Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatan : a translation

The Maya hieroglyphs written on the pages of the manuscript titled Relación de las cosas de Yucatán are the latest known examples of Maya writing. Written in the second half of the 16 th century, they illustrate both the continuity of a literary tradition by then almost two millennia old, as well as strikingly innovative conventions reflecting an underlying local language (Yukatekan) distinct from the Ch’olan language of the script’s early developers. The manuscript, ascribed to Diego de Landa, has been a source of numerous (mis)interpretations following its recovery in the 19 th century. As a testimony to the collision of cultures and a stockpile of mis-understandings, the Maya ‘alphabet’ found on folio 45r has been labeled everything from a Spanish fabrication to a ‘Rosetta Stone’. Similarly, the often-unique spellings of the Maya month names on folios 34r-43v have occasionally led to raised eyebrows. But it now seems increasingly clear that, while the manuscript’s month spellings do diverge considerably from the traditional Ch’olan spellings of the southern Maya lowlands, they in fact seem to constitute a bridge between the original orthography of these months and their Colonial Yukatekan glosses. Specifically, it would seem that an unknown northern scribe appended phonetic signs indicating the local pronunciation of many of the more divergent names. In this article, we re-examine the ‘month signs’ of the manuscript based on recent developments in Maya decipherment and on new photographs of the original manuscript in the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid.