from which all authorities agree they must have been developed, but all
such attempts have been failures. But here, in the Maya alphabet, we are
not only able to extract from the heart of the hieroglyphic the typical
sign for the sound, but we are able to go a step farther, and, by means
of the inscriptions upon the monuments of Copan and Palenque, deduce the
alphabetical hieroglyph itself from an older and more ornate figure; we
thus not Only discover the relationship of the European alphabet to the
American, but we trace its descent in the very mode in which reason
tells us it must have been developed. All this proves that the
similarities in question did not come from Phoenicians having
accidentally visited the shores of America, but that we have before us
the origin, the source, the very matrix in which the Phoenician alphabet
was formed. In the light of such a discovery the inscriptions upon the
monuments of Central America assume incalculable importance; they take
us back to a civilization far anterior to the oldest known in Europe;
they represent the language of antediluvian times.

It may be said that it is improbable that the use of an alphabet could
have ascended to antediluvian times, or to that prehistoric age when
intercourse existed between ancient Europe and America; but it must be
remembered that if the Flood legends of Europe and Asia are worth
anything they prove that the art of writing existed at the date of the
Deluge, and that records of antediluvian learning were preserved by
those who escaped the Flood; while Plato tells us that the people of
Atlantis engraved their laws upon columns of bronze and plates of gold.

There was a general belief among the ancient nations that the art of
writing was known to the antediluvians. The Druids believed in books
more ancient than the Flood. They styled them "the books of Pheryllt,"
and "the writings of Pridian or Hu." "Ceridwen consults them before she