De Landa alphabet

The de Landa alphabet is the correspondence of Spanish letters and glyphs written in the pre-Columbian Maya script, which the 16th-century bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa recorded as part of his documentation of the Maya civilization. With the aid of two Maya informants familiar with the script, de Landa made an attempt to provide a transcribed "A, B, C" for the Maya script with the intent of providing a key to its decipherment and translation. Despite its inaccuracies, the information provided by him would much later prove to be crucial to the mid-20th century breakthrough in the decipherment of the Maya script, starting with the work of the Russian epigrapher and Mayanist, Yuri Knorozov. Comparable to the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Behistun Inscription for Babylonian cuneiform, de Landa's notes effectively put scientists on a track that would eventually lead to the recovery of the long-lost ability to read many of the Maya inscriptions.

The "alphabet," along with some passages of explanatory notes and examples of its use in Maya writing, was written as a small part of de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán ("Account of the matters of Yucatán"), which also documented many aspects of the culture and practices of the indigenous Maya peoples that he had seen and been told of when he was living among them in the Yucatán Peninsula. His work was actually written after he had been recalled back to Spain to face trial by Inquisition for allegations of improper behaviour while there, and he wrote it as a defense of his mission there. The work was soon thereafter almost forgotten. Lost to scholarship for several centuries, an abridged copy of it was later rediscovered by the French antiquarian scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg in the 19th century.

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