Cahtich, or Katish, is therefore an appropriate name for a sacred city where religious ceremonies are performed and offerings made to the gods.

The whole coast of Asia Minor on the Mediterranean was once inhabited by nations having their homonyms in the Western Continent. Prominent among these were the Carians, of unknown origin, but wide-spread fame. Herodotus,1 himself a Carian, says that the ancient Carians called themselves Leleges, a name akin to Leleth (Maya), “to dwell in rocky places." Well, Strabo tells us they had been the occupants of all Ionia and of the islands of the Egean Sea, until driven from them by the Ionians and the Dorians, when they established themselves on the mainland. Thucydides calls them pirates, and asserts that King Minos expelled them from the Cyclades. Herodotus, bound to defend his countrymen from such an imputation, simply represents them as a warlike and seafaring people that, when requested, manned the ships of Minos. At that time they styled themselves "the most famous of all nations of the earth."4 The dress of the Carian women consisted of a linen tunic which required no fastenings. From all antiquity this tunic was used by the Maya women, and is still by the aborigines of Yucatan, Peten, and other places in Central America. It is called uipil.

3

The name Kar, or Carian, certainly is identical with that of the warlike nation the Caras, whose name is still preserved in that of the Caribbean Sea, and of many cities and places in the northern parts of the South American continent, the

3

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, lib. i., 8. 'Herodotus, lib. i., 171.

6 Ibid., lib. v., 87-88.

Antilles, and the coast of Honduras, where Carib tribes still exist. These Caras, once neighbors of the Mayas, extended their conquests from the frontiers of Mayach throughout the southern continent; to the river Plata, east of the Andes; to Chile, west of that chain of mountains. It would indeed be very difficult to explain the striking similarity of aboriginal names of places and tribes still used in the countries known to-day as Venezuela and Colombia, and those of localities on the shores of the Mediterranean, and of the people who dwelt in them, except through the intimate relationship of the Carians of Asia Minor and the Caras of the "Lands of the West." Their names are not only similar, but, on both sides of the Atlantic, were synonymous of "man," par excellence, of "eminent warrior," endowed with great dexterity and extraordinary power. When the Spaniards landed for the first time in America, the Caribs of the islands of St. Vincent and Martinique were cannibals, and the terror of their neighbors.

Lastly, according to Max Müller,2 Philip of Theangela, a Carian historian, says that the idiom of the Carians was mixed with a great number of Greek words. But Homer represents them among the earliest inhabitants of Asia Minor and of the Grecian peninsula, anterior, consequently, to the Hellenes, who in their intercourse with them would naturally have made use of many words of their language that afterward became engrafted on that of the Greeks themselves.

3

For the present we shall depart from the eastern shores of

1 Rochefort, Histoire Naturelle et Morale des Antilles, p. 401. D'Orbigny, L'Homme Americain, vol. ii., p. 268. Alcedo, Diccionario Geografico é Historico de las Indias Occidentales.

* Max Müller, Fragments, Hist. Græc, vol. iv., p. 475.

the Mediterranean and from Egypt, which we shall revisit later on. Before returning to Mayach let us again ask, This perfect identity of Maya, Hindoo, Chaldean, and Egyptian cosmogonic notions; these Maya words that form the names of places, nations, and gods, descriptive of their attributes or characteristics, in India, Chaldea, Phoenicia, and Egypt-are they mere coincidences?

5