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less a civilized people living under an organized government. Indeed, if any inference can be drawn from the epic legends it would be that, prior to the Aryan conquest, the Nágá rajas were ruling powers, who had cultivated the arts of luxury to an extraordinary degree, and yet succeeded in maintaining a protracted struggle against the Aryan invaders.”

Like the English of to-day, the Mayas sent colonists all over the earth. These carried with them the language, the traditions, the architecture, astronomy,' cosmogony, and other sciences—in a word, the civilization of their mother country. It is this civilization that furnishes us with the means of ascertaining the role played by them in the universal history of the world. We find vestiges of it, and of their language, in all historical nations of antiquity in Asia, Africa, and Europe. They are still frequent in the countries where they flourished.

It is easy to follow their tracks across the Pacific to India, by the imprints of their hands dipped in a red liquid and pressed against the walls of temples, caves, and other places looked upon as sacred, to implore the benison of the gods—also by their name, Maya, given to the banana tree, symbol of their country, whose broad leaf is yet a token of hospitality

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1H. T. Colebrooke, "Memoirs on the Sacred Books of India," Asiatic Researches, vol. ii., pp. 369-476, says: Maya is considered as the author of the Soúrya-Siddhanta, the most ancient treatise on astronomy in India. He is represented as receiving his science from a partial incarnation of the Sun." This work, on which all the Indian astronomy is founded, was discovered at Benares by Sir Robert Chambers. Mr. Samuel Davis partly translated it, particularly those sections which relate to the calculation of eclipses. It is a work of very great antiquity, since it is attributed to a Maya author whose astronomical rules show that he was well acquainted with trigonometry (Asiatic Researches, vol. ii., pp. 245-249), proving that abstruse sciences were cultivated in those remote ages, before the invasion of India by the Aryans. (See Appendix, note vi.)

* Codex Cortesianus, plates 7 and 8.

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among the natives of the islands; then along the shores of the Indian Ocean and those of the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Euphrates; up that river to Babylon, the renowned City of the Sun; thence across the Syrian desert to the valley of the Nile, where they finally settled, and gave the name of their mother country to a district of Nubia, calling it Maiu or Maioo. After becoming firmly established in Egypt they sent colonists to Syria. These reached as far north as Mount Taurus, founding on their way settlements along the coast of the Mediterranean, in Sidon, Tyre, the valley of the Orontes, and again on the banks of the Euphrates, to the north of Babylon, in Mesopotamia.

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Mayach (that is, "the land that first arose from the bottom of the deep ") was the name of the empire whose sovereigns bore the title of Can (serpent), spelt to-day khan in Asiatic countries. This title, given by the Mayas to their rulers, was derived from the contour of the empire, that of a serpent with inflated breast, which in their books and their sculptures they represented sometimes with, sometimes without wings, as the Egyptians did the uræus, symbol of their country. Ælian says: "It was the custom of the Egyptian kings to wear asps of different colors in their crowns, this reptile

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Captain J. Cook, Voyage among the Islands of the Pacific.

Henry Brugsch-Bey, History of Egypt under the Pharaohs, vol. i., p. 363; vol. ii., p. 78 (note) and p. 174. The name is comprised in the list of the lands conquered by Thotmes III., and in the list found in a sepulchral chamber in Nubia.

Khan is the title of the kings of Tartary, Burmah, Afghanistan, and other Asiatic countries. The flag of China is yellow, with a green dragon in the centre. That of the Angles also bore as symbol a dragon or serpent; that of the Saxons, according to Urtti-scind, a lion, a dragon, and over them a flying eagle; that of the Manchous, a golden dragon on a crimson field; that of the Huns, a dragon. Their chief was called Kakhan-short for Khan-Khan.

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