Page:A Study of the Manuscript Troano.djvu/14

viii 6th. We learn from the figures in the Manuscript that the cross in some of its forms was in use among this people as a religious emblem, and also that the bird was in some cases brought into connection with it, as at Palenque.

7th. In regard to the written characters I have reached the following conclusions:

That, although the movement of the figures is from the right to the left, and the plates should be taken in this way, at least by pairs, yet, as a general rule, the characters are in columns, to be read from the top downwards, columns following each other from left to right; that when they are in lines they are to be read from left to right and by lines from the top downwards, but that lines are used only where it is not convenient to place the characters in columns. The correctness of this conclusion is, I think, susceptible of demonstration by what is found in the Manuscript.

8th. That there is no fixed rule in reference to the arrangement of the parts of compound characters. The few which I have been able to decipher satisfactorily appear to have the parts generally arranged in an order nearly or quite the reverse of that in which the characters themselves are placed.

9th. That the characters, while to a certain extent phonetic, are not true alphabetic signs, but syllabic. Nor will even this definition hold true of them all, as some appear to be ideographic and others simply abbreviated pictorial representations. Most of the characters are compound, and the parts more or less abbreviated, and, as the writing is certainly the work of the priests, we may correctly term it hieratic.

Landa's alphabet, I think, is the result of an attempt on his part to pick out of the compound characters their simple elements, which he erroneously supposed represented letters. The day characters are found in the Manuscript substantially as given by this author, but appear to have been derived from an earlier age, and to have lost in part their original signification. No month characters are found in this work, though common in the Dresden Codex.

10th. That the work (the original, if the one now in existence be a copy) was probably written about the middle or latter half of the fourteenth century. This conclusion is reached first, from internal evidence alone;