ANCIENT LANGUAGES OF THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF AMERICA.
Letter to M. Champollion, on the Graphic Systems of America, and the Glyphs of Otolum or Palenque, in Central America.—By C. S. Rafinesque.
You have become celebrated by deciphering, at last, the glyphs and characters of the ancient Egyptians, which all your learned predecessors had deemed a riddle, and pronounced impossible to read. You first announced your discovery in a letter. I am going to follow your footsteps on another continent, and a theme equally obscure; to none but yourself can I address with more propriety letters on a subject so much alike in purpose and importance, and so similar to your own labors.
I shall not enter at present into any very elaborate discussion. I shall merely detail, in a concise manner, the object and result of my inquiries, so as to assert my claim to a discovery of some importance in a philological and historical point of view: which was announced as early as 1828 in some journals (three letters to Mr. McCulloch on the American nations), but not properly illustrated. Their full development would require a volume, like that of yours on the Egyptian antiquities, and may follow this perhaps at some future time.
It may be needful to prefix the following principles as guides to my researches, or results of my inquiries:—
1. America has been the land of false systems; all those made in Europe on it are more or less vain and erroneous.
2. The Americans were equal in antiquity, civilization, and sciences, to the nations of Africa and Europe—like them, the children of the Asiatic nations.
3. It is false that no American nations had systems of writing, glyphs, and letters. Several had various modes of perpetuating ideas.
4. There were several such graphic systems in America to express ideas, all of which find equivalents in the east continent.