Lost to scholarship for several centuries, an abridged copy of Relación de las cosas de Yucatán was later rediscovered by the French antiquarian scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg in the 19th century. In furtherance of this goal, nearly all the Mayan texts were destroyed, in deference to writings that conformed to Biblical doctrine.
The pre-existing establishments, such as the Mayan religious order, were all destroyed by invading Spanish belligerents, such as De Landa, to make way for Christian “enlightenment”. The work was soon thereafter almost forgotten. His work was written after he had been recalled to Spain to face trial by Inquisition for allegations of improper behaviour while there, and he wrote it as a defense of his mission there. The "alphabet", along with some passages of explanatory notes and examples of its use in Maya writing, was written as a small part of de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán ("Account of the matters of Yucatán"), which also documented many aspects of the culture and practices of the indigenous Maya peoples that he had seen and been told of when he was living among them in the Yucatán Peninsula. With the aid of two Maya informants familiar with the script, de Landa made an attempt to provide a transcribed "A, B, C" for the Maya script with the intent of providing a key to its decipherment and translation. Despite its inaccuracies, the information provided by him would much later prove to be crucial to the mid-20th century breakthrough in the decipherment of the Maya script, starting with the work of the Soviet epigrapher and Mayanist Yuri Knorozov. The de Landa alphabet is the correspondence of Spanish letters and glyphs written in the pre-Columbian Maya script, which the 16th-century bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa, recorded as part of his documentation of the Maya civilization.
Reproduction of the page from Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, which gives a purported correspondence between letters of the Spanish alphabet and Maya glyphs, and which has become known as the de Landa alphabet
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