Читать книгу The Calendar History of Kiowa Indians (Illustrated Edition) - James Mooney - Страница 5

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The peculiar and elaborate systems by means of which the more cultivated ancient nations of the south recorded their histories are too well known to students to need more than a passing notice here. It was known that our own tribes had various ways of depicting their mythology, their totems, or isolated facts in the life of the individual or nation, but it is only within a few years that it was even suspected that they could have anything like continuous historical records, even in embryo.

The fact is now established, however, that pictographic records covering periods of from sixty to perhaps two hundred years or more do, or did, exist among several tribes, and it is entirely probable that every leading mother tribe had such a record of its origin and wanderings, the pictured narrative being compiled by the priests and preserved with sacred care through all the shifting vicissitudes of savage life until lost or destroyed in the ruin that overwhelmed the native governments at the coming of the white man. Several such histories are now known, and as the aboriginal field is still but partially explored, others may yet come to light.