It is curious to note as an interesting analogy that the same checkered design frequently adorns the ancient Egyptian drinking bowls represented in the hieroglyphic writings. I have also observed it in some ancient Greek drinking vessels, preserved at the Imperial Hermitage Museum at St. Petersburg, where it decorated the bowl itself or the garments of Bacchantes figured thereupon. It is also met with in ancient Peruvian textile fabrics, in black and white, as on one figure vase in the Berlin Museum, and, needless to remark, it is a Scotch clan tartan. Its adoption as the basis for chess-boards of ancient Egypt seems to indicate that there it also signified the Above and Below and that the game was thought of as an exemplification of the eternal contest between the powers of Heaven and Earth, light and darkness, etc. We look to specialists for information as to the origin, meaning and employment in Egypt and Greece of this primitive and almost universal design.
In ancient Mexico and possibly Peru, it obviously pertained to a set of ideas which, in some communities, might easily have degenerated and led to the institution of rites and ideas such as were prevalent in the Maya colony which had established itself at the mouth of the Panuco river, on the coast of Mexico, north of Vera Cruz, and from which the Huaxtecans of the present day descend. It is interesting to note that the name of the capital founded by the colonists, who seem to have emigrated owing to well-founded religious persecution, was Tuch-pan, a word which signifies in the Maya tongue "the umbilicus," qualified by pan, meaning "that which is above or excels," etc., but which was expressed in Nahuatl picture-writings by a rabbit=tochtli and a banner=pantli.
The opposite of the checkered or xotlac design, was the native water and air pattern which has been pointed out as encircling the mitre of the Lord of the Above or Heaven. It likewise figures in native pictures on the mantles of some of Montezuma's predecessors. The history of its origin and development is best learned from the following native illustrations. Fig. 42, nos. 1 and 2, represents sea-waves, the Maya name for which, by the way, is kukul-yaam, which admits of the interpretation "divine-water" or, if we connect kukul with the Mexican coliuhqui, "twisted or bent water." A representation of water, as figured on a mantle in the "Lyfe of the Indians," conveys the idea of water moved by the action of the wind, the blank curve reminding one also of the curves so often associated by native artists with serpents' heads, and with the wind and rain-gods. The well-known symbol of the air-god is accompanied, as already shown (fig. 26), by an ornament which forms a solid frame for a hollow curve constituting an air-image. In the following image an analogous ear ornament is figured and it is surrounded by puffs of air or wind, conventionally drawn (fig. 43).