An Outline Dictionary of Maya Glyphs

Blurb

An Outline Dictionary of Maya Glyphs: With a Concordance and Analysis of Their Relationships is a monograph study of the Maya script by William E. Gates, first published in 1931. The inventory of glyphs used in Gates' analysis was compiled and drawn from the Madrid, Dresden and Paris codices, rather than from monumental inscriptions and stelae. It was published at a time when the Maya script remained wholly undeciphered and the type of writing system the script represented was unknown and much debated among Mayanists. Gates' work represented one of the major attempts in this pre-decipherment era of Mayanist scholarship to catalogue and analyse Maya glyphs as a prelude to uncovering their meaning. In comprehensiveness it was later superseded by Günther Zimmermann's Die Hieroglyphen der Maya-Handschriften, and then in particular by J. Eric S. Thompson's A Catalogue of Maya Hieroglyphs, which became established as the de facto standard catalogue and analysis of its day.