which I think is unquestionably the correct one, that the Maya writing is certainly something more than systematized picture-writing, and yet that we cannot expect to find in it anything corresponding to our own alphabet.
In the same year (1879) Dr. Carl Schultz-Sellack published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Bd., XI, th eresults of some studies he had made of the Dresden Codex, compared with others published in Kingsborough's work, especially with reference to the signs of the gods of the cardinal points. He recognized the same signs as De Rosny, but arranged them differently. Many of his comparisons of Maya with Aztec pictographs are suggestive and merit attentive consideration; but he speaks a great deal too confidently of their supposed close relationship.[1]
Although Dr. Förstemann, in his introductory text to the Dresden Codex (1880), expressly disclaims any intention to set up as an expounder of its contents, he nevertheless compared carefully the three published codices, and offers (pp. 15-17) a number of acute suggestions and striking comparisons, which the future student must by no means overlook.
Finally, the "Studies in American Picture-Writing" of Prof. Edward S. Holden, published in the "First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1881," are to be included in the list. He devotes his attention principally to the mural inscriptions, and only incidentally to the Manuscripts. The method he adopts is the mathematical one employed in unriddling cryptography. By its application he is convinced that the writing is from left to right, and from above downward; that the signs used at Copan and Palenque were the same, and had the same meaning; that in proper names, at least, the picture-writing was not phonetic; and that in all probability it had no phonetic elements in it whatever.
As Professor Holden states that he is entirely unacquainted with the Maya language, and but slightly with the literature of the subject; as his method would confessedly not apply to the characters, if phonetic, without a knowledge of the Maya; and as he assumes throughout his article that the mythology and attributes of the Maya divinities were the same as those of the Aztec, for which the evidence is very far from sufficient, we must
- ↑ Dr. Schultz-Sellack's article is entitled "Die Amerikanischen Götter der Vier Wellgegenden und ihre Tempel in Palenque."
