Chaldeans divided the year into twelve months, and the months into lesser divisions of weeks. Both inserted additional days, so as to give the year three hundred and sixty-five days. The Mexicans added five intercalary days; and the Egyptians, in the time of Amunoph I., had already the same practice.
Humboldt, whose high authority cannot be questioned, by an elaborate discussion (“Vues des Cordilleras,” p. 148 et. seq., ed. 1870), has shown the relative likeness of the Nahua calendar to that of Asia. He cites the fact that the Chinese, Japanese, Calmucks, Mongols, Mantchou, and other hordes of Tartars have cycles of sixty years’ duration, divided into five brief periods of twelve years each. The method of citing a date by means of signs and numbers is quite similar with Asiatics and Mexicans. He further shows satisfactorily that the majority of the names of the twenty days employed by the Aztecs are those of a zodiac used since the most remote antiquity among the peoples of Eastern Asia.
Cabera thinks he finds analogies between the Mexican and Egyptian calendars. Adopting the view of several writers that the Mexican year began on the 26th of February, he finds the date to correspond with the beginning of the Egyptian year.
The American nations believed in four great primeval ages, as the Hindoo does to this day.
“In the Greeks of Homer,” says Volney, “I find the customs, discourse, and manners of the Iroquois, Delawares, and Miamis. The tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides paint to me almost literally the sentiments of the red men respecting necessity, fatality, the miseries of human life, and the rigor of blind destiny.” (Volney’s “View of the United States.”) The Mexicans represent an eclipse of the moon as the moon being devoured by a dragon; and the Hindoos have precisely the same figure; and both nations continued to use this expression long after they had discovered the real meaning of an eclipse.
The Tartars believe that if they cut with an axe near a fire, or stick a knife into a burning stick, or touch the fire with a knife, they will “cut the top off the fire.” The Sioux Indians will not stick an awl or a needle into a stick of wood on the fire, or chop on it with an axe or a knife.
Cremation was extensively practised in the New World. The dead were burnt, and their ashes collected and placed in vases and urns, as in Europe. Wooden statues of the dead were made.
There is a very curious and apparently inexplicable custom, called the “Couvade,” which extends from China to the Mississippi Valley; it demands “that, when a child is born, the father must take to his bed, while the mother attends to all the duties of the household.” Marco Polo found the custom among the Chinese in the thirteenth century.
The widow tells Hudibras- “Chineses thus are said
To lie-in in their ladies’ stead.”
The practice remarked by Marco Polo continues to this day among the hill-tribes of China. “The father of a new-born child, as soon as the mother has become strong enough to leave her couch, gets into bed himself, and there receives the congratulations Of his acquaintances.”
(Max Mueller’s “Chips from a German Workshop,” vol. ii., p. 272.) Strabo (vol. iii., pp. 4, 17) mentions that, among the Iberians of the North of Spain, the women, after the birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going themselves. The same custom existed among the Basques only a few years ago. “In Biscay,” says M. F. Michel, “the women rise immediately after childbirth and attend to the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbors’ compliments.” The same custom was found in France, and is said to exist to this day in some cantons of Bearn.
Diodorus Siculus tells us that among the Corsicans the wife was neglected, and the husband put to bed and treated as the patient.
Apollonius Rhodius says that among the Tibereni, at the south of the Black Sea, “when a child was born the father lay groaning, with his head tied up, while the mother tended him with food and prepared his baths.”
The same absurd custom extends throughout the tribes of North and South America. Among the Caribs in the West Indies (and the Caribs, Brasseur de Bourbourg says, were the same as the ancient Carians of the Mediterranean Sea) the man takes to his bed as soon as a child is born, and kills no animals. And herein we find an explanation of a custom otherwise inexplicable. Among the American Indians it is believed that, if the father kills an animal during the infancy of the child, the spirit of the animal will revenge itself by inflicting some disease upon the helpless little one. “For six months the Carib father must not eat birds or fish, for what ever animals he eats will impress their likeness on the child, or produce disease by entering its body.” (Dorman, “Prim.
Superst.,” p. 58.) Among the Abipones the husband goes to bed, fasts a number of days, “and you would think,” says Dobrizboffer, “that it was he that had had the child.” The Brazilian father takes to his hammock during and after the birth of the child, and for fifteen days eats no meat and hunts no game. Among the Esquimaux the husbands forbear hunting during the lying-in of their wives and for some time thereafter.
Here, then, we have a very extraordinary and unnatural custom, existing to this day on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching back to a vast antiquity, and finding its explanation only in the superstition of the American races. A practice so absurd could scarcely have originated separately in the two continents; its existence is a very strong proof of unity of origin of the races on the opposite sides of the Atlantic; and the fact that the custom and the reason for it are both found in America, while the custom remains in Europe without the reason, would imply that the American population was the older of the two.
The Indian practice of depositing weapons and food with the dead was universal in ancient Europe, and in German villages nowadays a needle and thread is placed in the coffin for the dead to mend their torn clothes with; “while all over Europe the dead man had a piece of money put in his hand to pay his way with.” (“Anthropology,” p. 347.) The American Indian leaves food with the dead; the Russian peasant puts crumbs of bread behind the saints’ pictures on the little iron shelf, and believes that the souls of his forefathers creep in and out and eat them. At the cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise, Paris, on All-souls-day, they “still put cakes and sweetmeats on the graves; and in Brittany the peasants that night do not forget to make up the fire and leave the fragments of the supper on the table for the souls of the dead.” (Ibid..
351.)
The Indian prays to the spirits of his forefathers; the Chinese religion is largely “ancestor-worship;” and the rites paid to the dead ancestors, or lares, held the Roman family together.” (“Anthropology,” p. 351.) We find the Indian practice of burying the dead in a sitting posture in use among the Nasamonians, tribe of Libyans. Herodotus, speaking of the wandering tribes of Northern Africa, says, “They bury their dead according to the fashion of the Greeks. . . . They bury them sitting, and are right careful, when the sick man is at the point of giving up the ghost, to make him sit, and not let him die lying down.”
The dead bodies of the caciques of Bogota were protected from desecration by diverting the course of a river
