The City of the Sacred Well

by T. A. Willard

Only three hieroglyphic Codices have survived, and they are known respectively as the Dresden Codex, the Perez Codex, and the Tro-Cortesianus. All are in European museums and many facsimile reproductions have been made of them for use in other museums and libraries. These manuscripts are painstakingly illuminated by hand, in colors, and were done with some sort of brush, possibly of hair or feathers. They are done on paper or, rather, a sort of cardboard which has been given a smooth white surface through the application of a coating of fine lime. The body of the paper is made of the fiber of the maguey plant. The manuscript is folded like a Japanese screen or a railway time-table. According to early accounts, some of these records were also made on tanned or otherwise prepared deerskin and upon bark. None of the hide or bark records has ever been found by present-day explorations. It is known that the Mayas had many records concerning religious history, religious rites and ceremonies, medicine, and astronomy. The Spanish priests caused all of the Maya writings they could find to be gathered together and burned, in the fanatical belief that they were serving the church by so doing.

If only their bigotry had vented itself in some other way, how much these old manuscripts might have told us! Apropos of the burning of the priceless documents Landa says, “We collected all the native books we could find and burned them, much to the sorrow of the people, and caused them pain.”

A PAGE FROM THE PEREZ CODEX, DESCRIBING AN ECLIPSE OF THE SUN. THIS ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT ILLUMINATED IN COLOR IS NOW IN THE LIBRARY OF PARIS

The group of books called the Chilan Balam, which are chiefly ideographic transcripts of the more ancient works, written in the Maya tongue but in Spanish characters, probably were made surreptitiously by some of the educated natives soon after the Conquest. There are sixteen of these books still extant. The meaning of this Maya name, Chilan Balam, is interesting. Chi means “mouth”; lan indicates action. Therefore Chilan is “mouth action,” or “speech.” Balam is synonymous for either “tiger” or “ferocity.” But the tiger was worshiped as a deity and the combination of the words, Chilan Balam, means “Speech of the Gods.” The Maya priests were sometimes called by the name, indicating that they were the mouthpieces of the gods, and doubtless these records took their name from the priestly appellation.

The individual books of the Chilan Balam are known by the names of the villages in which they were found, and in a few cases the name of the village may have been derived from the presence of the book. The most important of these books are Nabula, Chun-may-el (which means “something of the first” or “original”), Kua, Man, X-kutz-cab, Ixil, Tihosuco, and Tixcocob.

Just when these books were written is not known, but there is evidence that the book of Mani was written prior to 1595 and the book of Nabula tells of an epidemic which occurred in 1663. While teaching the natives to write the Maya language in Spanish characters, Bishop Landa employed a rather original method, which is our only key to reading these writings and which serves as our only clue to the more ancient hieroglyphs. The ancient Maya writings were purely picture writings, but to some extent the hieroglyphs had lost their original picture significance and had come to have a somewhat symbolic meaning.

In arranging the so-called Maya alphabet (which was first used by the priests in writing out the prayers for the Mayas), Landa employed a very ingenious method and one that was practical at the time. He took the Spanish alphabet and beginning with “A” he asked the educated Indian to draw the character for him in which the sound of “A” was predominant. Naturally, after many attempts by the Indian to furnish such a character he finally selected the hieroglyph ac, which is a picture of a turtle’s head and which in Maya means “turtle” or “dwarf” or something having a slow movement. Next he took the letter “B” and eventually chose the character be, which means “road,” “walk,” “run,” and consists of the picture of a footprint. Therefore—not to go into a lengthy description of the system—he had “A” from ac, “B” from be, etc. With this extemporized alphabet the priests were able to write out the Catholic prayers in such a way that the Indian could repeat them in Spanish by using the sound of the first part of his hieroglyph for the sound of each Spanish letter.

It may be seen from the foregoing that Landa’s alphabet cannot be used for translating Maya, for when the hieroglyphs are made to represent the sounds of the Spanish alphabet the result does not indicate the original connection of a Maya word with its glyph. This fact was a great disappointment among archæologists, who at first expected to translate the Maya Codices by the use of the Landa alphabet. Their hopes, however, were short-lived and they even pronounced Landa an impostor. On the contrary, he has unintentionally given us what is almost a Rosetta Stone.

The Codices, I fear, will never yield a connected story, as they are written in a stenographic or shorthand style consisting of disconnected sentences.