FIG. 1.—Fac Simile of Landa’s Manuscript. ]
The alphabet which he inserts has been engraved and printed several times, but nowhere with the fidelity desirable for so important a monument in American archæology. For that reason I insert a photographic reproduction of it from the original MS. in the library of the Academia de la Historia of Madrid.
A comparison of this with the alphabet as given in Brasseur’s edition of Landa discloses several variations of importance. Thus the Abbé places the first form of the letter _C_ horizontally instead of upright. Again in the MS., the two figures for the letter _U_ stand, the first at the end of one line, the second at the beginning of the next. From their strong analogy with the sign of the sky at night, I am of opinion that they belong together as members of one composite sign, not separately as Brasseur gives them.
Both in it and in the inscriptions, manuscripts, and paintings the forms of the letters are rounded, and a row of them presents the outlines of a number of pebbles cut in two. Hence the system of writing has been called “calculiform,” from _calculus_, a pebble. The expression has been criticised, but I agree with Dr. Förstemann in thinking it a very appropriate one. It was suggested, I believe, by the Abbé Brasseur (de Bourbourg).
This alphabet of course, can not be used as the Latin _a_, _b_, _c_. It is surprising that any scholar should have ever thought so. It would be an exception, even a contradiction, to the history of the evolution of human intelligence, to find such an alphabet among nations of the stage of cultivation of the Mayas or Aztecs.
The severest criticism which Landa’s figures have met has been from Dr. Phillip J. J. Valentini. He discovered that many of the sounds of the Spanish alphabet were represented by signs or pictures of objects whose names in the Maya begin with that sound. Thus he supposes that Landa asked an Indian to write in the native character the Spanish letter _a_, and the Indian drew an obsidian knife, which, says Dr. Valentini, is in the Maya _ach_; in other words, it begins with the vowel _a_. So for the sound _ki_, the Indian gave the sign of the day named _kinich_.
Such is Dr. Valentini’s theory of the formation of Landa’s alphabet; and not satisfied with lashing with considerable sharpness those who have endeavored by its aid to decipher the manuscripts and mural inscriptions, he goes so far as to term it “a Spanish fabrication.”