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History of the Americas books Comentarios Reales de los Incas, Ambivalent Conquests, The Plains Sioux and US Colo, Missions Accomplished?: The Unite, Revolution from Without | ||
Relación de las cosas de Yucatán was written by Diego de Landa around 1566, shortly after his return from Yucatán to Spain. In it, de Landa catalogues Mayan words and phrases as well as a small number of Mayan hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs, sometimes referred to as the de Landa alphabet, proved vital to modern attempts to decipher the script. The book also includes documentation of Maya religion and the Mayan peoples' culture in general. It was written with the help of local Maya princes. It contains, at the end of a long list of Spanish words with Maya translations, a Maya phrase, famously found to mean "I do not want to." The original manuscript has been lost, but many copies still survive.
Currently-available English translations include William E. Gates's 1937 translation, has been published by multiple publishing houses, under the title Yucatan Before and After the Conquest: The Maya. Alfred Tozzer of Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has also published a translation of the work from the Cambridge University Press in 1941.