her husband — purposely disfigured by the scheming Jewish priest Hilkiah, who made the woman appear to have yielded to her tempter, perhaps out of spite against the prophetess Hul- dah, she having refused to countenance his fraud and to become his accomplice in it[1] — that rests the whole fabric of the Christian religion, which, since its advent in the world, has been the cause of so much bloodshed and so many atrocious crimes.
In these Maya writings we also meet with the solution of that much mooted question among modern scientists — the existence, destruction, and submergence of a large island in the Atlantic Ocean, as related by Plato in his "Timæus" and "Critias," in consequence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Of this dreadful cataclysm, in which perished sixty-four millions of human beings, four different authors have left descriptions in the Maya language. Two of these narratives are illustrated — that contained in the Troano MS.,[2] the other in the Codex Cortesianus. The third has been engraved on stone in relief, and placed for safe-keeping in a room in a building at Chicħen, where it exists to-day, sheltered from the action of the elements, and preserved for the knowledge of coming generations. The fourth was written thousands of miles from Mayach, in Athens, the brilliant Grecian capital, in the form of an epic poem, in the Maya language. Each line of said poem, formed by a composed word, is the name of one of the letters of the Greek alphabet, rearranged, as we have it, four hundred and three years before the Christian era, under the archonship of Euclydes.
- ↑ 2 Kings, chap, xxii., verse 14 et passim; also 2 Chronicles, chap, xxxiv., verse 24.
- ↑ See Appendix, note iii.
