Etchings on Mystery Stone in Swamp May Be Work of Pre-Mayan Tribe

Eighteen centuries ago, terrifying portents appeared in the sky to disturb the peace of an Indian tribe that lived deep in the mangrove swamps near the Gulf of Mexico.

The Indians knew and feared the hurricanes that blew in from the Gulf of Mexico, the powerful rainstorms and fierce winds ascribed to the Caribbean god Hurrakkan. But perhaps more awesome to their priests and elders in the 2nd Century were the eerie celestial occurrences--recognized as eclipses today--which they recorded on a huge stone block.

For centuries, presumably, the stone carved with its enigmatic symbols stood on an earthen mound where two waterways meet outside La Mojarra, a village of some 300 people about 20 miles south of the Gulf of Mexico port of Alvarado.

Finally, in 1944, erosion from the Acula River where it meets a stream called the Piojo toppled the big rock.

Fishermen poling the Acula in November, 1986, were surprised to hit an obstruction about 30 feet from the left bank. They dived into the water and found the stone, at a depth of 7 feet.

The 4-ton, 7-foot-long monument, or stele, was loaded onto a barge and taken to the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology of Veracruz state university.

Curators kept the find secret for two years to better study the stone without publicity. Today, they are just beginning to decipher its mysteries.

“The minute I saw it I knew we were onto something big,” said Fernando Winfield Capitaine, a senior researcher at the museum.

He said it appears to be the work of a pre-Mayan tribe that worshiped the sun and moon, a culture that may have given the Mayas the astronomical calendars and numerical system history credits them with advancing.

“It’s one of the five oldest and the longest piece of ancient carved-rock writing on the American continent,” said Winfield, who was director of the museum at the time of the discovery.

Also found was a 19-inch-high clay figure of a fertility-rite priest, known as a Xipe Totec. It was broken in pieces, stored in a house in the village about 130 feet away from the stele. It was retrieved and restored, but it hasn’t yielded much information.

Researchers from many nations have now studied the stele. But while they have failed so far to decipher the words of the hieroglyphics, they have made a startling find regarding the dates and numbers carved into it.

From what the researchers can determine, the stone carvings date to the middle of the 2nd Century. They record a 25-year period of eclipses and planetary alignments that must have struck fear in the hearts of the ancient tribe.

So far, the researchers don’t even know the name of the tribe, which inhabited a region of crocodile-infested swamps.

Ancient Mexicans worshiped the sun and moon, the gods of war and rain, among others. To the rulers and priests, the heavenly swirl of stars and planets was of tantamount importance to their lives. They needed the astral bodies to measure time, draw up calendars, divine the future, even navigate.

And yet these celestial deities were suddenly behaving erratically!

The moon almost blotted out the sun on Aug. 13, AD 128, darkening the day. Quite a few people must have gone blind, or suffered eye damage, from viewing the annular eclipse, which appeared in the constellation Leo.

Two other annular eclipses followed--on July 13, 139, in the constellation Cancer, hiding the planet Venus, and on May 2, 143, in the constellation Taurus.

And there was a total eclipse June 12, 150, in the constellation Gemini, followed by another annular one on April 11, 153, between the constellations Taurus and Aries.

Other no-less puzzling events in between--a wrong star appearing next to the moon or popping up in the wrong place--must have been so awesome the priests ordered them all written up in their primitive picture-writing “hieroglyphic” language.

They subsequently had it carved on the 7-foot long slab of rock, a slightly oblong block with a gently rounded top, preserving the knowledge for future generations.

Carving such a monument in itself was a feat, for there is no stone in the entire region. The area is alluvial; all soft loam, sluggish streams and swampland.

Even more amazing was how they shaped the stele out of basalt, one of the Earth’s hardest rocks, then polished one side and carved on it; for these people had no hard-metal tools to speak of.

Scientists speculate that the basalt was brought by river canoe or raft from the Tuxtlas, a region some 50 rugged miles away, and experts guess that the priests must have used dried fish-bone or tropical wood hardened by fire as carving tools.

The numbers are Mayan figures of dots and bars, based on five. “Every dot represents one, every bar five. A bar with three dots on top is eight, three bars and one dot is 16,” Winfield explained.

Using computers to plot the dates, Winfield and Hugo H. Prestinary Canossa, a mathematician and astronomer in California, confirmed that the stele contains three different calendars used by the Mayas.

One was a religious calendar with a 260-day year called “Tzolkin”; another was a civilian or “agricultural” calendar of a 365-day year called “Haab,” and a third was the Long Count Calendar of 1,966,900 days.

“But these people were not Mayas, who emerged in the 4th Century in the Yucatan Peninsula about 700 miles to the east,” Winfield said. “Nor were they linked to the neighboring Olmecs, who flourished from around 1050 BC to 500 BC.

“We suspect they were a civilization in between, that bridged the Olmecs and the Mayas. In any case, they must have given the Mayas their calendar and numbering system.”

If that’s true, a lot of feats currently attributed to the Mayas would have to be studied anew.

The text on the stele contains at least 36 symbols used by more than a dozen civilizations, some surviving up to 14 centuries later in cultures as far away as central Mexico, Guatemala and the United States.

Aside from 33 “elements,” such as rain-god representations, the text consists of 577 glyphs, or picture-words, divided into two groups of neat columns with a well-defined alley in between.

One group of 12 columns to the right, and another of nine columns to the left, look inward toward each other and the columns are read from top to bottom.

There are at least 36 “sentences,” each divided by an inverted U with two horizontal dots inside, symbolizing our full-stop of today. “The longest ‘sentence’ has 31 glyphs, the shortest only two,” Winfield said.