Customs.—­Both peoples manufactured a fermented, intoxicating drink, the one deriving it from barley, the other from maize.  Both drank toasts.  Both had the institution of marriage, an important part of the ceremony consisting in the joining of hands; both recognized divorce, and the Peruvians and Mexicans established special courts to decide cases of this kind.  Both the Americans and Europeans erected arches, and had triumphal processions for their victorious kings, and both strewed the ground before them with leaves and flowers.  Both celebrated important events with bonfires and illuminations; both used banners, both invoked blessings.  The Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Egyptians practised circumcision.  Palacio relates that at Azori, in Honduras, the natives circumcised boys before an idol called Icelca. ("Carta,” p. 84.) Lord Kingsborough tells us the Central Americans used the same rite, and McKenzie (quoted by Retzius) says he saw the ceremony performed by the Chippeways.  Both had bards and minstrels, who on great festivals sung the deeds of kings and heroes.  Both the Egyptians and the Peruvians held agricultural fairs; both took a census of the people.  Among both the land was divided per capita among the people; in Judea a new division was made every fifty years.  The Peruvians renewed every year all the fires of the kingdom from the Temple of the Sun, the new fire being kindled from concave mirrors by the sun’s rays.  The Romans under Numa had precisely the same custom.  The Peruvians had theatrical plays.  They chewed the leaves of the coca mixed with lime, as the Hindoo to-day chews the leaves of the betel mixed with lime.  Both the American and European nations were divided into castes; both practised planet-worship; both used scales and weights and mirrors.  The Peruvians, Egyptians, and Chaldeans divided the year into twelve months, and the months into lesser divisions of weeks.  Both inserted additional days, so as to give the year three hundred and sixty-five days.  The Mexicans added five intercalary days; and the Egyptians, in the time of Amunoph I., had already the same practice.

Humboldt, whose high authority cannot be questioned, by an elaborate discussion ("Vues des Cordilleras,” p. 148 et. seq., ed. 1870), has shown the relative likeness of the Nahua calendar to that of Asia.  He cites the fact that the Chinese, Japanese, Calmucks, Mongols, Mantchou, and other hordes of Tartars have cycles of sixty years’ duration, divided into five brief periods of twelve years each.  The method of citing a date by means of signs and numbers is quite similar with Asiatics and Mexicans.  He further shows satisfactorily that the majority of the names of the twenty days employed by the Aztecs are those of a zodiac used since the most remote antiquity among the peoples of Eastern Asia.

Cabera thinks he finds analogies between the Mexican and Egyptian calendars.  Adopting the view of several writers that the Mexican year began on the 26th of February, he finds the date to correspond with the beginning of the Egyptian year.