DECIPHERMENT OF THE LINGUISTIC PORTION OF THE 

 MAYA HIEROGLYPHS ^ 



By Benjamin Leb Whobf 



The Maya were the only fully literate people of the aboriginal 

 American world. The buildings and monuments of stone that they 

 left are covered with their writings — writings of which little has yet 

 been read except the dates with which they begin. Moreover, they 

 wrote many books and manuscripts, and three such books of fairly 

 late period have been preserved. These are the famous three Maya 

 codices, and I propose, before the end of this paper, to read a very 

 brief extract from one of them, and to show, in a very plain and 

 simple way, what the Maya writing system was like, and how its signs 

 were put together. 



Included in this writing system is a group of signs and combina- 

 tions of signs referring to a special kind of subject matter. These 

 are signs denoting numerals, periods of time, and terms of the calen- 

 dar, between which mathematical relations exist and the use of 

 which constitutes a system of mathematics. The mathematical ref- 

 erences of these signs have been determined from these mathematical 

 relations that are observed to exist between them, and thus we can 

 read the dates and the positions of the solar-lunar calendar that are 

 recorded at the beginning of most inscriptions. Besides this mathe- 

 matical record, there is the purely linguistic portion of the writings, 

 between the parts of which we can observe grammatical or linguistic 

 relations, but no mathematical relations. These purely linguistic 

 portions are those with which I shall deal. I shall deal, moreover, 

 with the writing in the codices, not that of the inscriptions, though 

 the inscriptional writing is generally similar to that of the codices. 

 It may surprise many to know that in the codices the nonmathe- 

 matical, linguistic signs outnumber the mathematical ones by more 

 than a hundred to one (not counting repetitions of the same 



1 A paper read before the Section on Anthropological Sciences of the Eighth American 

 Scientific Congress, Washington, D. C, May 10-18, 1940. Proof of this paper has not been 

 read by the author, who died on July 26, 1941. 



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