DISCOVERY 



373 



" sun " and " region," and they were used phone- 

 tically in a secondary manner only. 



Such glyphs as are phonetic, it must be clear, rank 

 not as letters, but as sj-llables. This kind of writing 

 Brinton called ikonomatic, or rebus-writing — a script 



At an early stage in his researches Forstemann 

 discovered the sign for zero or nought (a shell), which 

 was derived from the symbol for " completeness," 

 zero being regarded as the only complete or perfect 

 number, incapable of division or multiplication, lie 



The sign for the year. 



o ,% c 



The sign for "beginning." 



in which the characters do not indicate the meaning 

 of the objects which they portraj', but only the sounds 

 of their names. Let us suppose, if the reader will 

 pardon the homeliness of the illustration, that we 

 draw pictures of a human eye, a can, a bear, a cobbler's 

 awl, the numeral 4 and a ewe, and translate the rebus 

 " I can bear all for you." In such a system the first 

 picture is intended to recall not the idea " ej'e," but 

 the sound of the word denoting the object, which is 

 also that for the personal pronoun I. Again, the 

 picture of a bear does not represent the idea of that 

 animal, but stands for the sound of its name. Such a 

 method is occasionally employed in the Maya writing, 

 especially, thinks Mr. Bowditch, in the case of common 

 nouns and abstract ideas. The writing in use among 

 the Aztecs of Mexico was, indeed, entirely of this 

 character, and it is believed that they drew inspiration 

 from Maya sources at an early period. 



The crux of the whole question, indeed, is : How far 

 do phonetic elements enter into the composition of the 

 Maya glyphs ? It seems probable that as the de- 

 cipherment of Maya writing progresses, an ever- 

 increasing number of phonetic elements will be 

 identified, though the idea of a glyph will always be 

 found to overshadow its phonetic value. That is, in 

 the consciousness of those who employed it, the system 



was also able to show that the symbol for the moon 

 (a cursive form of the head of the moon god), repre- 

 sented the Maya " month " of twenty days, the period 

 in which the moon wa.\es and wanes, and therefore 

 the number 20. It was readily found that a dot 

 stood for the numeral one, from the analogy of the 

 Mexican manuscripts, in which the days of the month 

 are numbered in their proper sequence by dots, and 

 from the same source it was gleaned that a bar or dash 

 represented five, a bar and one dot six, two bars ten, 

 and so forth. But the manner in which the " higher 

 mathematics " and system of dating of the Maya 

 were elucidated is much too involved a process to be 

 described in a popular article, and some account of 

 the way in which a few of the more useful glyphs were 

 identified will, doubtless, prove of greater interest to 

 the reader. 



Forstemann recognised from Landa's work that one 

 of the signs for a certain day of the Maya month is 

 called akbal, which means " night," and that the sign 

 had the same significance and phonetic value as a 

 glyph was suggested by the star-like dots which 

 surround it. Now akbal is used as a day-sign because 

 it also means " the beginning of the month," the Maya 

 month commencing immediately after midnight. 

 Therefore, when he found the sign akbal as an element 



©®EV 



•'T>nng together," "unicn." 



^^^<s[y^ 



' Division " is s>*mbolised by a flint knife. 



The sign for " might " and "sky. 

 The dots represent stars. 



would, through generations of usage, come to possess 

 a significance chiefly ideographic,' and it would not 

 necessitate any such effort of mental translation as a 

 people unused to rebus-writing would have to make 

 to comprehend it readily. 

 1 That is, each complete glyph would bear a fi.xcd meaning. 



of a glyph and observed footsteps painted beneath it, 

 Forstemann translated it as " beginning " or " forward 

 movement." He found, too, that a glyph representing 

 the number seven, which in Maya has the significance 

 of " great " or " ultimate," means " the end." From 

 the frequent contrast of these terms there can be little 



