Juan Pio Perez, Diccionario de la lengua maya (Merida de Yucatan, 1866-1877)
The first large printed dictionary of a Maya language, set in Merida from types ordered in New York because the alphabet Spanish friars devised for Maya needed sorts no Yucatecan press held. Its prologue records how three centuries of missionary lexicography reached the 1830s - a 1690 vocabulary found in a parish archive, an anonymous dictionary from a Franciscan library with its first pages gone, one meagre printed book - and why little else survived.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of Maya studies begin with Landa's alphabet and jump to the twentieth-century decipherment, leaving the three centuries in between as a gap. This object fills part of it from the sheets of the book that closed it: the one printed vocabulary a lexicographer in Yucatan could actually obtain in 1835, the 1690 vocabulary pulled out of a parish archive at Ticul in 1836, the Franciscan dictionary bought back in 1855 with its first pages missing, the types ordered from New York because Franciscan orthography demanded sorts no Merida press held, and the boxes of printed sheets thrown into the street as trench material in 1867. It also puts the cost beside the achievement in the source's own words - manuscripts burned by the conqueror, vocabularies written almost solely to convert - and it flags where the same prologue contradicts itself about what was ever printed, and where it slides into Atlantis.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The volume read here is the printed original. Its title page reads "DICCIONARIO DE LA LENGUA MAYA por D. JUAN PIO PEREZ", with the imprint "MERIDA DE YUCATAN. IMPRENTA LITERARIA, DE JUAN F. MOLINA SOLIS" and the dates "1866 - 1877". The copy digitised is the Bodleian Library's, carrying the pencilled shelfmark Amer. d. 112 on the leaf facing the title.
The prologue dates the start of the work to about 1835 and states what the compiler had to start from: some manuscripts he had copied in order to study Maya chronology, and the meagre vocabulary of Father Beltran, which he copied into a notebook holding only 41 leaves of text. He enlarged it from Beltran's Novena de Cristo crucificado, Beltran's Doctrina and the Platicas of Father Dominguez - three works the prologue calls prominent in Maya literature on the authority of Dr Berendt.
Two colonial manuscripts reached him by accident and are named with dates. In 1836 Fray Estanislao Carrillo found in the archive of the parish of Ticul a thick Spanish-Maya vocabulary dated 1690, which he lent, and of which Perez made a copy running to 146 pages. In 1848 Perez saw at the house of the priest Jose Maria Meneses a more voluminous Maya dictionary that had belonged to the library of the great convent of San Francisco, and whose author and date were unknown because the first pages of the book were missing; its owner would not part with it, Perez took extracts by post from Peto where he was then serving as jefe politico, and he obtained the volume itself only in 1855.
The prologue states the losses in its own words rather than leaving them to be inferred. Maya manuscripts, it says, had been condemned to the fire by the European conqueror, and the stone inscriptions surviving on the walls of the old cities remained illegible to travellers. Missionaries had composed grammars and vocabularies, in its words, almost with the single object of converting the Indians, and it treats that single purpose as the reason they are incomplete. This is a nineteenth-century Yucatecan publisher's account and not an archival audit, but it is the account of someone whose whole enterprise depended on those books existing.
The same prologue contradicts itself about printing, and the contradiction is worth recording rather than smoothing. On its page IV it says that several of the missionary grammars and vocabularies had reached "el honor de la estampa" but that almost all had disappeared by the 1830s; on page VII it says instead that none of them was ever printed except the most incomplete of them all, Father Beltran's. Both sentences are in the same signed text three pages apart. What the two versions agree on is the outcome - that a working lexicographer in Yucatan in 1835 could lay hands on essentially one printed book.
The method described is fieldwork as much as copying. The prologue credits the compiler's long residence in interior towns where the language was then best preserved, and says he constantly interpolated words of common use caught in his frequent dealings with the Indians and drawn from his own collection of manuscripts. He ordered his catalogue of Maya words alphabetically first and only then began the Spanish translation, which had reached the letter U when he died on 6 March 1859.
A footnote gives the scale and the comparison the publisher wanted drawn. The Maya vocabulary the abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg printed in the second volume of his Manuscrit Troano is said to hold eight to nine thousand words; Perez's dictionary is said to contain close to thirty thousand, gathered over twenty-four years of constant work. The figure for Perez's own book is the publisher's, given without a method of counting.
The financing and the typography are documented in the same pages. The heir had been charged with setting aside six hundred pesos for the printing and the sum proved insufficient; in 1866 Carlos Peon, a relative of Perez, and the printer who signs the prologue undertook the work. With those six hundred pesos they sent to New York for the paper and for the special types the Maya language requires - the k, the p, the reversed c and the h that forms the ch. The orthography a sixteenth-century Franciscan devised for Maya still governed what a press had to buy in 1866.
The manuscript was completed by a foreign physician. Dr C. Hermann Berendt had come to Yucatan to practise medicine, was struck by the ruins, set himself to study Maya and its dialects, and spent years living among Indians and visiting groups that still kept their doors closed; returning from one of those journeys about 1870 he finished Perez's manuscript at Carlos Peon's request, after a minute examination of the notes and drafts the author had left.
The book nearly did not survive its own printing. Printing began in 1866; in 1867, with Merida threatened by republican forces under general Cepeda and the defenders fortifying the streets, a detachment of imperial troops entered the printer's house and dragged his furniture, several printing implements and the boxes holding the printed sheets and the original manuscript into the street and onto the balconies to build improvised trenches. Carlos Peon recovered them at risk to himself. Printing then continued slowly and was finished in 1875. No public subsidy was sought, the prologue says, because the government then in the country came out of the French intervention and the editors' politics would not let them ask its agents for anything.
The uses claimed for the book are civil, not devotional, and one of them carries an argument about colonial-era documents. The prologue offers it for daily communication with the large part of the Yucatecan population that still knew no language but its ancestors'; for public instruction, whose poor state it blames less on scarce funds than on the anomaly of teaching in Spanish and with Spanish books to children who do not understand that language; for the priest who wants his doctrine understood; and for the judge, the lawyer and the landholder obliged to handle old titles and documents written in Maya. That last clause is evidence that Maya-language title deeds were still in legal circulation in Yucatan in the 1870s.
Where the prologue stops being reliable, and it does. Its claim that Yucatan preceded the other countries of America in producing a book of this kind, and that no American language is known to possess one as complete, is the publisher's own judgement about the book he paid to print. Its closing pages move from bibliography into the diffusionism of its decade - Lesseps and Brasseur on Plato's Atlantis and Greek wars with transatlantic peoples, maize found in the tomb of a Theban mummy after thirty or forty centuries, Caucasian and African types read off the drawings of Catherwood, Charnay and Le Plongeon, offered as support for the unity of the human species. The manuscript history and the printing narrative in the same text are first-hand and checkable; the speculation is neither, and is recorded here as a feature of the document.
What this object is and is not. What was opened and read is the printed book of 1866-1877 and its editor's prologue, which is why the tier here is primary. The colonial manuscripts on which it rests - the Ticul vocabulary of 1690 and the anonymous Franciscan dictionary - were not opened, and every statement about them in this object is the prologue's testimony about documents it had in hand, not this corpus's reading of them.