Page:Here and there in Yucatan - miscellanies (IA herethereinyucat00lepl 0).djvu/131

 houses. He had a book that only he could read, which contained many things about them. I do not know what became of the sacred book."

With the dispersion of the Maya priests, the arts and sciences disappeared, or died out; yet there were some men who remembered the primitive history of the nation, who perhaps had in their possession ancient books. The author of the Troano Manuscript seems to have had some such documents.

But the antique or hieratic mode of writing being only understood by those initiated in the art, under oath of secrecy, a new alphabetical system was needed. In the mural inscriptions we find also traces of a writing that might have been known to the people, as was the demotic among the Egyptians. These popular letters no doubt served, together with some of the signs of the Nahualts, to form the alphabet that Landa, several centuries later, found in use, and preserved for us at the same time that he destroyed all the Maya literature he could lay hands on. His alphabet contains only six letters of the old hieratic alphabet, which Dr. Le Plongeon has discovered by studying the sculptured mural inscriptions.

The Troano Manuscript is written with the new alphabet, and for this reason we judge that the work was compiled after the settlement of the Nahualts in the peninsula.