and inscriptions still defied all attempts at decipherment, despite much concerted effort. It was Morley's view, and one that found wide support, that these undeciphered portions would contain only more of the same astronomical, calendric and perhaps religious information, not actual historical data. He wrote in 1940, "time, in its various manifestations, the accurate record of its principal phenomena, constitutes the majority of Maya writing." He also wrote that he doubted that any toponym would be found in the texts. He supposed that the Maya writing system was one based chiefly upon ideographic or pictographic principles, and that if present any elements of phoneticism would always be "overshadow[ed]" by the ideographic meaning assigned to each glyph." That is to say, in Morley's view each glyph substantially represented words, ideas and concepts in toto, and did not separately depict the individual language sounds as spoken by the scribes who had written them (with the possible exception of an occasional rebus-like element, as had already been demonstrated for Aztec writing). The convincing evidence which was to overturn this view became known only after Morley's death, starting with Yuri Knorozov's work in the 1950s. Over the next decades other Mayanists such as Proskouriakoff, Michael D. Coe, and David H. Kelley would further expand upon this phonetic line of enquiry, which ran counter to the accepted view but would prove to be ever more fruitful as their work continued. By the mid-1970s, it had become increasingly clear to most that the Maya writing system was a logosyllabic one, a mixture of logograms and phonetic components that included a fully functional syllabary. These realizations led to the successful decipherment of many of the texts which had been impenetrable (and almost "dismissed") by Morley and the "old school". In retrospect, these breakthroughs may have been realized earlier had it not been for Morley's, and later Eric Thompson's, almost "on principle" position against the phonetic approach. Consequently, most of Morley's attempts to advance understanding of the Maya script have been superseded. Morley's particular passion was the study of the Maya calendar and its related inscriptions, and in this respect, he made useful expositions that have withstood later scrutiny. His talent was not so much to make innovations, but rather to publicise and explain the workings of the various systems. He was particularly proficient at recovering calendar dates from well-worn and weathered inscriptions, owing to his great familiarity