[34-*] The blue is a true blue, quite distinct from the turquoise blue elsewhere, and is found in the case of these numbers only.
[34-†] Gesammelte Abhandlungen, I, 515; “Zur mexik. Chronologie.”
THE MAYA GLYPHS
Up to date our knowledge of the meanings of the glyphs is still to all intents and purposes limited to the direct tradition we have through Landa, and the deductions immediately involved in these. We know the day and month signs, the numbers, including 0 and 20, four units of the archaic calendar count (the day, tun, katun and cycle), the cardinal point signs, the negative particle. We have not fully solved the uinal or month sign, which seems to be chuen on the monuments and a cauac, or chuen, in the manuscripts. We are able to identify what must be regarded as metaphysical or esoteric applications of certain glyphs in certain places, such as the face numerals.[35-*] But every one of these points is either deducible directly by necessary mathematical calculation, or else from the names of certain signs given by Landa in his day and month list, and then found in other combinations, such as yax, kin, etc. That we have as many of the points as we have, and still cannot form from them the key—that we cannot read the glyphs—is a constant wonder; but a fact nevertheless.
The innumerable efforts to identify the glyphs by their superficial appearance, calling the banded headdress a “pottery decoration,” and explaining the face-glyph of the North thereby, because in Maya xaman is north and xamach a tortilla dish (to say nothing of others still more fanciful, by a host of writers), have broken down, as was to be expected. I mention this instance because it illustrates fully the results of superficial analysis, united with a seeming ineradicable tendency even among those most able students who have added the most to our stock of Maya knowledge (among whom Dr. Brinton was certainly one of the foremost), to treat these glyphs as carelessly done, to disregard the differences between manifest variants, or else to talk freely, whenever a passage does not fit the explanation which is being worked out, of scribal errors.
In the first place, if these glyphs are to be interpreted primarily by the Yucatecan Maya dialect (one in which we have most ample printed and MS. lexicographic material), and if in that dialect no other words at all resembling xaman and xamach are found, as we are told, then (if the Mayas named the north star, or the North, by a pun on a tortilla dish) wherever this banded headdress is found, we must assume the text to be treating either of the North, or of tortillas. That might safely be left to break down of its own weight; but we shall also see that the explanation is given in total disregard of manifest, important variants. This banded headdress appears ornamenting at least
