Sylvanus Griswold Morley

“ My own conviction is that they [the inscriptions and codices] will prove to be much more astronomical than even the latter [Doctor Förstemann] believes; that they are primarily and essentially records of the motions of the heavenly bodies; and that both figures and characters are to be interpreted as referring in the first instance to the sun and moon, the planets, and those constellations which are most prominent in the nightly sky in the latitude of Yucatan. ”

“ It has no parallel in nature, but is, on the contrary, a highly artificial unit. Consequently, monuments the erection of which was regulated by the successive returns of this period could not depend in the least for the fact of their existence on any astronomical phenomenon other than that of the rising and setting of eighteen hundred successive suns, an arbitrary period.
The Maya of Yucatan had a similar method of marking time, though their unit of enumeration was 7,200 days, or four times the length of the one used for the same purpose in the older cities. ”

“ It has long been known that the Aztec employed ikonomatic characters in their writing to express the names of persons and places, though this practice does not seem to have been extended by them to the representation of abstract words. The Aztec codices contain many glyphs which are to be interpreted ikonomatically, that is, like our own rebus writing. For example in figure 15, a, is shown the Aztec hieroglyph for the town of Toltitlan, a name which means "near the place of the rushes." ”

“ On the other hand, in Maya texts each glyph is in itself a finished picture, dependent on no other for its meaning, and consequently the various elements entering into it undergo very considerable modifications in order that the resulting composite character may not only be a balanced and harmonious design, but also may exactly fill its allotted space. All such modifications probably in no way affect the meaning of the element thus mutilated.
Fig. 11. Normal-form and head-variant glyphs, showing retention of essential element in each. ”

“ These facts Doctor Brinton regards as proof that some sort of phonetic writing was not unknown, and, indeed, both the inscriptions and the codices establish the truth of this contention. For example, the sign in a, figure 13, has the phonetic value kin, and the sign in b the phonetic value yax. In the latter glyph, however, only the upper part (reproduced in c) is to be regarded as the essential element. It is strongly indicative of phoneticism therefore to find the sound yaxkin, a combination of these two, expressed by the sign found in d. ”

“ Examples of glyph elision, showing elimination of all parts except essential element (here, the crossed bands) .
Moreover, there is encountered at the very outset in the study of these elements a condition which renders progress slow and results uncertain. In Egyptian texts of any given period the simple phonetic elements or signs are unchanging under all conditions of composition. Like the letters of our own alphabet, they never vary and may be recognized as unfailingly. ”

“ For had the erection of the monuments depended on the successive recurrences of some astronomical phenomenon, there would be corresponding intervals between the dates of such monuments [9] the length of which would indicate the identity of the determining phenomenon; and they would hardly have presented the same logical increase due to the natural growth of a nation, which the accompanying diagram clearly sets forth.
Fourth. Although no historical codices [10] are known to have survived, history was undoubtedly recorded in these ancient Maya books. ”

“ All of these, however, with the exception of the first and the last (the inscriptions on stone and the fiber-paper books or codices) just mentioned, occur so rarely that they may be dismissed from present consideration.
The stones bearing inscriptions are found in a variety of shapes, the commonest being the monolithic shafts or slabs known as stelæ. Some of the shaft-stelæ attain a height of twenty-six feet (above ground) ; these are not unlike roughly squared obelisks, with human figures carved on the obverse and the reverse, and glyphs on the other faces. ”

“ This failure to establish the exclusive phonetic character of the Maya glyphs has resulted in the general acceptance of the second theory, that the signs are ideographic. Doctor Brinton (1894b: p. 14) , however, has pointed out two facts deducible from the Landa alphabet which render impossible not only the complete acceptance of this second theory but also the absolute rejection of the first: (1) That a native writer was able to give a written character for an unfamiliar sound, a sound, moreover, which was without meaning to him, as, for example, that of a Spanish letter ”

“ It seems almost necessary to conclude from such a parallel that the inscriptions of the southern cities will also be found to treat of historical matters.
Second. When the monuments of the southern cities are arranged according to their art development, that is, in stylistic sequence, they are found to be arranged in their chronological order as well. ”

“ Texts have been found carved on the wooden lintels of Tikal, molded in the stucco reliefs of Palenque, scratched on shells from Copan and Belize, etched on a bone from Wild Cane Key, British Honduras, engraved on metal from Chichen Itza, drawn on the plaster-covered walls of Kabah, Chichen Itza, and Uxmal, and painted in fiber-paper books. ”

“ Rebus writing depends on the principle of homophones; that is, words or characters which sound alike but have different meanings.↑ The period of the synodical revolution of Venus as computed to-day is 583.920 days.↑ According to modern calculations, the period of the lunar revolution is 29.530588, or approximately 291⁄2 days. For 405 revolutions the accumulated error would be .03×405=12.15 days. This error the Maya obviated by using 29.5 in some calculations and 29.6 in others, the latter offsetting the former. Thus the first 17 revolutions of the sequence are divided into three groups ”