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.
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