Brinton, a pioneering American ethnologist, set out to give beginners the elements needed to study the native writing of Central America. He explains the Maya numerals and calendar signs, the pictorial and graphic elements of the glyphs, the debate over whether the script was phonetic, and specimen texts from the codices, closing with an index-vocabulary of Maya words.
A window on Maya studies decades before the decipherment, for readers interested in the history of how the glyphs were read. Download the free EPUB.