Note 1104 — Chapter III · (continued 2)

Studies in Central American picture-writing (Washington, 1881), extracted from the First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. His method is epitomized in The Century, Dec., 1881. He finds Stephens’s drawings the most trustworthy of all, Waldeck’s being beautiful, but they embody “singular liberties.” His examination was confined to the 1500 separate hieroglyphs in Stephens’s Central America. Some of Holden’s conclusions are worth noting: “The Maya manuscripts do not possess to me the same interest as the stones, and I think it may be certainly said that all of them are younger than the Palenqué tablets, far younger than the inscriptions at Copan.” “I distrust the methods of Brasseur and others who start from the misleading and unlucky alphabet handed down by Landa,” by forming variants, which are made “to satisfy the necessities of the interpreter in carrying out some preconceived idea.” He finds a rigid adherence to the standard form of a character prevailing throughout the same inscription. At Palenqué the inscriptions read as an English inscription would read, beginning at the left and proceeding line by line downward. “The system employed at Palenqué and Copan was the same in its general character, and almost identical even in details.” He deciphers three proper names: “all of them have been pure picture-writing, except in so far as their rebus character may make them in a sense phonetic.” Referring to Valentini’s Landa Alphabet a Spanish Fabrication, he agrees in that critic’s conclusions. “While my own,” he adds, “were reached by a study of the stones and in the course of a general examination, Dr. Valentini has addressed himself successfully to the solution of a special problem.” Holden thinks his own solution of the three proper names points of departure for subsequent decipherers. The Maya method was “pure picture-writing. At Copan this is found in its earliest state; at Palenqué it was already highly conventionalized.”