in 1596, and, later, dean of the chapter of the cathedral at Merida. His book, too, is extremely scarce, and I have never seen a copy; but I have copious extracts from it, made by the late Dr. C: Hermann Berendt from a copy in Yucatan. Aguilar writes of the Mayas:
"They had books made from the bark of trees, coated with a white and durable varnish. They were ten or twelve yards long, and were gathered together in folds, like a palm leaf. On these they painted in colors the reckoning of their years, wars, pestilences, hurricanes, inundations, famines, and other events. From one of these books, which I myself took from some of these idolaters, I saw and learned that to one pestilence they gave the name Mayacimil, and to another Ocnakucchl, which mean 'sudden deaths' and 'times when the crows enter the houses to eat the corpses.' And the inundation they called Hunyecil, the submersion of trees."[1]
The writer leaves it uncertain whether he learned these words directly from the characters of the book or through the explanations of some native.
It has sometimes been said that the early Spanish writers drew a broad line between the picture-writing that they found in America and an alphabetic script. This may be true of other parts, but is not so of Yucatan. These signs, or some of them, are repeatedly referred to as "letters," letras.
This is pointedly the case with Father Grabriel de San Buenaventura, a French Franciscan who served in Yucatan about 1670-80. He published one of the earliest grammars of the language, and also composed a dictionary in three large volumes, which was not printed. Father Beltran de Santa Rosa quotes from it an interesting tradition preserved by Buenaventura, that among the inventions of the mythical hero-god of the natives, Itzamna, or Kinich ahau, was that of "the letters of the Maya language," with which letters they wrote their books.[2] Itzamna, of course; dates back to a misty antiquity, but the legend is of value, as showing that the characters used by the natives did, in the opinion of the early missionaries, deserve the name of letters.
- ↑ Pedro Sanchez do Aguilar, Informa contra Idolorum cultores del Obispado de Yucatan. 4to. Madrid 1639, ff. 124.
- ↑ "El primero que balló las letras de la lengua Maya é hizó el cómputo de los años, meses y edades, y lo euseño todo a los Indios de esta Provincia, fué un Indio Hamado Kinchahau, y por otro nombre Tzamna." Fr. Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa Maria, Arte del Idioma Maya, p. 16 (2d ed., Mérida do Yucatan, 1839).
