1886.] 5 Id [Brinton. 



scarcely any with its vocabulary. From tliis it is evident that 

 even were these codices in ikonomatic writing, such investigators 

 could make very little progress in deciphering them, and might 

 readily come to the conclusion that the figures are not phonetic 

 in any sense. Precisely the same position was taken by a num- 

 ber of students of Egyptian antiquity long after the announce- 

 ment of the discovery of Champollion ; and even within a few 

 years works have been printed denying all phoneticism to the 

 Nilotic inscriptions. 



What induces me to believe that much of the Maya script is 

 of the nature of the Mexican is the endeavor, undertaken for a 

 very different purpose, of Professor Valentini to explain the 

 origin of the so-called Ma}a alphabet, preserved by Bishop 

 Landa, and printed in the editions of his celebrated " Descrip- 

 tion of Yucatan."* Professor Talentini shows by arguments 

 and illustrations, which I think are in the main correct, that 

 when the natives were asked to represent the sounds of the 

 Spanish letters in their method of writing, they selected objects 

 to depict, whose names, or initial sounds, or first syllables, were 

 the same, or akin, to the sounds of the Spanish vowel or conso- 

 nant heard by them. Sometimes they would give several words, 

 with their corresponding pictures, for the same sound ; just as 

 I have shown was the custom of the ancient Egyptians. Thus, 

 for the sound b they drew a foot-print, which in their tongue was 

 called be ; for the sound a an obsidian knife, in Maya, ach, etc. 

 Talentini thinks also that the letter E was delineated by black 

 spots, in Maya eelc, meaning black, which, if proved by further 

 research, would show that the Mayas, like the Mexicans, attrib- 

 uted phonetic values to the colors they employed in their painted 

 scrolls. 



Outside of the two nations mentioned, the natives of the Ameri- 

 can continent made little advance toward a phonetic system. 

 We have no positive evidence that even the cultivated Tarascas 

 and Zapotecs had anything better than ikonographs ; and of the 

 Quiches and Cakchiquels, both near relatives of the Mayas, we 

 only know that they had a written literature of considerable ex- 



* Valentini's Essay appeared in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian 

 Society, April, 1880. Landa's work was originally published by the Abbe Bras- 

 seur (de Bourbourg) at Paris, 1864, and more accurately at Madrid, 1884, under 

 the supervision of Don Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgada. 



