When the island of Flores was captured these books were found stored in the house of the king Canek, containing the account of all that had happened to the tribe.[[230]] What disposition was made of them we are not informed.
I have reserved until now a discussion of the description of the Maya writing presented in the well-known work of Diego de Landa, the second bishop of Yucatan. Landa arrived in the province in August, 1549, and died in April, 1579, having passed most of the intervening thirty years there in the discharge of his religious duties. He became well acquainted with the language, which, for that matter, is a comparatively easy one, and though harsh, illiberal, and bitterly fanatic, he paid a certain amount of attention to the arts, religion, and history of the ancient inhabitants.
The notes that he made were copied after his death and reached Spain, where they are now preserved in the library of the Royal Academy of History, Madrid. In 1864 they were published at Paris, with a French translation, by the Abbé Brasseur (de Bourbourg).
Of all writers Landa comes the nearest telling us how the Mayas used their system of writing; but, unfortunately, he also is so superficial and obscure that his words have given rise to very erroneous theories. His description runs as follows:
“This people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books their ancient matters and their sciences, and with them (i. e., with their characters or letters), and figures (i. e., drawings or pictures), and some signs in the figures, they understood their matters, and could explain them and teach them. We found great numbers in these letters, but as they contained nothing that did not savor of superstition and lies of the devil, we burnt them all, at which the natives grieved most keenly and were greatly pained.
“I will give here an a, b, c, as their clumsiness does not allow more, because they use one character for all the aspirations of the letters, and for marking the parts another, and thus it could go on in infinitum, as may be seen in the following example. Le means a noose and to hunt with one; to write in their characters, after we had made them understand that there are two letters, they wrote it with three, giving to the aspiration of the l the vowel é, which it carries before it; and in this they are not wrong so to use it, if they wish to, in their curious manner. After this they add to the end the compound part.”[[231]]
I need not pursue the quotation. The above words show clearly that the natives did not in their method of writing analyze a word to its primitive phonetic elements. “This,” said the bishop, “we had to do for them.” Therefore they did not have an alphabet in the sense of the word as we use it.
On the other hand, it is equally clear, from his words and examples, that they had figures which represented sounds, and that they combined these and added a determinative or an ideogram to represent words or phrases.
Fig. 1.—Fac Simile of Landa’s Manuscript.