FOOTNOTES:
[13] It might be worth while here to note that Stephens declared he found at Copan the remains of two circular towers with stairs.
[CHAPTER XVIII]
HIEROGLYPHICS AND PAINTINGS
Throughout that part of Central America which from time immemorial has been inhabited by the Mayans, in their ruined cities, on the stelae, on the door-posts, on the wooden and stone lintels, on altar-slabs, and on special tablets are hieroglyphics. Wherever the Mayan Linguistic Stock is found, in Yucatan, in Guatemala, in Chiapas, in Tabasco, and in Honduras we find them, the only exception being among the Huastecas, the Mayan tribe living on the Panuco River, Mexico. Considering the extent of the Mayan ruins, these hieroglyphics are few in number; but the Spanish vandals are known to have burnt countless manuscripts written on bark[14] and leaf. And thus, if the carved inscriptions are sparse, there is good ground for believing that the art of writing was practised for some centuries before the Conquest. Four manuscripts only survive, and these we describe later. The hieroglyphics, whether carved or written, and no matter what their position or what the material upon which they are inscribed, are invariably of the same nature, though it is noticeable that those on some monuments are finer cut, more intricate, and display a higher art than others.
In Mexico writing never reached such a high degree of perfection as in Yucatan and the other southern territories of the Mayan tribes. Thus it would seem that at the time of the Aztec invasion the Mayans of the Mexican plateau were only acquainted with the merest outline of the art which their kinsmen of the south had so far perfected. This is entirely consonant with the theories we have earlier advanced as to the comparatively crude stage of civilisation to which the Mexican Mayans, the Toltecs of the Aztec traditions, had attained at the coming of the warlike northern tribes. In most cases the Mexican writings are pictographic rather than hieroglyphic, though Mayan glyphs do occur. The best collection of these pictographs is that made by Alexander von Humboldt and presented by him to the Royal Library of Berlin in January, 1806. Some of these are described in his Vues des Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples indigènes de l'Amérique; while others are reproduced in Lord Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico. Up to the present all efforts to find an undeniable "key" to the decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphics have failed. The most resolute and intelligent work has been done by Americans and Germans. Among the former the most famous are Professor Cyrus W. Thomas, T. Goodman, S. Holden, and in past years the late Dr. D. G. Brinton. Among the latter those most prominent are Professors E. Forstemann, Eduard Seler, and Paul Schellhas. France has been represented by Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, Professor Leon de Rosny, Count de Charencey, and M. A. Pousse; while England, alas! has been practically unrepresented in this important work, for Mr. A. P. Maudslay, the only British student in this field, has chiefly devoted himself to photographing rather than attempting to decipher the glyphs.
Much might reasonably have been expected from the labours of all these scholars, but practically nothing has resulted but a series of theories, over the exact value and application of which there is endless bickering. Attempts have been made from time to time to compose an alphabet by which the glyphs could be read phonetically. The first great stir in this direction was made by Abbé de Bourbourg in 1864, when he announced that he had discovered a year before in Madrid a manuscript entitled, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan, by Diego de Landa, Bishop of Merida from 1573 to 1579. In this manuscript was included an alphabet of the Mayan glyphs with their equivalents in Spanish. For the moment this "find" was regarded as a Central American "Rosetta Stone," and every one believed the glyphs would offer no further difficulties. But the archæological world was doomed to disappointment, for on an attempt being made to use the alphabet, it broke down and was declared by all to be an invention of Landa. But the Abbé did not give it up; and, assisted by Leon de Rosny, he defined twenty-nine letters with numerous variants, and published his report in 1869 in the introduction to the Codex Troano; while the result of de Rosny's labours were printed in his Essai sur le Déchiffrement de l'Écriture hiératique de l'Amérique Centrale in 1876.
The next "alphabet" was that propounded in The Scientific American for January, 1885, by Dr. Le Plongeon, who, in an article entitled "Ancient Maya Hieratic Alphabet according to Mural Inscription," declared it to contain twenty-three letters with the usual numerous variants. But this, like Landa's, was strangled almost at its birth by remorseless scholars. Next came forward Dr. Hilborne T. Cresson, who at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1892 and 1894, advanced the theory that the characters were purely phonetic; but his untimely death cut short his researches. Professor Cyrus W. Thomas, in a paper in The American Anthropologist for July, 1893, entitled "Are the Maya Hieroglyphics Phonetic?" rather follows Cresson, but in recent years has reconsidered this view and now would seem to hold that some, at least, are ideographs.
Thus there may be said to be the two schools of decipherers: those who believe the Mayan writing to be phonetic and those who hold it to be ideographic. For the latter stand the German school (Forstemann, Seler and Schellhas); for the former the Abbé, de Rosny and de Charencey. The American students have been for the most part willing to follow the lead of Cyrus Thomas and declare it to be a mixture of phonetics and ideographs. After years of careful study of the glyphs Professor Forstemann has come to the general conclusion that they are largely composed of numerals made up of astronomical ideographs. He was the first to discover what are now generally accepted as the various numeral signs. His first achievement was his alleged identification of one of the glyphs with our nought in April, 1885. From this start he went slowly up the numeral scale until he asserted he had deciphered the signs for the numbers up to twenty. These are now generally accepted as correct and are composed as shown on opposite page. Thus it would seem, if Professor Forstemann is right, that the highest number to which they counted by means of these dots and dashes was 19. No greater number than this has ever been found in any of the codices or on the monuments. Assuming this as true, it is obvious that the number 20 must be looked for in a new form.