“They had books made from the bark of trees, coated with a white and durable varnish. They were ten or twelve yards long, and were gathered together in folds, like a palm leaf. On these they painted in colors the reckoning of their years, wars, pestilences, hurricanes, inundations, famines, and other events. From one of these books, which I myself took from some of these idolaters, I saw and learned that to one pestilence they gave the name Mayacimil, and to another Ocnakuchil, which mean ‘sudden deaths’ and ‘times when the crows enter the houses to eat the corpses.’ And the inundation they called Hunyecil, the submersion of trees.”[[225]]

The writer leaves it uncertain whether he learned these words directly from the characters of the book or through the explanations of some native.

It has sometimes been said that the early Spanish writers drew a broad line between the picture-writing that they found in America and an alphabetic script. This may be true of other parts, but is not so of Yucatan. These signs, or some of them, are repeatedly referred to as “letters,” letras.

This is pointedly the case with Father Gabriel de San Buenaventura, a French Franciscan who served in Yucatan about 1670–'80. He published one of the earliest grammars of the language, and also composed a dictionary in three large volumes, which was not printed. Father Beltran de Santa Rosa quotes from it an interesting tradition preserved by Buenaventura, that among the inventions of the mythical hero-god of the natives, Itzamna or Kinich ahau, was that of “the letters of the Maya language,” with which letters they wrote their books.[[226]] Itzamna, of course, dates back to a misty antiquity, but the legend is of value, as showing that the characters used by the natives did, in the opinion of the early missionaries, deserve the name of letters.

Father Diego Lopez Cogolludo is the best-known historian of Yucatan. He lived about the middle of the seventeenth century, and says himself that at that time there was little more to be learned about the antiquities of the race. He adds, therefore, substantially nothing to our knowledge of the subject, although he repeats, with positiveness, the statement that the natives “had characters by which they could understand each other in writing, such as those yet seen in great numbers on the ruins of their buildings.”[[227]]

This is not very full. Yet we know to a certainty that there were quantities of these manuscripts in use in Yucatan for a generation after Cogolludo wrote. To be sure, those in the Christianized districts had been destroyed, wherever the priests could lay their hands on them; but in the southern part of the peninsula, on the islands of Lake Peten and adjoining territory, the powerful chief, Canek, ruled a large independent tribe of Itzas. They had removed from the northern provinces of the peninsula somewhere about 1450, probably in consequence of the wars which followed the dissolution of the confederacy whose capital was the ancient city of Mayapan.

Their language was pure Maya, and they had brought with them in their migration, as one of their greatest treasures, the sacred books which contained their ancient history, their calendar and ritual, and the prophecies of their future fate. In the year 1697 they were attacked by the Spaniards, under General Don Martin de Ursua; their capital, on the island of Flores, in Lake Peten, taken by storm; great numbers of them slaughtered or driven into the lake to drown, and the twenty-one temples which were on the island razed to the ground.

A minute and trustworthy account of these events has been given by Don Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, in the course of which occur several references to the sacred books, which he calls Analtés.

The king Canek, he tells us, in reading in his Analtés, had found notices of the northern provinces of Yucatan and of the fact that his predecessors had come thence, and had communicated these narratives to his chiefs.[[228]]

These books are described as showing “certain characters and figures, painted on certain barks of trees, each leaf or tablet about a quarter (of a yard) wide, and of the thickness of a piece of eight, folded at one edge and the other in the manner of a screen, called by them Analtehes.”[[229]]