The inventory of glyphs used in Gates' analysis was compiled and drawn from the Madrid, Dresden and Paris codices, rather than from monumental inscriptions and stelae.
Gates' work represented one of the major attempts in this pre-decipherment era of Mayanist scholarship to catalogue and analyse Maya glyphs as a prelude to uncovering their meaning.
In comprehensiveness it was later superseded by Günther Zimmermann's Die Hieroglyphen der Maya-Handschriften (1956), and then in particular by J. Eric S. Thompson's A Catalogue of Maya Hieroglyphs (1962), which became established as the de facto standard catalogue and analysis of its day.
While many of the interpretations put forward in the early catalogues by Gates et al. have been made redundant by the modern knowledge of the script, catalogues such as Gates' have retained their significance and utility as references and records—particularly for calendrical and astronomical data and interpretation.
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