May 24 Saturday – Livy’s diary: “Mr & Mrs Frederick Goddard here for luncheon” [MTP: DV161].

Mary A. Geisse wrote from Phila. to Sam, thanking him for “his prompt reply, also for your opinion of my work” (poems) [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env. “I tried to make this fool understand (without saying the naked brutal words) that she has neither talent nor genius with this damned result.”

Joe Goodman wrote to Sam from Alameda, Calif., promising to send “as a curiosity” a copy of his forthcoming book, The Archaic Maya Inscriptions (1902) to be published in London. The work was a translation of “the inscriptions on the ruins of Central America and Yucatan.” Joe added “there is no hope of profit in it. Not a thousand persons care anything about the study. The only compensation is that I found out what nobody else could, and that my name will always be associated with the unraveling of the Maya glyphs, as Champollion’s is with the Egyptian. But that is poor pay for what will be twenty years’ hard work” [MTP; Gribben 267]. Note: Sam was fascinated with the book and praised it in a reply to Joe on June 13. See entry. The newly published AMT 1: contains a paragraph of summary information about Goodman and his work on the Mayan codes:

At the urging of prominent archaeologist Alfred P. Maudslay (1850-1931), Goodman traveled to London in 1895. There in 1897 he published his findings as The Archaic Maya Inscriptions, a book-length work that Maudslay later made the appendix to his own multivolume Archaeology. In 1898 Goodman published a monograph, The Maya Graphic System: Reasons for Believing It to be Nothing but a Cipher Code, and in 1905 he published an article, “Maya Dates” ….Modern scholarship has validated Goodman’s confidence in his discoveries. Michael D. Coe, in Breaking the Maya Code, noted that Goodman “made some truly lasting contributions,” among them “calendrical tables…still in use among scholars working out Maya dates” and his “amazing achievement” in proposing “a correlation between the Maya Long Count calendar and our own” (Coe 1999, 112, 114). Jean François Champollion (1790-1832), considered the father of Egyptology, was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics [546].