Now suppose a busy
people trying to give this sign: instead of drawing the serpent in all
its details they would abbreviate it into something like this, ### ; now
we turn to the ancient Ethiopian sign for k (ka), and we have ### , or
the Himyaritic Arabian ### ; while in the Phoenician it becomes ### ; in
the archaic Greek, ### ; and in the later Greek, when they changed the
writing from left to right, ### . So that the two lines projecting from
the upright stroke of our English K are a reminiscence of the
convolution of the serpent in the Maya original and the Egyptian copy.
Turn now to the Maya sign for t: it is ### , . What is the distinctive
mark about this figure? It is the cross composed of two curved lines,
thus, ### . It is probable that in the Maya sign the cross is united at
the bottom, like a figure 8. Here again we turn to the valley of the
Nile, and we find that the Egyptian hieroglyph for t is ### and ### ;
and in the Syriac t it is ### . We even find the curved lines of the
Maya t which give it something of the appearance of the numeral 8,
repeated accurately in the Mediterranean alphabets; thus the Punic t
repeats the Maya form almost exactly as ### and ### .
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