Progress in decipherment of Maya inscriptions has been much heralded of late at scholarly meetings at universities around the country and in a spate of publications. There is wide consensus that after generations of frustration and failed attempts the principles of the writing system are now understood, and decipherment is proceeding apace. Hence it is an auspicious time for Eduard Seler’s collected works, including many of his articles about Maya writing, to become readily available in English translation. Once again, through his controversy with Cyrus Thomas, we can revisit the debate about whether the hieroglyphs were ideographic or phonetic and see how efforts to use the Landa “alphabet” as a phonetic key were unsuccessful. Eventually progress was made and obstacles were surmounted through comparing identical pieces of texts on different monuments and working from what the monuments might reasonably be expected to record. In hindsight it is not surprising that the writing system is mixed, neither entirely ideographic (Seler’s position) nor entirely phonetic (Thomas’s position).
Collected Works in Mesoamerican Linguistics and Archaeology is the first printed English edition of Seler’s collected pieces. In 1939 a typescript of these translations was duplicated and placed in a number of university libraries around the country. Like the 1908 German edition of Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Amerikanischen Sprach-und Alterthumskunde, the 1939 typescript has become a rare item not readily accessible to the growing number of Mesoamericanists in the United States today. A handsome new German edition in five volumes was published in 1960, followed a few years later by a sixth volume containing a massive index. This new English edition also does well with the illustrations and will include an index in volume 5.
Volume 1 contains three sections: linguistics, picture writing, and calendrics and hieroglyphics. Some of the articles that appear in the 1908 German edition were omitted from the 1939 typescript and also from the current edition, but footnotes direct the reader to other sources where the missing articles can be found. Numbering of the articles proceeds as though the missing articles were present. Hence the first article in volume 1 is numbered “2.” In addition to Seler’s six articles criticizing Thomas’s work, the first volume contains 28 other articles. “The Gonjugation System of Maya Languages ” is a tour de force applying the methodology of German comparative linguistics to eleven members of the Mayan family, and in this volume Seler deals with Nahuatl, Zapotee, and Mixtee as well. Today Mayanists will read Seler’s works as historical documents, and some of what he writes about Nahuatl is also quaint by current standards. But it is instructive to read Seler, nonetheless, to see that ideas we ascribe to more recent scholars appeared in his work earlier and that observations we may think we have struck upon for the first time were obvious to Seler long ago.
Reading Seler I was discomforted to learn that there is less new in Mesoamerican scholarship than I had assumed; reading John Weeks’s treatment of William Gates and his manuscript collection produced a strong sense of déjà vu. Weeks covers the same material, albeit in briefer form, in his Middle American Indians: A Guide to the Manuscript Collection at Tozzer Library, Harvard University (1985), and in the expanded version he incorporates chunks verbatim from his earlier publication. Gates was a difficult person, as Tulane, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins universities discovered in their dealings with him, and anyone interested in the man and his collection should read Weeks’s longer treatment in Mesoamerican Ethnohistory. Because Gates misled buyers by holding back items, by substituting photocopies for originals, and by letting people like Bowditch believe they were purchasing unique photocopies, it has always been difficult to define what the Gates collection actually was and where it all has ended up. Weeks, too, has been less than successful in his reconstruction of the collection. Yet another cache of sixty-nine manuscripts and broadsides in Nahuatl and other Mexican Indian languages passed from private hands to the University of Virginia late in 1988. I do not find these documents in Weeks 1990, so it appears that this volume will need a supplement. However, in every other way, this is the most comprehensive guide to the scattered collection that has ever been available, and it is sure to be of great help to Mesoamerican scholars.
