Day Symbols of the Maya Year

Description

Author: Thomas, Cyrus (1825-1910)

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution

Pub Date: 1897

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Fair to Good.  Binding tight.  No marks, tears, bends or folds.  This report is excised from a copy the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1894-1895, that was falling apart, and I had several reports rebound in paperback.  Foxing to all text blocks.

Notes: The Maya calendar consisted of eighteen months of twenty days each, with five “supplemental” days (boy, wouldn’t you love to have a few of those?).  “In the accompanying paper he discusses at length the origin and significance of the names given to the twenty days of the Mexican month in the Maya language, as well as in the Tzental, Quiche-Cakchiquel, Zapotec, and Nahuatl.  In the several languages the names are associative or symbolic in the vague fashion characteristic of prescriptorial ideation: they connote wind, water, rain, various animals and plants, etc, and in most or all cases the connotation apparently represents derivation.  Dr. Thomas finds strong indications that the day characters of the codices were phonetic, and one of the purposes of his paper is to set forth the evidence on this point.”  (From the Administrative Report).  Also includes an appendix “The List of the Deities of the Days of the Month in the Maori Calendar (After Thomas)”.  VERY RARE in this single report format–if you want the whole 1897 BAE, not so much.