Note 1091 — Chapter III · (continued 2)

Manuscrit Troano Etudes sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas (Paris, 1869-70)—the first volume containing a fac-simile of the Codex in seventy plates, with Brasseur’s explications and partial interpretation. In the second volume there is a translation of Gabriél de Saint Bonaventure’s Grammaire Maya, a “Chrestomathie” of Maya extracts, and a Maya lexicon of more than 10,000 words. Brasseur published at the same time (1869) in the Mémoires de la Soc. d’Ethnographie a Lettre à M. Léon de Rosny sur la découverte de documents relatifs à la haute antiquité américaine, et sur le déchiffrement et l’interprétation de l’écriture phonétique et figurative de la langue Maya (Paris, 1869). He explained his application of Landa’s alphabet in the introduction to the MS. Troano, i. p. 36. Brasseur later confessed he had begun at the wrong end of the MS. (Bib. Mex.-Guat., introd.). The pebble-shape form of the characters induced Brasseur to call them calculiform; and Julien Duchateau adopted the term in his paper “Sur l’écriture calculiforme des Mayas” in the Annuaire de la Soc. Amér. (Paris, 1874), iii. p. 31.