The Alphabet That Was Not an Alphabet

The Relación de las cosas de Yucatán contains a page on which Landa asked a Maya informant to write the letters of the Spanish alphabet, and recorded the signs he was given. For four hundred years this was treated as a curiosity or a fraud, because the signs plainly do not work as an alphabet: asked for the letter be, the Maya scribe supplied a sign for the syllable bay, which is what the name of the letter sounds like.

In 1952 the Russian linguist Yuri Knórozov argued that the script was logographic and syllabic together, and that the list was a partial syllabary badly labelled. That reading was resisted for decades, partly for reasons of Cold War academic politics, and is now the basis of a decipherment that reads most surviving Maya inscriptions. The rest of the Relación is no less useful and no less compromised. It sets out the two calendars and their interlocking cycle, the month festivals, the new year ceremonies and the deities of the four directions, from the notes of a man who had spent years extracting information under duress. What survives is also not his manuscript. The text known today is a shortened copy made around 1660 and published in 1864, so the original length and arrangement are lost.