The Mayas were a literary people. They made frequent use of tablets, wrote many books, and covered the walls of their buildings with hieroglyphic signs, cut in the stones or painted upon the plaster. The explanation of these signs is one of the leading problems in American archæology. It was supposed to have been solved when the manuscript of Bishop Landa's account of Yucatan was discovered, some twenty years ago, in Madrid. The Bishop gave what he called "an A, B, C," of the language, but which, when applied to the extant manuscripts and the mural inscriptions, proved entirely insufficient to decipher them. The disappointment of the antiquaries was great, and by one of them, Dr. Felipe Valentini, Landa's alphabet has been denounced as "a Spanish fabrication."[61-1] But certainly any one acquainted with the history of the Latin alphabet, how it required the labor of thousands of years and the demands of three wholly different families of languages, to bring it to its perfection, should not have looked to find among the Mayas, or anywhere else, a parallel production of human intelligence. Moreover, rightly understood, Landa does not intimate anything of the kind. He distinctly states that what he gives are the sounds of the Spanish letters as they would be transcribed in Maya characters; not at all that they analyzed the sounds of their words and expressed the phonetic elements in these characters. On the contrary, he takes care to affirm that they could not do this, and gives an example in point.[62-1] Dr. Valentini, therefore, was attacking a windmill, and entirely misconstrued the Bishop's statements. I shall not, in this connection, enter into a discussion of the nature of these hieroglyphics. It is enough for my purpose to say that they were recognized by the earliest Spanish explorers as quite different from those of Mexico, and as the only graphic system on the continent, so far as they knew it, which merited the name of writing.[62-2] The word for book in Maya is _huun_, a monosyllable which reappears in the Kiche _vuh_ and the Huasteca _uuh_. In Maya this initial _h_ is almost silent and is occasionally dropped, as _yuunil Dios_, the book of God (syncopated form of _u huunil Dios_, the suffix _il_ being the "determinative" ending). I am inclined to believe that _huun_ is merely a form of _uoohan_, something written, this being the passive participle of _uooh_, to write, which, as a noun, also means a character, a letter.[63-1] Another name for their books, especially those containing the prophecies and forecasts of the priestly diviners, is said to have been _anahte_; or _analte_. This word is not to be found in any of the early dictionaries. The usual authority for it is Villagutierre Sotomayor, who describes these volumes as they were seen among the Itzas of Lake Peten, about 1690.[64-1]