480 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



sign). So much for the belief that the Maya writings are mainly 

 mathematical. 



When Champollion began the decipherment of Egyptian writing, 

 he was in the relatively fortunate position of not having to oppose 

 an extensive body of established doctrine holding that the markings 

 were not writing but a nonlinguistic symbolism. To be sure there 

 were the fantastic speculations of Athanasius Kircher, concerned 

 wholly with the religious and mystical symbolism which he read into 

 the hieroglyphs, but these were upheld by none of the scholarly dis- 

 ciplines and quickly went down before Champollion's irrefutable 

 logic. At that time the philologist and literary scholar reigned 

 supreme in the study of ancient cultures. Champollion therefore 

 had only to prove the linguistic logic of his results to philologists; 

 he needed not to advocate his methods to archeologists, for there were 

 none, except philologists. There was not then the specialized separa- 

 tion of disciplines which prevails now. At that time philology led 

 the way, read inscriptions, and stimulated archeology. 



It is popularly supposed that the success of Champollion's effort 

 was wholly due to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone with its bi- 

 lingual inscription, and that there is nothing corresponding to the 

 Rosetta Stone in Maya hieroglyphs. Both suppositions are wrong. 

 Champollion would have ultimately succeeded without a Rosetta 

 Stone, for the inscriptions happened to be in a language that he knew. 

 He knew Egyptian, that is Coptic, the late form of the language and 

 still essentially the same tongue, which the ancient Egyptians spoke 

 and wrote. Just so the Central American writings happen to be in 

 a language that it is possible to know. They might have been in a 

 dead language, and then the case would indeed be difficult, but for- 

 tunately they are in Maya, which is still spoken and can be studied 

 from many sources. But how do we know they are in Maya ? This 

 will be quite clear to a linguistic scholar, who appreciates that if 

 texts in an unknown character are in a language that he knows, it is 

 likely that he can detect that fact from the the nature and frequency 

 of repeated collocations of signs. In addition, the meaning of vari- 

 ous clusters of signs in the Maya system is known from tradition 

 (e. g., the glyphs of the months) and others from pictures that 

 accompany them in the codices. The hieroglyphs record a language 

 in which the writings for a certain month and for sitting position 

 begin with the same sign, which is the image of a feather. This 

 condition is satisfied only by the Maya language, in which the roots 

 of these particular words and the root of the word "feather" all begin 

 with the same syllable. Again, it is a language in which the writings 

 for snake, fish, and a certain time period all begin with the same 



