William Gates (1863–1940), the first director of Tulane’s Department of Middle American Research, was captivated by the ancient Maya. A self-taught Mayanist, he made substantial contributions as a collector and publisher. Gates’ passions were sparked by an early interest in reproducing Maya codices on his own printing press. To do so, he had to solve the problem of how to render ancient glyphs in modern type.
His lifelong fascination with Maya hieroglyphic script and the problem of its decipherment was coupled with the belief that the secret to decoding this script lay hidden in existing Maya manuscripts. More broadly, he believed that the hieroglyphs harbored a transcendent dimension as repositories of ancient wisdom and esoteric knowledge. He thus invested a small fortune gathering documents on the ancient Maya with unmatched zeal.
In 1920, Gates presided over the Maya Society, a scholarly social group in Philadelphia that published his translation of Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1566). Landa’s work was later proved to contain key information that led to unlocking the Maya code.
Among the enduring strengths of The Latin American Library’s collections inherited from William Gates is the study of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly that of the Maya. One measure of this distinctive quality is the presence in the LAL’s holdings of key texts that later proved to be crucial in the chain of discoveries and breakthroughs leading to the successful decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic script in the 1980s. A second is the later acquisition of Merle Greene Robertson’s remarkable corpus of ink rubbings and photographic images representative of over 1,000 years of textual and artistic creation by the ancient Maya.