hat a tecpan constituted a minor integral whole and
comprised the rule over twenty classes of people, we see that whilst the
four provincial tecpans were in themselves miniature reproductions of the
metropolis, they but filled the same position in relation to this as the
four limbs to the body of a man or quadruped. A final proof of how
completely this analogy was recognized by the native rulers is furnished
by the Maya titles which embody the word kab=arm and hand.

It has already been mentioned in the preceding pages that the rulers of
the four quarters were entitled Ba-cab and that in the Dresden Codex an
image of the four quarters was figured by four bones. The word for bone
being bac and for arm being kab, it is obvious that the arm-bone or
humerus would furnish a rebus, expressing the title of the four Bacabs--a
conclusion which throws light upon the signification of the cross-bones of
native pictography and also of the incised and decorated human arm and leg
bones which have been found in Mexico and Yucatan.

At the same time the word kab also recurs in the title Ah-Cuch-Cab which
signifies "the ruler or chief of a town or place," Cuchil being the name
of the latter. Both of these words so closely resemble cuxabal and cuxtal,
the word for "life," that it is not impossible that the native mind often
associated the town as a centre of life, and thought of their chief as one
whose symbol was a "life-dispensing hand." In order to grasp the full
significance of the symbol of the hand in Maya sculptured and written
records it is necessary to bear these facts in mind.

In 1895 Mr. Teobert Maler unearthed in the centre of the public square at
"El Seibal," Guatemala, a sculptured stela exhibiting the figures of a
chieftain over whose head an open hand was carved. It is impossible not to
interpret this as a mark that the chieftain had once been the ruler of a
town and that this, in turn, was one of four minor capitals belonging to a
central metropolis. A hand, enclosed in quadrangular lines and represented
on the garment of a chieftain, was found by Dr. Le Plongeon at Uxmal, and
I believe that this should be interpreted in the same manner.

In my essay on Ancient Mexican Shields (Internationales Archiv fuer
Ethnographie, band V, 1892) I reproduced two interesting instances of the
employment, as the name-sign of a ruler in native pictography, of a hand
on the palm of which an eye is depicted. The effigy of a hand, the sacr