[1101] Cf. Sabin’s Amer. Bibliopolist, ii. 143.
[1102] Contributions to N. A. Ethnology, Powell’s Survey, vol. v. Cf. also his Phonetic elements in the graphic system of the Mayas and Mexicans in the Amer. Antiquarian (Nov., 1886), and separately (Chicago, 1886), and his Ikonomic method of phonetic writing (Phila., 1886). Thomas in The Amer. Antiquarian (March, 1886) points out the course of his own studies in this direction.
[1103] Cf. Short, p. 425. Dr. Harrison Allen in 1875, in the Amer. Philosophical Society’s Transactions, made an analysis of Landa’s alphabet and the published codices. Rau, in his Palenqué Tablet of the U. S. Nat. Museum (ch. 5), examines what had been done up to 1879. In the same year Dr. Carl Schultz-Sellack wrote on “Die Amerikanischen Götter der vier Weltgegenden und ihre Tempel in Palenqué,” touching also the question of interpretation (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol. xi.); and in 1880 Dr. Förstemann examined the matter in his introduction to his reproduction of the Dresden Codex.
[1104] Studies in Central American picture-writing (Washington, 1881), extracted from the First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. His method is epitomized in The Century, Dec., 1881. He finds Stephens’s drawings the most trustworthy of all, Waldeck’s being beautiful, but they embody “singular liberties.” His examination was confined to the 1500 separate hieroglyphs in Stephens’s Central America. Some of Holden’s conclusions are worth noting: “The Maya manuscripts do not possess to me the same interest as the stones, and I think it may be certainly said that all of them are younger than the Palenqué tablets, far younger than the inscriptions at Copan.” “I distrust the methods of Brasseur and others who start from the misleading and unlucky alphabet handed down by Landa,” by forming variants, which are made “to satisfy the necessities of the interpreter in carrying out some preconceived idea.” He finds a rigid adherence to the standard form of a character prevailing throughout the same inscription. At Palenqué the inscriptions read as an English inscription would read, beginning at the left and proceeding line by line downward. “The system employed at Palenqué and Copan was the same in its general character, and almost identical even in details.” He deciphers three proper names: “all of them have been pure picture-writing, except in so far as their rebus character may make them in a sense phonetic.” Referring to Valentini’s Landa Alphabet a Spanish Fabrication, he agrees in that critic’s conclusions. “While my own,” he adds, “were reached by a study of the stones and in the course of a general examination, Dr. Valentini has addressed himself successfully to the solution of a special problem.” Holden thinks his own solution of the three proper names points of departure for subsequent decipherers. The Maya method was “pure picture-writing. At Copan this is found in its earliest state; at Palenqué it was already highly conventionalized.”
[1105] See references in Bancroft’s Nat. Races, ii. 576.
[1106] Cogulludo’s Hist. de Yucatan, 3d ed., i. 604.
[1107] Prescott, i. 104, and references.
[1108] Dec. iv., lib. 8.
[1109] Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Troano MS., i. 9. Cf. on the Aztec books Kirk’s Prescott, i. 103; Brinton’s Myths, 10; his Aborig. Amer. Authors, 17; and on the Mexican Paper, Valentini in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., 2d s., i. 58.
[1110] Cf. Icazbalceta’s Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, primer Obispo y Arzobispo de México (1529-48). Estudio biográfico y bibligráfico. Con un apéndice de documentos inéditos ó raros (Mexico, 1881). A part of this work was also printed separately (fifty copies) under the title of De la destruction de antigüedades méxicanas atribuida á los misioneros en general, y particularmente al Illmo. Sr. D. Fr. Juan de Zumárraga, primer Obispo y Arzobispo de México (Mexico, 1881). In this he exhausts pretty much all that has been said on the subject by the bishop himself, by Pedro de Gante, Motolinía, Sahagún, Duran, Acosta, Davila Padilla, Herrera, Torquemada, Ixtlilxochitl, Robertson, Clavigero, Humboldt, Bustamante, Ternaux, Prescott, Alaman, etc. Brasseur (Nat. Civil., ii. 4) says of Landa that we must not forget that he was oftener the agent of the council for the Indies than of the Church. Helps (iii. 374) is inclined to be charitable towards a man in a skeptical age, so intensely believing as Zumárraga was. Sahagún relates that earlier than Zumárraga, the fourth ruler of his race, Itzcohuatl, had caused a large destruction of native writings, in order to remove souvenirs of the national humiliation.