A Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics

Chapter 2: PREFACE.

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About This Book

A concise manual introducing Mayan hieroglyphic writing and its decipherment, covering the script's general character and surviving manuscripts, the numerical and calendrical systems and astronomical content, pictorial motifs including deities, cosmology and ritual, and graphic conventions for composing and reading glyphs. It explains Mayan numeric notation and time-count methods, catalogues common visual radicals and symbols, outlines methods for tracing ritual calendars, and offers specimen texts and analyses. The work aims to supply learners with elemental tools for studying inscriptions, combining descriptive summaries of glyphic elements with practical guidance for interpretation.

PREFACE.

In the following pages I have endeavored with the greatest brevity to supply the learner with the elements necessary for a study of the native hieroglyphic writing of Central America. The material is already so ample that in many directions I have been obliged to refer to it, rather than to summarize it. This will explain various omissions which may be noted by advanced scholars; but they will not, I believe, diminish the usefulness of the work as an elementary treatise.

In conclusion I would express my thanks to the officers of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, and of the Peabody Museum of Archæology, Cambridge, for various facilities they have obligingly furnished me.