The important question remains, how closely, by these cycles, did the Mayas approximate to preserving the exact date of an event?
To answer this fairly, we should be sure that we have a perfectly authentic translation of their hieroglyphic annals. It is doubtful that we have. Those I present in this volume are the most perfect, so far as I know, but they certainly do not agree among themselves. Can their discrepancies be explained? I think they can in a measure (1) by the differing length of the katuns, (2) by the era assumed as the commencement of the reckoning.
It must be remembered that there was apparently no common era adopted by the Mayas; each province may have selected its own; and it is quite erroneous to condemn the annals off-hand for inaccuracy because they conflict between themselves.
§ 8. Ancient Hieroglyphic Books.
The Mayas were a literary people. They made frequent use of tablets, wrote many books, and covered the walls of their buildings with hieroglyphic signs, cut in the stones or painted upon the plaster.
The explanation of these signs is one of the leading problems in American archæology. It was supposed to have been solved when the manuscript of Bishop Landa’s account of Yucatan was discovered, some twenty years ago, in Madrid. The Bishop gave what he called “an A, B, C,” of the language, but which, when applied to the extant manuscripts and the mural inscriptions, proved entirely insufficient to decipher them.
The disappointment of the antiquaries was great, and by one of them, Dr. Felipe Valentini, Landa’s alphabet has been denounced as “a Spanish fabrication.”[61-1] But certainly any one acquainted with the history of the Latin alphabet, how it required the labor of thousands of years and the demands of three wholly different families of languages, to bring it to its perfection, should not have looked to find among the Mayas, or anywhere else, a parallel production of human intelligence. Moreover, rightly understood, Landa does not intimate anything of the kind. He distinctly states that what he gives are the sounds of the Spanish letters as they would be transcribed in Maya characters; not at all that they analyzed the sounds of their words and expressed the phonetic elements in these characters. On the contrary, he takes care to affirm that they could not do this, and gives an example in point.[62-1] Dr. Valentini, therefore, was attacking a windmill, and entirely misconstrued the Bishop’s statements.
I shall not, in this connection, enter into a discussion of the nature of these hieroglyphics. It is enough for my purpose to say that they were recognized by the earliest Spanish explorers as quite different from those of Mexico, and as the only graphic system on the continent, so far as they knew it, which merited the name of writing.[62-2]
The word for book in Maya is huun, a monosyllable which reappears in the Kiche vuh and the Huasteca uuh. In Maya this initial h is almost silent and is occasionally dropped, as yuunil Dios, the book of God (syncopated form of u huunil Dios, the suffix il being the “determinative” ending). I am inclined to believe that huun is merely a form of uoohan, something written, this being the passive participle of uooh, to write, which, as a noun, also means a character, a letter.[63-1]
Another name for their books, especially those containing the prophecies and forecasts of the priestly diviners, is said to have been anahte; or analte. This word is not to be found in any of the early dictionaries. The usual authority for it is Villagutierre Sotomayor, who describes these volumes as they were seen among the Itzas of Lake Peten, about 1690.[64-1]