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It may be seen from the foregoing that Landa’s alphabet cannot be used for translating Maya, for when the hieroglyphs are made to represent the sounds of the Spanish alphabet the result does not indicate the original connection of a Maya word with its glyph. This fact was a great disappointment among archæologists, who at first expected to translate the Maya Codices by the use of the Landa alphabet. Their hopes, however, were short-lived and they even pronounced Landa an impostor. On the contrary, he has unintentionally given us what is almost a Rosetta Stone.

The Codices, I fear, will never yield a connected story, as they are written in a stenographic or shorthand style consisting of disconnected sentences.

Many of the stones, or stelæ, may contain history, and as soon as we know the meanings of, possibly, a thousand glyphs we shall be able to make a decided advance in the art of reading the books. Landa in his book explains not the Maya glyphs but the way the priests used these Maya characters for religious purposes. For example, he says Ma-in-kati means “I do not want,” represented in the ancient Maya by three simple glyphs. Written as the priests had arranged, with a glyph for each sound of a Spanish letter, the result is a combination of five glyphs, which, if given their original Maya pictured meanings, leads to the rather surprising knowledge that “no dead animal was seen at this place,” or, literally, “not see tail [animal] death place.”