Writing—the contrivance of symbols for transmission of speech and thought—has been acclaimed as the very touchstone of civilization. If proof were needed of the advanced development of the Mayas, it is demonstrated by their possession of a script and of prodigious records on stelae, walls, tablets, lintels, murals, jades, and ceramics. In this skill the Mayas outranked all other peoples of the New World. The Incas and their predecessors in the Central Andes apparently never outgrew their primitive method of committing information to knotted quipus. The Toltecs, Zapotecs, and Aztecs knew how to write and, like the Mayas, produced book on folded animal hide or pounded vegetables fiber, but they never arrived at a standardized system of writing and relied to an excessive degree in pictorialization, which probably made it impossible to lay down a precise rendering of any text. Though the “Olmecs” were perhaps the original inventors of the pebble-shaped (calcuiform) Maya characters, and though there exist some affinities between Maya and Zapotec and Mixtec glyphs, the uniformity, refinement, and profusion of the Maya script are unique in Mesoamerica. For all we know, the Mayas alone developed a literature culture. Of them, the oft-mentioned Diego de Landa wrote, in the sixteenth century: “These people also made use of certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books, their ancient affairs and their sciences, and with these and drawings and with certain signs in these drawings, they understood their affairs and made others understand them and taught them.”