Reproduction of the page from Diego de Landa's Relacíon de las cosas de Yucatán, which gives a purported correspondence between letters of the Spanish alphabet and Maya glyphs, and which has become known as the de Landa alphabet

The de Landa alphabet is the correspondence of Spanish letters and glyphs written in the pre-Columbian Maya script, which the 16th century Bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa recorded as part of his documentation of the Maya civilization during his tenure there. Diego de Landa Calderón ( 12 November, 1524 &ndash 1579 was Bishop of Yucatán. A glyph is an element of writing Two or more glyphs representing the same symbol whether interchangeable or context-dependent are called Allographs the abstract unit they The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences The Maya script, also known as Maya hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the Pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently Yucatán is one of the 31 states of Mexico, located on the north of the Yucatán Peninsula. Diego de Landa Calderón ( 12 November, 1524 &ndash 1579 was Bishop of Yucatán. The Maya civilization is a Mesoamerican Civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the Pre-Columbian Americas With the aid of two Maya interlocutors who were familiar with the script, de Landa made an attempt to provide a transcribed "A, B, C" for the Maya script with the intent of providing a key to its decipherment and translation. Despite its inaccuracies, the information provided by de Landa would much later prove to be crucial to the mid-20th century breakthrough in the decipherment of the Maya script, starting with the work of the Russian epigrapher and Mayanist, Yuri Knorozov. Epigraphy (ἐπιγραφολογία from Greek ἐπιγραφή — "inscription" is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs engraved Mayanist is a term which has been in widespread use from the late 19th century onwards to refer to scholars who have specialised in research and study of the Central American Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (alternatively Knorosov; Russian Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; b It proved, in effect, to be the "Rosetta Stone" which would eventually lead to the recovery of the long-lost ability to read many of the Maya inscriptions. The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egyptian artifact (حجر رشيد in Arabic which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyphic writing

The "alphabet", along with some passages of explanatory notes and examples of its use in Maya writing, was written as a small part of de Landa's Relacíon de las cosas de Yucatán ("Account of the matters of Yucatán"), in which he also documented many aspects of the culture and practices of the indigenous Maya peoples he had seen and been told of when he was living among them in the Yucatán Peninsula. The Maya peoples constitute a diverse range of the Native American peoples of southern Mexico and northern Central America. The Yucatán Peninsula, in Southeastern Mexico, separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico. His work was actually written after he had been recalled back to Spain to face trial by Inquisition for allegations of improper behaviour while there, and he wrote it as a defense of his mission there. The work was soon thereafter all but forgotten and was lost to scholarship for several centuries, until an abridged copy of it was rediscovered by the French antiquarian scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg. Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (8 September 1814 &ndash 8 January 1874 was a noted French writer Ethnographer, Historian and

Owing to a mutual misunderstanding between de Landa, who failed to appreciate that it was not alphabetic, but logosyllabic, and his Maya informants, who wrote glyphs most nearly corresponding to the sounds of the Spanish letters, de Landa's interpretation is now known to be inaccurate. An alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a Phoneme, a Spoken language, either A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language When the Relacíon was rediscovered in the 19th century, a number of unsuccessful attempts were made to use its de Landa alphabet passages to decipher the now completely-unknown script, attempts which failed on a similar basis as de Landa's own misconceptions about the actual nature of the Maya writing system. A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. It was not until the early 1950s when Knorozov published his landmark paper analysing it and other inscriptions in a new light that substantial progress began to be made.