The chronicles recorded by such means are invaluable. The walls of Central American ruins are covered with voiceless hieroglyphics; and the costly folios of Lord Kingsborough’s _Mexican Antiquities_ have placed at the command of the scholars of both hemispheres the dubious ideography of native historians. But the artistic representations preserved alike in the bas-reliefs and statues of Palenque, or in the characteristic pipe-sculpture of the Ohio mounds, are as significant and easy of interpretation as those on the Ramesian tablets of Abbosimbul in Nubia, which demonstrate the existence, in the era of Rameses, of Semitic and Ethiopian races, with ethnical diversities as clearly defined as now.
Among the characteristics of ancient and modern nations discernible in peculiar rites and customs, or disclosed in their arts, there are some that indicate widely-diffused hereditary influences, and so furnish a clew to remote affinities of race. The practice of circumcision, for example, which prevails both in Asia and Africa, wherever the influence of Semitic nations can be traced, strikingly illustrates the value of such indices. Another ancient custom, that of systematic cranial distortion, was common to nations of both hemispheres, and is proved by the evidence of ancient sculpture to have been in use at the period of highest architectural art in Central America. The Indian war-trophy of the scalp, and its singular counterpart, the peace-pipe, are also significant usages of the New World; though the former appears to have been equally common among ancient Asiatic nations. Herodotus refers to scalping as one of the most characteristic war-customs of the Scythians, and to their hanging the scalp-trophies to the warrior’s bridle-rein. Hence the ἀποσκυθίζειν of Euripides, quoted by Rawlinson, when remarking on the resemblance of such ancient customs to those of the Red Indians. The correspondence is worthy of note, in connection with others afterwards referred to, as possibly indicative of something more than a mere American counterpart to Egyptian and Oriental accumulations of trophies of the slain—the skulls, the hands, the ears, or even the foreskins,—repeatedly referred to in the Old Testament Scriptures, and recorded with minute detail on the paintings of Egypt, and the sculptures of Nimroud and Khorsabad. But no such analogies throw light on the singular usage of the peace-pipe. The ethnical relations which it indicates belong exclusively to the New World, where it seems to perpetuate a significant symbolism derived from an extinct native civilisation. As such, it is worthy of study by the American ethnologist, as the most curious of the many practices connected with the use of the strange nicotian stimulant. The pipe appears to have been associated with solemn religious rites and civic ceremonials, both in ancient and modern times. It bore a prominent part in the worship of the old Mound-Builders; and still retains its place among the paraphernalia of the inspired medicine-man or priest, and the most sacred credentials of the ambassador or war-chief.