CHAPTER V. 



ABORIGINAL WRITING IN MEXICO, YUCATAN AND CENTRAL 



AMERICA. 



In the year 1863 the Abbe Brasseur de Boui'bourg discovered in the 

 archives of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid a Spanish manuscript 

 copied from one composed by Diego de Landa, a member of the Franciscan order, 

 who, having left Sj^ain at an early age, lived many years as a missionary in 

 Yucatan, where he died in 1579 as second bishop of Merida. The indefatigable 

 French savant, perceiving at once the importance of the manuscript, copied it, 

 and published in the next year (1864) at Paris the Spanish text with accom- 

 panying French translation, introduction, and copious notes and additions — the 

 whole forming a volume of 516 pages — under the titles " Relation des Choses 

 de Yucatan de Diego de Landa," and " Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan sacada 

 de lo que escrivio el Padre Fray Diego de Landa de la Orden de San Fran- 

 cisco." This work gives an account of the country, its history and conquest by 

 the Spaniards, and quite an extensive description of the native inhabitants, their 

 mode of living, arts and religion ; but the prominence it has acquired among 

 books of a similar character is chiefly due to the circumstance that its author 

 presents delineations of the signs which, according to his statement, the natives 

 employed in writing, and also of those expressing the days and months of their 

 calendar. An explanatory text accompanies these characters, the division of 

 time in particular being treated in quite a comprehensive manner. Some enthu- 

 siastic savants, specially interested in the decipherment of Palenquean and other 

 glyphs, and of the few aboriginal manuscripts which have escaped the destroying 

 zeal of Spanish priests, deemed the publication of these characters a literary 

 event, fraught with important consequences. It was thought a kind of Rosetta 

 stone had been discovered, by the aid of which a new light might be thrown 

 on former periods of American history. The subject of interpretation was taken 

 up at once by French scholars, who, in general, are more given to the study of 

 American archaeology than those of other European countries ; but the results, 

 as we shall see, have thus far not justified the high expectations at first enter- 

 tained. 



Landa's alphabet (Fig. 10) consists of thirty-three signs, twenty-six of them 



47 



