IN considering the methods of record and communication used by these peoples, we must keep in mind the two distinct systems of the Aztecs and the Mayas;[1078] and further, particularly as regards the former, we must not forget that some of these writings were made after the Conquest, and were influenced in some degree by Spanish associations. Of this last class were land titles and catechisms, for the native system obtained for some time as a useful method with the conquerors for recording the transmission of lands and helping the instruction by the priests.[1079]
FAC-SIMILE OF A PART OF LANDA’S MS.
After a fac-simile in the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France, nouv. ser., ii. 34. (Cf. pl. xix. of Rosny’s Essai sur le déchiffrement, etc.) It is a copy, not the original, of Landa’s text, but a nearly contemporary one (made thirty years after Landa’s death), and the only one known.
It is usual in tracing the development of a hieroglyphic system to advance from a purely figurative one—in which pictures of objects are used—through a symbolic phase; in which such pictures are interpreted conventionally instead of realistically. It was to this last stage that the Aztecs had advanced; but they mingled the two methods, and apparently varied in the order of reading, whether by lines or columns, forwards, upwards, or backwards. The difficulty of understanding them is further increased by the same object holding different meanings in different connections, and still more by the personal element, or writer’s style, as we should call it, which was impressed on his choice of objects and emblems.[1080] This rendered interpretation by no means easy to the aborigines themselves, and we have statements that when native documents were referred to them it required sometimes long consultations to reach a common understanding.[1081] The additional step by which objects stand for sounds, the Aztecs seem not to have taken, except in the names of persons and places, in which they understood the modern child’s art of the rebus, where such symbol more or less clearly stands for a syllable, and the representation was usually of conventionalized forms, somewhat like the art of the European herald. Thus the Aztec system was what Daniel Wilson[1082] calls “the pictorial suggestion of associated ideas.”[1083] The phonetic scale, if not comprehended in the Aztec system, made an essential part of the Maya hieroglyphics, and this was the great distinctive feature of the latter, as we learn from the early descriptions,[1084] and from the alphabet which Landa has preserved for us. It is not only in the codices or books of the Mayas that their writing is preserved to us, but in the inscriptions of their carved architectural remains.[1085]
Note—This representation of Yucatan hieroglyphics is a reduction of pl. i. in Léon de Rosny’s Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique de l’Amérique Centrale, Paris, 1876. Cf. Bancroft, iv. 92; Short, 405.
When the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg found, in 1863, in the library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, the MS. of Landa’s Relacion, and discovered in it what purported to be a key to the Maya alphabet, there were hopes that the interpretation of the Maya books and inscriptions was not far off. Twenty-five years, however, has not seen the progress that was wished for; and if we may believe Valentini, the alphabet of Landa is a pure fabrication of the bishop himself;[1086] and even some of those who account it genuine, like Le Plongeon, hold that it is inadequate in dealing with the older Maya inscriptions.[1087] Cyrus Thomas speaks of this alphabet as simply an attempt of the bishop to pick out of compound characters their simple elements on the supposition that something like phonetic representations would be the result.[1088] Landa’s own description[1089] of the alphabet accompanying his graphic key[1090] is very unsatisfactory, not to say incomprehensible. Brasseur has tried to render it in French, and Bancroft in English; but it remains a difficult problem to interpret it intelligibly.