ed by
them at Uxmal and Chichen, were--CAN (serpent) and [C]OZ (bat), his
wife, from whom were born CAY (fish), the pontiff; AAK (turtle), who
became the governor of Uxmal; CHAACMOL (leopard), the warrior, who
became the husband of his sister MOO (macaw), the Queen of _Chichen_,
worshiped after her death at Izamal; and NICTE (flower), the priestess
who, under the name of _Zuhuy-Kuk_, became the goddess of the maidens.

The Egyptians, in expressing their ideas in writing, used three
different kinds of characters--phonetic, ideographic and
symbolic--placed either in vertical columns or in horizontal lines, to
be read from right to left, from left to right, as indicated by the
position of the figures of men or animals. So, also, the Mayas in their
writings employed phonetic, symbolic and ideographic signs, combining
these often, forming monograms as we do to-day, placing them in such a
manner as best suited the arrangement of the ornamentation of the facade
of the edifices. At present we can only speak with certainty of the
monumental inscriptions, the books that fell in the hands of the
ecclesiastics at the time of the conquest having been destroyed. No
truly genuine written monuments of the Mayas are known to exist, except
those inclosed within the sealed apartments, where the priests and
learned men of MAYAB hid them from the _Nahualt_ or _Toltec_ invaders.

As the Egyptians, they wrote in vertical columns and horizontal lines,
to be read generally from right to left. The space of this small essay
does not allow me to enter in more details; they belong naturally to a
work of different nature. Let it therefore suffice, for the present
purpose, to state that the comparative study of the language of the
Mayas led us to suspect that, as it contains words belonging to nearly
all the known languages of antiquity, and with exactly the same meaning,
in their mode of writing might be found letters or characters or signs
used in those tongues. Studying with attention the photographs made by
us of the inscriptions of Uxmal and Chichen, we were not long in
discovering that our surmises were indeed correct. The inscriptions,
written in squares or parallelograms, that might well have served as
models for the ancient hieratic Chaldeans, of the time of King Uruck,
seem to contain ancient Chaldee, Egyptian and Etruscan characters,
together with others that seem to be purely Mayab.

Applying these known characters to the decipherment o