tain that the land law of the feud drew its origin from the corruption of the blood-tie, as a bond of government, in the last dregs of Romulus (in face Romuli), as Cicero phrased it. In the redistribution of social elements in this period of change, a separate and distinct stratification of social layers was being slowly effected throughout the whole Roman Empire. The upper classes were differentiated into finical strata based on mere distinctions of rank, the aristocracy of place and function, and no longer the aristocracy of character and What with titular rights of precedence among the Nobilissimi, the Illustres, the Spectabiles, the Clarissimi, the Perfectissimi, and the Egregii, the lines of social demarcation were arbitrarily drawn, because they were purely artificial in their institution. The public offices were gradually converted from posts of public trust into the seats of a centralizing despotism, which called for posturemasters of servility rather than for self-respecting rulers. The office of Decurion from being sought because of its honorable insignia and its social privileges came to be loathed and shunned for its intolerable burdens. Rich men hid themselves from publicity, and, like the martyrs they were, they wandered in deserts and in mountains and in dens and caves of the earth to escape the pains and penalties of office. They married slaves to work corruption of blood in order to disqualify themselves for public honors. They enlisted as common soldiers, preferring the horrors of war to the terrors of office. The only door of hope which opened to them a way of escape from this valley of Achor was to be the father of twelve children. The law of the Empire graciously assumed that the father of twelve children had done service enough to the State without being called to make further contributions, and that he was likely to have cumber enough at home without bending his back to bear the burdens of the commonwealth. And as every benedict could not hope that his wife would prove such a fruitful vine by the sides of his house as to be the mother of twelve children, rich men at length sullenly forswore matrimony on the plea that they were tired of gendering servants who should be at the behests of an insatiate and blood-thirsty populace, which never wearied in its cry for bread and gladiatorial games.* In like manner the Labor Unions, from being self-protecting leagues which aimed to stimulate a wholesome emulation among * Corpus Iuris Civilis: Novella xxxviii. their membership, were ultimately converted into so many bands of hereditary bondsmen, tied to the trades in which they were born as serfs were tied to the soil on which they were born. The unions themselves were crushed under the iron wheel of imperial law.* It became a rule of law that a labor union could claim its run-away members as the curials of a town could claim their run-away officials. Theodosius launched his thunderbolt at the members of labor leagues who deserted handicraft service in the cities and betook themselves into the waste places of the earth. He proclaimed that all such shirks should be recovered from the solitudes into which they had fled, and should be bound afresh to the thraldom of their taskmasters. There was no exit from the status of the laborer. The laboring masses were reduced to a common level of degradation, with no vicissitude except that determined by distinction of labor castes. The feudal system was in full process of formation. We see how true it is that the loss of freedom and of individual initiative brings with it the loss of all other boons. "Sow liberty in a lagoon," says Serrigny, "as at Venice, in her origin; in a fen, as in Holland; in a little island, as in England, and there will spring from it a nation great and glorious. . . Give to despots the whole earth, as the empire of Rome, the capital city of the world, was given to the Cæsars (or, rather, as it was snatched by them), and they will raise great armies, will build magnificent structures and monuments, will create grand and beautiful highways, will organize an administration regular, uniform, and highly centralized, the instrument of domination; will achieve, if needs. be, the conquest of the world. itants of that nation only ruin, misery, confiscation, desolation, and from all this there will emanate in the end only a putrid corpse, ready to be trampled under foot by barbarians."† *Digest: xlviii, 22. All this will produce for the inhab Serriguy: Droit Public et Administratif Romain. Vol. ii, p. 448. ---- ARE THE MAYA HIEROGLYPHS PHONETIC? BY CYRUS THOMAS. The character of the writing found in the Maya codices and inscriptions has been, in the last few years, the subject of considerable discussion among the few scholars who are devoting attention to these aboriginal records; but the conclusions reached are widely different, some—as Drs. Förstemann, Schellhas, Seler, and Valentini-maintaining that the characters are ideographic and not phonetic, while others-as H. de Charencey, Leon de Rosny, and the present writer-believe them to be chiefly phonetic. Dr. Brinton takes a somewhat middle ground, holding that this script is in the nature of rebus-writing, which he terms "ikonomatic." If the interpretations here presented be accepted in whole or even in part, the question of phoneticism is settled. There are reasons besides the direct test of decipherment for believing the writing to be, in part at least, phonetic. We have the positive statements of early Spanish writers to this effect, Landa supporting his assertion by giving what he declares are some of the letter elements of the glyphs and a full series of the day and month symbols. As the latter have been verified throughout by the codices and to some extent by the inscriptions, it would seem improbable that he was wholly in error in regard to the character of the writing. It appears, further, from a statement by Father Alonzo Ponce, quoted by Dr. Brinton,* that the missionaries learned to read and write them, and probably used them to impart instruction to the natives. A translation of his language is as follows: They are noteworthy for three things among all those of New Spain : one, that in ancient times they had characters and letters with which were written their history and the ceremonies and order of the sacrifices to their idols, and their calendar, in books made of the bark of a certain tree, which were long strips a quarter or a third as wide, which were doubled and folded, and thus assumed somewhat the form of a book bound in quarto. These letters and characters were not understood save by the priests of the idols (called in that language ahkines) and some Indians of high position. In later times some of our priests understood and knew how to read them and also to write them. *Maya Chronicles, p. 63. The natural inference to be drawn from this language is that these characters were something more than mere conventional symbols. The remarkably correct description of these codices given by Father Ponce, who had traveled in Mexico and was acquainted with the Aztec picture-writing, warrants us in assuming that he was correctly informed as to their character by the priests who had studied them; and, if so, there is little, if any, doubt that he understood them to be phonetic. The failure hitherto to apply Landa's letter elements in the solution of the problem is not conclusive proof that they are wholly erroneous. Numerous reasons for such failure besides that of misconception or willful misrepresentation on the part of the old bishop may be given. One cause of failure to obtain favorable results has been the neglect of those attempting to use the alphabet to take into consideration the bishop's lack of artistic skill in drawing the characters. This neglect has perhaps been a more serious drawback than has been supposed. Take for example his second, which, as it stands in his manuscript, will not be recognized in the codices, but if turned half-way round is seen to be a rough attempt to draw the symbol of the day Ahau, which forms the upper half of the symbol for Likin, "East." When thus correctly understood it begins to drop into place according to its given phonetic value. So with his second x, which, if the position is changed, will be recognized as a rude imitation of the upper part of the symbol for Chikin, "West," the same as the symbol for the day Manik. Here again the phonetic value is retained in the combination. Another reason why efforts at decipherment have failed of success is the misconception of the peculiar character of the writing which Dr. Brinton, with clearer conception, evidently attempts to explain by his theory of "rebus-writing." This peculiarity is found in the fact that as it exists in the codices and incriptions it is in a transition stage from the purely ideographic to the phonetic. I think, however, he has failed to give a complete explanation in neglecting to note the range in variety, and especially the nearer approach in part made to true sound writing. As it is not supposable that there was a sudden leap from the symbolic to the phonetic, it is presumable that the symbols would, so far as possible, be gradually given phonetic significance, in which process they would pass through the stage this author has aptly named "ikonomatic." Had the Maya scribes at the time of the Conquest advanced beyond this stage? I think they had, though it is not contended that the transition was completed, but in process. If this opinion be correct, we may expect to find an intermingling of conventional symbols and phonetic characters; but it is not supposable that the latter had reached that stage where each sound was indicated by a glyph or sign; nor is this method of forming a written language peculiar, as the derivation of the cuneiform or "wedge-shaped" writing from picturewriting has been traced through the archaic forms of the earlier Babylonian texts. "Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the system included both the use of symbols standing for syllables, and also of the older ideographs or sketches of the object, used as determinatives to secure the right understanding of the combined syllables."* "Both cuneiform and hieroglyph trace their origin to picturewriting. The two systems developed independently five hundred characters: phonetic, ideographic, and determinative."† It is therefore to be expected that examples of each of these stages of development will be found in the Maya writing. In fact, it is probable that the same character may be found in one place as phonetic and in another as retaining its symbolic significance. As an example, the symbol for the day Kan appears in many places to be used as a mere symbol for maize or the grain of maize; yet it is found in numerous combinations and relations where it cannot be considered a symbol with its usual meaning, but may be consistently rendered if considered phonetic. The same may be said of other symbols. If the writing be in any true sense phonetic, we may expect to find here, as in the primary stage of other written languages, several different signs for the same sound, which we find is true even in Landa's short and partial list. The indications, so far as revealed by the study of the writings, are that, as a general rule, the consonant sounds are those represented by the characters; not that these glyphs are limited to these consonant elements, for this is seldom if ever true; but it appears that a character was selected to represent a certain sound or syllable because as a conventional symbol it was used to denote a word having a given consonant as its chief phonetic element. Thus, for words or syllables in which bis the chief consonant sound, they made use of the conventional symbol for "footstep," *Conder, "Syrian Stone-lore," p. 15. |