ABORIGINAL WRITING IN MEXICO, ETC. 57 



But, supposing the Maya manuscripts had been translated, in part or entirely, 

 through Bishop Landa's key, it would still be a difficult, if at all practicable, 

 task to interpret the glyphs sculptured on the tablets of Palenque, which 

 evidently are of much higher antiquity than those written records. Admitting 

 for a moment that both, the sculptured glyphs and written characters, were 

 contemporaneous, the former most probably would ditfer in shape from those 

 traced by the scribe, who, we may suppose, performed his work rapidly, and 

 employed abbreviations and other conventional modifications not used by the 

 artist who chiseled them in bas-relief on stone.='= These two kinds of characters, 

 however, are not contemporaneous, the sculptures being, in all likelihood, many 

 centuries older than the manuscripts, and during the period intervening between 

 the execution of both, additional alterations in the shape of the written signs 

 may have taken place. Yet the difficulties just mentioned are of subordinate 

 importance, if those arising from changes in the language are taken into consid- 

 eration. I have elsewhere stated as my belief that the Maya tongue or a 

 kindred dialect was spoken by the builders of Palenque, and, as a consequence, 

 I hold that this language underlies the signs exhibited on the tablets of the 

 ruined city. If we ascribe to these tablets an antiquity of a thousand years — 

 which is probably a moderate estimate — Landa's key, provided that it really 

 v/ere applicable to the Maya language as spoken about three hundred years ago, 

 would fail to disclose the meaning of the Palenquean glyphs, because they express 

 the Maya of a much earlier period, and therefore diftcring from that spoken at 

 the time of the conquest.-|- But if, as has been maintained, Palenque was built 



* In consideration of their shape 51. Aubin has designated these characters as " calculiform." It does not 

 appear to me that this definition admits of a general application. 



t I cannot abstain from quoting here, for the sake of illustration, Sir Charles Lyell's observations on the 

 mutability of languages : — " None of the widely spoken languages of modern Europe is a thousand years old. 

 No English scholar who has not specially given himself up to the study of Anglo-Saxon can interpret the docu- 

 ments in which the chronicles and laws of England were written in the days' of King Alfred, so that we may be 

 sure that none of the English of the nineteenth century could converse with the subjects of that monarch if these 

 last could now be restored to life. The difficulties encountered -would not arise merely from the intrusion of 

 French terras, in consequence of the Norman conquest, because that large portion of our language (including the 

 articles, pronouns, etc.) which is Saxon has also undergone great transformations by abbreviation, new modes of 

 pronunciation, spelling, and variou-s corruptions, so as to be unlike both ancient and modern German. They who 

 now speak German, if brought info contact with their Teutonic ancestors of the ninth century, would be quite 

 unable to converse with them, and, in like manner, the subjects of Charlemagne could not have exchanged ideas 

 with the Goths of Alaric's army, or with the soldiers of Arminius in the days of Augustus Csesar. So rapid 

 indeed has been the change in Germany, that the epic poem called the Nibelungen Lied, once so popular, and 

 only seven centuries old, cannot now be enjoyed, except by the erudite. 



" If we then turn to France, we meet again with similar evidence of ceaseless change. There is a treaty of 

 peace still extant a thousand years old, between Charles the Bald and King Louis of Germany (dated A. D. 841), 

 in which the German king takes an oath in what was the French tongue of that day, while the French king 

 swears in the German of the same era, and neither of these oaths would now convey a distinct meaning to any 

 but the learned in these two countries. So also in Italy, the modern Italian cannot be traced back much beyond 

 the time of Dante, or some six centuries before our t\ai<i."—Aniiqtiitij of Man ; fourth edition, London and Phila- 

 delphia, 1873, p. 508. 

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