destroyed by a sudden shifting of the crater on the earth's surface: and some people believe that there is a periodicity in such sea-elianges, and that the time is not far distant when vast continents will emerge in the Southern Hemisphere (which has at present a great preponderance of ocean surface over the Northern). If the destruction of Atlantis should be historically established by Mayan records, we shall be a fraction nearer to ascertaining whether the islands of Polynesia are for the most part the uplands and mountain tops of a great submerged continent, soon to be uplifted.—l am, etc., J. LIDDELL KELLY.