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THE ALPHABET places; some polychrome clay pottery painted with glyphs and figures, as well as carvings and engravings on metal and bone have also been found.
The dates of the manuscripts are still uncertain; they seem, however, to belong to the later Maya period, whereas the stelae seem to belong to an earlier period. As a matter of fact, these monolithic pillars are dated, most of the dates being of the ninth and tenth cycles of Maya chronology
Fig. 66 4, Mexican symbels representing the
twenty days 2, Page from the Maya Codex Tro
Cortatuta o Madrid
(that is probably the second half of the third and the first half of the fourth century A.D.). The stelae served as time-markers, being apparently erected at 5, 10-, or 20-year intervals, and recorded the principal events of the town in the period concerned.
The cartouches or glyphs are highly conventionalized, containing sometimes many picture-signs gathered into a single frame, and they have
