CHAPTER III 



THE WRITING. 



It must be admitted that noue of the attempts made at decipher- 

 iug the writing in these manuscripts has proved entirely satisfactory; 

 in fact there is still some doubt as to whether any of the characters 

 are truly phonetic; nevertheless it is believed that what is here shown 

 will tend to lessen this doubt. It must be conceded, however, notwith- 

 standing these drawbacks and difficulties, that some material prog- 

 ress has been made towards a better understanding of its type and of 

 the nature of the characters. 



The direction in which it is to be read must of course be deter- 

 mined before any progress can be made in deciphering it. This was, 

 until recently, a matter of speculation, but now may be considered 

 settled. As this has been explained' it is unnecessary to repeat that 

 explanation here. 



A certain parallelism in the sentences or groups of characters has 

 also been discovered. Attention was first called to this by me in the 

 work referred to, but is more fully explained by Dr. P. Schellhas in 

 his paper entitled "Die Mayahandschrift der koniglichen Bibliothek 

 zu Dresden." It will readily be understood from a single illustra- 

 tion. Take for example the lower division of Plate XV of the Manu- 

 script Troano (see Study Ms. Troano). Omitting from consideration 

 the numerals and the day column at the left, there are here two short 

 columns on the left and two on the right over the animal figures, 

 and three longer columns between. As explained in the work re- 

 ferred to, the short columns are to be read as lines from left to right 

 and the longer columns separately, from the top downward. There 

 are, in all, five groups or sentences, each containing four compound 

 characters. Representing these by letters, repeating those which in- 

 dicate similar characters, and arranging as in the plate, the I'esult is 

 as follows: . 



In this case the characters represented by a and r are repeated in 

 each group and in the same relation to the other characters. It is 



See Chapter VI, Study of the Manuscript Troano, by Cyrus Thomas. 



345 



