An Outline Dictionary Of Maya Glyphs

''An Outline Dictionary of Maya Glyphs: With a Concordance and Analysis of Their Relationships'' is a

monograph A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject. In library cataloging, ''monograph ...

study of the Maya script by

William E. Gates William Edmond Gates (December 8, 1863 – April 24, 1940) was an American Mayanist. Most of his research focused around Mayan language hieroglyphs. He also collected Mesoamerican manuscripts."Yucatán en el tiempo", Casares G. Cantón, Raúl; ...

, first published in 1931. The inventory of glyphs used in Gates' analysis was compiled and drawn from the Madrid, Dresden and Paris codices, rather than from monumental inscriptions and stelae. It was published at a time when the Maya script remained wholly undeciphered and the type of writing system the script represented was unknown and much debated among Mayanists. Gates' work represented one of the major attempts in this pre-decipherment era of Mayanist scholarship to catalogue and analyse Maya glyphs as a prelude to uncovering their meaning. In comprehensiveness it was later superseded by Günther Zimmermann's '' Die Hieroglyphen der Maya-Handschriften'' (1956), and then in particular by J. Eric S. Thompson's '' A Catalogue of Maya Hieroglyphs'' (1962), which became established as the ''de facto'' standard catalogue and analysis of its day. Once it was realised in the latter half of the 20th century that the Maya script was largely

logosyllabic In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, a ...

in nature, Mayanist epigraphers beginning with Yuri Knorozov began a process of breakthroughs in the script's decipherment. Other key contributions and realisations—such as establishing that the stelae texts recorded actual history and real personages and events—led to the decipherment of a significant number of glyphs and texts, particularly from the 1970s onwards. While many of the interpretations put forward in the early catalogues by Gates ''et al.'' have been made redundant by the modern knowledge of the script, catalogues such as Gates' have retained their significance and utility as references and records—particularly for calendrical and astronomical data and interpretation. The original edition was limited to 207 copies. The book was subsequently reprinted by

Dover Dover () is a town and major ferry port in Kent, South East England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel at from Cap Gris Nez in France. It lies south-east of Canterbury and east of Maidstone ...

in 1978, and by Kessinger in 2003. 1931 non-fiction books Maya script Mesoamerican studies books English bilingual dictionaries Johns Hopkins University Press books {{mesoamerica-stub