■18!J4-95.] ABORIGINAL AMERICAN INSCRIPTIONS. 53 



ABORIGINAL AMERICAN INSCRIPTIONS IN PHONETIC 



CHARACTERS. 



By John Campbell, LL.D., F.R.S.C, &c. 



{Read ijih December, iSg^] 



The dictum of Schoolcraft, to the effect that our aborigines had never 

 advanced beyond the pictographic stage of writing and were ignorant of 

 phonetic characters, has been generally accepted by those who are 

 regarded as authorities on the subject of American antiquities. That 

 irrational preconception, which facts traverse on every side, has led them 

 to denounce as forgeries documentary evidence on stone, for the pro- 

 duction of which no adequate motive has been adduced, and the genuine- 

 ness of which has been attested by many credible witnesses. Discovered 

 at different periods, by many different persons, and in regions widely 

 separated, from Virginia to Massachusetts, and from Iowa to Nova 

 Scotia, these documents, with variations, are all of one character, and 

 that is intimately related to the syllabary found on many Siberian 

 monuments. I have already in two papers, of which the Siberian 

 alone has yet been published, furnished the Institute with samples of 

 the northern Asiatic and kindred Buddhist Indian inscriptions. A 

 similar task I now propose to perform for those of the North American 

 continent. 



Before proceeding with this task, however, I may say that I have 

 already nullified the preconceived contention of Schoolcraft's followers 

 by presenting to the Royal Society of Canada, at its meeting last May, 

 translations of several Central American inscriptions found at Palenque, 

 Copan and Chichen-Itza, inscriptions of a purely ideographic character, 

 whose sole peculiarity is that the phonetic equivalents of the ideographs 

 occasionally possess the equivocal values of the rebus. The Central 

 American hieroglyphics are a form of American writing entirely distinct 

 from that of the Mound Builders, and were derived, as Professor Cyrus 

 Thomas at last agrees with me, from the Malay- Polynesian area. The 

 hieroglyphics of Mexico proper, on the other hand, are to the characters 

 of the Mound Builders as the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians 

 were to their hieratic and demotic script. 



There are pictured rocks in Siberia and Japan, very similar to those 

 found throughout America, as the latter are portrayed in the late Garrick 



