Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native
writing system
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...
of the
Maya civilization
The Maya civilization () of the Mesoamerican people is known by its ancient temples and glyphs. Its Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is also noted for its art, archit ...
of
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...
and is the only
Mesoamerican writing system
Mesoamerica, along with Mesopotamia and China, is one of three known places in the world where writing is thought to have developed independently. Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are a combination of logographic and syllabic systems. Th ...
that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE in
San Bartolo,
Guatemala
Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico; to the northeast by Belize and the Caribbean; to the east by H ...
. Maya writing was in continuous use throughout Mesoamerica until the
Spanish conquest of the Maya
The Spanish conquest of the Maya was a protracted conflict during the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, in which the Spanish ''conquistadores'' and their allies gradually incorporated the territory of the Late Postclassic Maya states and ...
in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Maya writing used
logogram
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
s complemented with a set of
syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
glyph
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
s, somewhat similar in function to modern
Japanese writing. Maya writing was called "hieroglyphics" or
hieroglyph
A hieroglyph ( Greek for "sacred carvings") was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatoni ...
s by early European explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries who found its general appearance reminiscent of
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...
, although the two systems are unrelated.
Though modern
Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
are almost entirely written using the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
rather than Maya script, there have been recent developments encouraging a revival of the Maya glyph system.
Languages
Evidence suggests that codices and other classic texts were written by
scribe
A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing.
The profession of the scribe, previously widespread across cultures, lost most of its promi ...
s—usually members of the
Maya priesthood
Until the discovery that Maya stelae depicted kings instead of high priests, the Maya priesthood and their preoccupations had been a main scholarly concern. In the course of the 1960s and over the following decades, however, dynastic research ca ...
—in
Classic Maya
A classic is an outstanding example of a particular style; something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality; of the first or highest quality, class, or rank – something that exemplifies its class. The word can be an adjective (a ''c ...
, a literary form of the extinct
Chʼoltiʼ language
The Chʼoltiʼ language is an extinct Mayan language which was spoken by the Manche Chʼol people of eastern Guatemala and southern Belize. The post-colonial stage of the language is only known from a single manuscript written between 1685 and ...
. It is possible that the Maya elite spoke this language as a ''
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
'' over the entire Maya-speaking area, but texts were also written in other
Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
of the
Petén and
Yucatán
Yucatán (, also , , ; yua, Yúukatan ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán,; yua, link=no, Xóot' Noj Lu'umil Yúukatan. is one of the 31 states which comprise the political divisions of Mexico, federal entities of Mexico. I ...
, especially
Yucatec
Yucatec Maya (; referred to by its speakers simply as Maya or as , is one of the 32 Mayan languages of the Mayan language family. Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. There is also a significant diasporic commu ...
. There is also some evidence that the script may have been occasionally used to write Mayan languages of the
Guatemalan Highlands
The Guatemalan Highlands is an upland region in southern Guatemala, lying between the Sierra Madre de Chiapas to the south and the Petén lowlands to the north.
Description
The highlands are made up of a series of high valleys enclosed by mou ...
. However, if other languages were written, they may have been written by Chʼoltiʼ scribes, and therefore have Chʼoltiʼ elements.
Structure
![Maya script reading direction](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Maya_script_reading_direction.png)
Mayan writing consisted of a relatively elaborate set of glyphs, which were laboriously painted on ceramics, walls and bark-paper
codices
The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...
, carved in wood or stone, and molded in
stucco
Stucco or render is a construction material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as a decorative coating for walls and ceilings, exterior walls, and as a sculptural and a ...
. Carved and molded glyphs were painted, but the paint has rarely survived. , the sound of about 80% of Maya writing could be read and the meaning of about 60% could be understood with varying degrees of certainty, enough to give a comprehensive idea of its structure.
Maya texts were usually written in blocks arranged in columns two blocks wide, with each block corresponding to a noun or verb
phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...
. The blocks within the columns were read left to right, top to bottom, and would be repeated until there were no more columns left. Within a block, glyphs were arranged top-to-bottom and left-to-right (similar to Korean
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...
syllabic blocks). Glyphs were sometimes
conflated into ligatures, where an element of one glyph would replace part of a second. In place of the standard block configuration, Maya was also sometimes written in a single row or column, or in an 'L' or 'T' shape. These variations most often appeared when they would better fit the surface being inscribed.
The Maya script was a
logosyllabic
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, a ...
system with some
syllabogram Syllabograms are signs used to write the syllables (or morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols represent phonemes, or a logograph ...
matic elements. Individual glyphs or symbols could represent either a
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
or a
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
, and the same glyph could often be used for both. Because of these dual readings, it is customary to write logographic readings in
all caps
In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...
and phonetic readings in italics or bold. For example, a calendaric glyph can be read as the morpheme or as the syllable ''chi''.
Glyphs used as syllabograms were originally logograms for single-syllable words, usually those that ended in a vowel or in a weak consonant such as ''y, w, h,'' or
glottal stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
. For example, the logogram for 'fish fin'—found in two forms, as a fish fin and as a fish with prominent fins—was read as
ahand came to represent the syllable ''ka''. These syllabic glyphs performed two primary functions: as phonetic complements to disambiguate logograms which had more than one reading (similar to ancient Egyptian and modern Japanese ''
furigana
is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters printed either above or next to kanji (logographic characters) or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known ...
''); and to write grammatical elements such as verbal inflections which did not have dedicated logograms (similar to Japanese ''
okurigana
are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb fo ...
''). For example, ''bʼalam'' 'jaguar' could be written as a single logogram, ; a logogram with syllable additions, as ''ba-'', or ''-ma,'' or ''bʼa-''-''ma''; or written completely phonetically with syllabograms as ''bʼa-la-ma.''
In addition, some syllable glyphs were
homophones
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
, such as the six different glyphs used to write the very common
third person
Third person, or third-person, may refer to:
* Third person (grammar), a point of view (in English, ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', and ''they'')
** Illeism, the act of referring to oneself in the third person
* Third-person narrative, a perspective in p ...
pronoun ''u-''.
Harmonic and disharmonic echo vowels
![Dresden codex, page 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Dresden_codex%2C_page_2.jpg)
Phonetic glyphs stood for simple consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-only (V) syllables. However, Mayan
phonotactics
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek "voice, sound" and "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable struc ...
is slightly more complicated than this. Most Mayan words end with consonants, and there may be sequences of two consonants within a word as well, as in ''xolteʼ'' ( 'scepter') which is CVCCVC. When these final consonants were
sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
s ''(l, m, n)'' or
guttural
Guttural speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity, especially where it's difficult to distinguish a sound's place of articulation and its phonation. In popular usage it is an imprecise term for s ...
s ''(j, h, ʼ)'' they were sometimes ignored ("underspelled"). More often, final consonants were written, which meant that an extra vowel was written as well. This was typically an
"echo" vowel that repeated the vowel of the previous syllable. For example, the word
ah'fish fin' would be underspelled ''ka'' or written in full as ''ka-ha''. However, there are many cases where some other vowel was used, and the orthographic rules for this are only partially understood; this is largely due to the difficulty in ascertaining whether this vowel may be due to an underspelled suffix.
proposed the following conventions:
* A CVC syllable was written ''CV-CV,'' where the two vowels (V) were the same: ''yo-po''
op'leaf'
* A syllable with a long vowel (CVVC) was written ''CV-Ci,'' unless the long vowel was
in which case it was written ''CiCa: ba-ki''
aak
''Aak'' is a genre of Korean court music. It is an imported form of the Chinese court music ''yayue'', and means "elegant music". ''Aak'' was performed almost exclusively in state sacrificial rites, and in the present day it is performed in ce ...
'captive', ''yi-tzi-na''
ihtziin'younger brother'
* A syllable with a
glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consonan ...
vowel (CVʼC or CVʼVC) was written with a final ''a'' if the vowel was
, o, u
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...
or with a final ''u'' if the vowel was
or
''hu-na''
uʼn'paper', ''ba-tzʼu''
aʼtsʼ'howler monkey'.
* Preconsonantal
is not indicated.
In short, if the vowels are the same (harmonic), a simple vowel is intended. If the vowels are not the same (disharmonic), either two syllables are intended (likely underspelled), or else a single syllable with a long vowel (if V
1 =
e? o uand V
2 =
or else if V
1 =
and V
2 =
or with a glottalized vowel (if V
1 =
? o uand V
2 =
or else if V
1 =
iand V
2 =
. The long-vowel reading of
e-Ciis still uncertain, and there is a possibility that
e-Curepresents a glottalized vowel (if it is not simply an underspelling for
eCuC, so it may be that the disharmonies form natural classes:
for long non-front vowels, otherwise
to keep it disharmonic;
for glottalized non-back vowels, otherwise
A more complex spelling is ''ha-o-bo ko-ko-no-ma'' for
aʼoʼb kohknoʼm'they are the guardians'. A minimal set is,
*''ba-ka''
ak*''ba-ki''
aak
''Aak'' is a genre of Korean court music. It is an imported form of the Chinese court music ''yayue'', and means "elegant music". ''Aak'' was performed almost exclusively in state sacrificial rites, and in the present day it is performed in ce ...
*''ba-ku''
aʼk=
aʼak*''ba-ke''
aakel(underspelled)
*''ba-ke-le''
aakel
Verbal inflections
Despite depending on consonants which were frequently not written, the Mayan
voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in ...
system was reliably indicated. For instance, the paradigm for a transitive verb with a CVC root is as follows:
The active suffix did not participate in the harmonic/disharmonic system seen in roots, but rather was always ''-wa''.
However, the language changed over 1500 years, and there were dialectal differences as well, which are reflected in the script, as seen next for the verb "(s)he sat" ( is an
infix
An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with ''adfix,'' a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.
When marking text for int ...
in the root ''chum'' for the
passive voice
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing t ...
):
Emblem glyphs
![NaranjoStela10Maler](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/NaranjoStela10Maler.jpg)
An "emblem glyph" is a kind of royal title. It consists of a place name followed by the word ''
ajaw
Ajaw or Ahau ('Lord') is a pre-Columbian Maya political title attested from epigraphic inscriptions. It is also the name of the 20th day of the ''tzolkʼin'', the Maya divinatory calendar, on which a ruler's ''kʼatun''-ending rituals would fal ...
'', a Classic Maya term for "lord" with an unclear but well-attested etymology. Sometimes the title is introduced by an adjective ''kʼuhul'' ("holy, divine" or "sacred"), resulting in the construction "holy [placename] lord". However, an "emblem glyph" is not a "glyph" at all: it can be spelled with any number of syllabic or logographic signs and several alternative spellings are attested for the words ''kʼuhul'' and ''ajaw'', which form the stable core of the title. "Emblem glyph" simply reflects the time when Mayanists could not read Classic Maya inscriptions and used a term to isolate specific recurring structural components of the written narratives, and other remaining examples of Maya orthography.
This title was identified in 1958 by
Heinrich Berlin Heinrich may refer to:
People
* Heinrich (given name), a given name (including a list of people with the name)
* Heinrich (surname), a surname (including a list of people with the name)
*Hetty (given name), a given name (including a list of peo ...
, who coined the term "emblem glyph". Berlin noticed that the "emblem glyphs" consisted of a larger "main sign" and two smaller signs now read as ''
kʼuhul ajaw''. Berlin also noticed that while the smaller elements remained relatively constant, the main sign changed from site to site. Berlin proposed that the main signs identified individual cities, their ruling dynasties, or the territories they controlled. Subsequently, argued that the "emblem glyphs" referred to archaeological sites, or more so the prominence and standing of the site, broken down in a 5-tiered hierarchy of asymmetrical distribution. Marcus' research assumed that the emblem glyphs were distributed in a pattern of relative site importance depending on broadness of distribution, roughly broken down as follows: Primary regional centers (capitals) (
Tikal
Tikal () (''Tik’al'' in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-Co ...
,
Calakmul
Calakmul (; also Kalakmul and other less frequent variants) is a Maya archaeological site in the Mexican state of Campeche, deep in the jungles of the greater Petén Basin region. It is from the Guatemalan border. Calakmul was one of the large ...
, and other "superpowers") were generally first in the region to acquire a unique emblem glyph(s). Texts referring to other primary regional centers occur in the texts of these "capitals", and dependencies exist which use the primary center's glyph. Secondary centers (
Altun Ha,
Lubaantun,
Xunantunich
Xunantunich () is an Ancient Maya archaeological site in western Belize, about 70 miles (110 km) west of Belize City, in the Cayo District. Xunantunich is located atop a ridge above the Mopan River, well within sight of the Guatemala bord ...
, and other mid-sized cities) had their own glyphs but are only rarely mentioned in texts found in the primary regional center, while repeatedly mentioning the regional center in their own texts. Tertiary centers (towns) had no glyphs of their own, but have texts mentioning the primary regional centers and perhaps secondary regional centers on occasion. These were followed by the villages with no emblem glyphs and no texts mentioning the larger centers, and hamlets with little evidence of texts at all. This model was largely unchallenged for over a decade until Mathews and Justeson, as well as Houston, argued once again that the "emblem glyphs" were the titles of Maya rulers with some geographical association.
The debate on the nature of "emblem glyphs" received a new spin in . The authors demonstrated that there were many place-names-proper, some real, some mythological, mentioned in the hieroglyphic inscriptions. Some of these place names also appeared in the "emblem glyphs", some were attested in the "titles of origin" (expressions like "a person from Lubaantun"), but some were not incorporated in personal titles at all. Moreover, the authors also highlighted the cases when the "titles of origin" and the "emblem glyphs" did not overlap, building upon Houston's earlier research. Houston noticed that the establishment and spread of the Tikal-originated dynasty in the Petexbatun region was accompanied by the proliferation of rulers using the Tikal "emblem glyph" placing political and dynastic ascendancy above the current seats of rulership. Recent investigations also emphasize the use of emblem glyphs as an
emic
In anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic () and etic () refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, values, ...
identifier to shape socio-political self-identity.
Numerical system
![Mayan numerals 0-19 & 2 vertical examples](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Mayan_numerals_0-19_%26_2_vertical_examples.gif)
The Mayas used a positional base-twenty (
vigesimal
vigesimal () or base-20 (base-score) numeral system is based on twenty (in the same way in which the decimal numeral system is based on ten). '' Vigesimal'' is derived from the Latin adjective '' vicesimus'', meaning 'twentieth'.
Places
In ...
) numerical system which only included whole numbers. For simple counting operations, a bar and dot notation was used. The dot represents 1 and the bar represents 5. A shell was used to represent zero. Numbers from 6 to 19 are formed combining bars and dots, and can be written horizontally or vertically.
Numbers over 19 are written vertically and read from the bottom to the top as powers of 20. The bottom number represents numbers from 0 to 20, so the symbol shown does not need to be multiplied. The second line from the bottom represents the amount of 20s there are, so that number is multiplied by 20. The third line from the bottom represents the amount of 400s, so it's multiplied by 400; the fourth by 8000; the fifth by 160,000, etc. Each successive line is an additional power of twenty (similar to how in
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write Decimal, decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers ...
, additional powers of 10 are added to the right of the first digit). This positional system allows the calculation of large figures, necessary for chronology and astronomy.
History
It was until recently thought that the Maya may have adopted writing from the
Olmec
The Olmecs () were the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization. Following a progressive development in Soconusco, they occupied the tropical lowlands of the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. It has been speculated that t ...
or
Epi-Olmec culture The Epi-Olmec culture was a cultural area in the central region of the present-day Mexican state of Veracruz. Concentrated in the Papaloapan River basin, a culture that existed during the Late Formative period, from roughly 300 BCE to roughly 250 ...
, who used the
Isthmian script
The Isthmian script is a very early Mesoamerican writing system in use in the area of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec from perhaps 500 BCE to 500 CE, although there is disagreement on these dates. It is also called the La Mojarra script and the Epi-O ...
. However, murals excavated in 2005 have pushed back the origin of Maya writing by several centuries, and it now seems possible that the Maya were the ones who invented writing in Mesoamerica. Scholarly consensus is that the Maya developed the only
complete writing system in
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...
.
Knowledge of the Maya writing system continued into the early colonial era and reportedly a few of the early
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
priests who went to
Yucatán
Yucatán (, also , , ; yua, Yúukatan ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán,; yua, link=no, Xóot' Noj Lu'umil Yúukatan. is one of the 31 states which comprise the political divisions of Mexico, federal entities of Mexico. I ...
learned it. However, as part of his campaign to eradicate pagan rites, Bishop
Diego de Landa
Diego de Landa Calderón, O.F.M. (12 November 1524 – 29 April 1579) was a Spanish Franciscan bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. Many historians criticize his campaign against idolatry. In particular, he burned almost a ...
ordered the collection and destruction of written Maya works, and a sizable number of
Maya codices
Maya codices (singular ''codex'') are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of ...
were destroyed. Later, seeking to use their native language to convert the Maya to Christianity, he derived what he believed to be a Maya "alphabet" (the so-called
de Landa alphabet
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. Despi ...
). Although the Maya did not actually write alphabetically, nevertheless he recorded a glossary of Maya sounds and related symbols, which was long dismissed as nonsense (for instance, by leading Mayanist
J. E. S. Thompson in his 1950 book ''Maya Hieroglyphic Writing'') but eventually became a key resource in
deciphering the Maya script, though it has itself not been completely deciphered. The difficulty was that there was no simple correspondence between the two systems, and the names of the letters of the Spanish alphabet meant nothing to Landa's Maya scribe, so Landa ended up asking things like ''write "ha": "hache–a",'' and glossed a part of the result as "H," which, in reality, was written as a-che-a in Maya glyphs.
Landa was also involved in creating an
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
, or a system of writing, for the
Yukatek Maya language
Yucatec Maya (; referred to by its speakers simply as Maya or as , is one of the 32 Mayan languages of the Mayan language family. Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. There is also a significant diasporic commu ...
using the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
. This was the first Latin orthography for any of the Mayan languages, which number around thirty.
Only four
Maya codices
Maya codices (singular ''codex'') are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of ...
are known to have survived the conquistadors. Most surviving texts are found on pottery recovered from Maya tombs, or from
monument
A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, his ...
s and
stelae
A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), whe ...
erected in sites which were abandoned or buried before the arrival of the Spanish.
Knowledge of the writing system was lost, probably by the end of the 16th century. Renewed interest in it was sparked by published accounts of
ruined Maya sites in the 19th century.
Decipherment
![Escritura maya](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Escritura_maya.jpg)
Deciphering Maya writing proved a long and laborious process. 19th-century and early 20th-century investigators managed to decode the
Maya numbers and portions of the texts related to
astronomy
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...
and the
Maya calendar
The Maya calendar is a system of calendars used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in many modern communities in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.
The essentials of the Maya calendar are based upon a system which had ...
, but understanding of most of the rest long eluded scholars. In the 1930s,
Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Lee Whorf (; April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. He is known for "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis," the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how thei ...
wrote a number of published and unpublished essays, proposing to identify phonetic elements within the writing system. Although some specifics of his decipherment claims were later shown to be incorrect, the central argument of his work, that Maya hieroglyphs were phonetic (or more specifically, syllabic), was later supported by the work of
Yuri Knorozov
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (alternatively Knorosov; russian: link=no, Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; 19 November 1922 – 31 March 1999) was a Soviet-Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly reno ...
(1922–1999), who played a major role in deciphering Maya writing.
Napoleon Cordy Hannibal Napoleon David Alfred Thomas ("Nap") Cordy (July 29, 1902 — January 30, 1977) was an amateur scholar in the field of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations, who made some notable contributions in the 1930s and 1940s to the early study a ...
also made some notable contributions in the 1930s and 1940s to the early study and decipherment of Maya script, including "Examples of Phonetic Construction in Maya Hieroglyphs", in 1946. In 1952 Knorozov published the paper "Ancient Writing of Central America", arguing that the so-called "de Landa alphabet" contained in
Bishop Diego de Landa's manuscript ''Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán'' was made of
syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
, rather than
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...
ic symbols. He further improved his decipherment technique in his 1963
monograph
A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject.
In library cataloging, ''monograph ...
"The Writing of the Maya Indians" and published translations of Maya manuscripts in his 1975 work "Maya Hieroglyphic Manuscripts". In the 1960s, progress revealed the dynastic records of Maya rulers. Since the early 1980s scholars have demonstrated that most of the previously unknown symbols form a
syllabary
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
, and progress in reading the Maya writing has advanced rapidly since.
As
Knorozov's early essays contained several older readings already published in the late 19th century by
Cyrus Thomas
Cyrus Thomas (July 27, 1825 – June 26, 1910) was an American ethnologist and entomologist prominent in the late 19th century and noted for his studies of the natural history of the American West.
Biography
Thomas was born in Kingsport, ...
, and the
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
editors added propagandistic claims to the effect that Knorozov was using a peculiarly "
Marxist-Leninist" approach to decipherment, many Western
Mayanist
A Mayanist ( es, mayista) is a scholar specialising in research and study of the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian Maya civilisation. This discipline should not be confused with Mayanism, a collection of New Age beliefs about the ancient Maya.
Mayan ...
s simply dismissed Knorozov's work. However, in the 1960s, more came to see the syllabic approach as potentially fruitful, and possible phonetic readings for symbols whose general meaning was understood from context began to develop. Prominent older epigrapher
J. Eric S. Thompson
Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson (31 December 1898 – 9 September 1975) was a leading English Mesoamerican archeology, archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigraphy, epigrapher. While working in the United States, he dominated Maya studies and p ...
was one of the last major opponents of Knorozov and the syllabic approach. Thompson's disagreements are sometimes said to have held back advances in decipherment. For example, says "the major reason was that almost the entire Mayanist field was in willing thrall to one very dominant scholar, Eric Thompson".
G. Ershova, a student of Knorozov's, stated that reception of Knorozov's work was delayed only by authority of Thompson, and thus has nothing to do with
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
– "But he (Knorozov) did not even suspect what a storm of hatred his success had caused in the head of the American school of Mayan studies, Eric Thompson. And the Cold War was absolutely nothing to do with it. An Englishman by birth, Eric Thompson, after learning about the results of the work of a young Soviet scientist, immediately realized 'who got the victory'."
![Detail of Codex Dresdensis drawn by Lacambalam](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Detail_of_Codex_Dresdensis_drawn_by_Lacambalam.jpg)
In 1959, examining what she called "a peculiar pattern of dates" on stone monument inscriptions at the Classic Maya site of
Piedras Negras Piedras Negras may refer to:
* Piedras Negras, Coahuila, a city in the state of Coahuila, Mexico
** Piedras Negras Municipality, a municipality in Mexico, with the center in the eponymous city
* Piedras Negras (Maya site)
Piedras Negras is the ...
, Russian-American scholar
Tatiana Proskouriakoff
Tat'yana Avenirovna Proskuriakova (russian: Татья́на Авени́ровна Проскуряко́ва) ( – August 30, 1985) was a Russian-American Mayanist scholar and archaeologist who contributed significantly to the deciphering of ...
determined that these represented events in the lifespan of an individual, rather than relating to religion, astronomy, or prophecy, as held by the "old school" exemplified by Thompson. This proved to be true of many Maya inscriptions, and revealed the Maya
epigraphic
Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
record to be one relating actual histories of ruling individuals: dynastic histories similar in nature to those recorded in other human cultures throughout the world. Suddenly, the Maya entered written history.
Although it was then clear what was on many Maya inscriptions, they still could not literally be read. However, further progress was made during the 1960s and 1970s, using a multitude of approaches including
pattern analysis, de Landa's "alphabet", Knorozov's breakthroughs, and others. In the story of Maya decipherment, the work of
archaeologists
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
, art historians, epigraphers,
linguists
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, and
anthropologists
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and v ...
cannot be separated. All contributed to a process that was truly and essentially multidisciplinary. Key figures included
David Kelley
David Christopher Kelley (born June 23, 1949) is an American philosopher. He is a professed Objectivist, though his position that Objectivism can be revised and influenced by other schools of thought has prompted disagreements with other Objec ...
,
Ian Graham
Ian James Alastair Graham OBE (12 November 1923 – 1 August 2017) was a British Mayanist whose explorations of Maya ruins in the jungles of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize helped establish the ''Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions'' publi ...
,
Gilette Griffin, and
Michael Coe
Michael Douglas Coe (May 14, 1929 – September 25, 2019) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, epigrapher, and author. He is known for his research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya, and was among the foremost May ...
.
Dramatic breakthroughs occurred in the 1970s, in particular at the first
Mesa Redonda de Palenque, a scholarly conference organized by
Merle Greene Robertson
Merle Greene Robertson (August 30, 1913 – April 22, 2011) was an American artist, art historian, archaeologist, lecturer and Mayanist researcher, renowned for her extensive work towards the investigation and preservation of the art, iconogr ...
at the Classic Maya site of
Palenque
Palenque (; Yucatec Maya language, Yucatec Maya: ), also anciently known in the Itza Language as Lakamhaʼ ("Big Water or Big Waters"), was a Maya city City-state, state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins dat ...
and held in December, 1973. A
working group
A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...
led by
Linda Schele
Linda Schele (October 30, 1942 – April 18, 1998) was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played an invaluable role in the decipherment of much of the Maya hieroglyphs. Sh ...
, an art historian and epigrapher at the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
, included
Floyd Lounsbury
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (April 25, 1914 – May 14, 1998) was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar and epigrapher, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. ...
, a linguist from
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
, and
Peter Mathews, then an undergraduate student of David Kelley's at the
University of Calgary
The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...
(whom Kelley sent because he could not attend). In one afternoon they managed to decipher the first
dynastic list of Maya kings, the ancient kings of the city of
Palenque
Palenque (; Yucatec Maya language, Yucatec Maya: ), also anciently known in the Itza Language as Lakamhaʼ ("Big Water or Big Waters"), was a Maya city City-state, state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins dat ...
. By identifying a sign as an important royal title (now read as the recurring name ''Kʼinich''), the group was able to identify and "read" the life histories (from birth, to accession to the throne, to death) of six kings of Palenque.
From that point, progress proceeded rapidly, not only in the decipherment of the Maya glyphs, but also towards the construction of a new, historically based understanding of Maya civilization. Scholars such as
J. Kathryn Josserand,
Nick Hopkins and others published findings that helped to construct a Mayan vocabulary. In 1988
Wolfgang Gockel published a translation of the Palenque inscriptions based on a morphemic rather than syllabic interpretation of the glyphs. The "old school" continued to resist the results of the new scholarship for some time. A decisive event which helped to turn the tide in favor of the new approach occurred in 1986, at an exhibition entitled "The Blood of Kings: A New Interpretation of Maya Art", organized by
InterCultura
InterCultura, Inc., was a not-for-profit private foundation, based in Fort Worth, Texas with offices in London, England, founded in 1982 by Gordon Dee Smith (president), J. Roderick Grierson (vice-president), Milbry Polk, and several other individu ...
and the
Kimbell Art Museum
The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, hosts an art collection as well as traveling art exhibitions, educational programs and an extensive research library. Its initial artwork came from the private collection of Kay and Velma Kimbell, wh ...
and curated by Schele and by Yale art historian
Mary Miller. This exhibition and its attendant catalogue—and international publicity—revealed to a wide audience the new world which had latterly been opened up by progress in decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics. Not only could a real history of ancient America now be read and understood, but the light it shed on the material remains of the Maya showed them to be real, recognisable individuals. They stood revealed as a people with a history like that of all other human societies: full of wars, dynastic struggles, shifting political alliances, complex religious and artistic systems, expressions of personal property and ownership and the like. Moreover, the new interpretation, as the exhibition demonstrated, made sense out of many works of art whose meaning had been unclear and showed how the material culture of the Maya represented a fully integrated cultural system and world-view. Gone was the old Thompson view of the Maya as peaceable astronomers without conflict or other attributes characteristic of most human societies.
However, three years later, in 1989, supporters who continued to resist the modern decipherment interpretation made their last argument against it. This occurred at a conference at
Dumbarton Oaks
Dumbarton Oaks, formally the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, is a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was the residence and garden of wealthy U.S. diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife, M ...
. It did not directly attack the methodology or results of decipherment, but instead contended that the ancient Maya texts had indeed been read but were "epiphenomenal". This argument was extended from a populist perspective to say that the deciphered texts tell only about the concerns and beliefs of the society's elite, and not about the ordinary Maya. In opposition to this idea, Michael Coe described "epiphenomenal" as "a ten penny word meaning that Maya writing is only of marginal application since it is secondary to those more primary institutions—economics and society—so well studied by the dirt archaeologists."
Linda Schele noted following the conference that this is like saying that the inscriptions of ancient Egypt—or the writings of Greek philosophers or historians—do not reveal anything important about their cultures. Most written documents in most cultures tell us about the elite, because in most cultures in the past, they were the ones who could write (or could have things written down by scribes or inscribed on monuments).
Over 90 percent of the Maya texts can now be read with reasonable accuracy. , at least one phonetic glyph was known for each of the syllables marked green in this chart. /tʼ/ is rare. /pʼ/ is not found, and is thought to have been a later innovation in the Ch'olan and Yucatecan languages.
Syllables
Syllables are in the form of consonant + vowel. The top line contains individual vowels. In the left column are the consonants with their pronunciation instructions. The apostrophe ' represents the glottal stop. There are different variations of the same character in the table cell. Blank cells are bytes whose characters are not yet known.
Example
Tomb of
Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal
Kʼinich Janaab Pakal I (), also known as Pacal or Pacal the Great (March 603 – August 683), was ''ajaw'' of the Maya city-state of Palenque in the Late Classic period of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican chronology. He acceded to the throne in July 6 ...
:
![Exx](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Exx.png)
Text: ''Yak’aw ʔuk’uhul pik juʔn winaak pixoʔm ʔusak hunal ʔuʔh Yax K’ahk’ K’uh(?) ʔutuʔp k’uh(ul)? ...l ʔukoʔhaw Chaahk (‘GI’) Sak Baluʔn.''
Translation: «He gave the god clothing,
onsisted oftwenty nine headgears, white ribbon, necklace, First Fire God’s earrings and God’s quadrilateral badge helmet, to Chaahk Sak-Balun».
Revival
In recent times, there has been an increased interest in reviving usage of the script. Various works have recently been both transliterated and created into the script, notably the transcription of the
Popol Vuh
''Popol Vuh'' (also ''Popol Wuj'' or ''Popul Vuh'' or ''Pop Vuj'') is a text recounting the mythology and history of the Kʼicheʼ people, one of the Maya peoples, who inhabit Guatemala and the Mexican states of Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatan and Q ...
in 2018, a record of
Kʼicheʼ religion. Another example is the sculpting and writing of a modern
stele
A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), whe ...
placed at
Iximche
Iximcheʼ () (or Iximché using Spanish orthography) is a Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican archaeological site in the western highlands of Guatemala. Iximche was the capital of the Late Postclassic Kaqchikel Maya kingdom from 1470 until its abandon ...
in 2012, describing the full historical record of the site dating back to the beginning of the
Mayan long count
The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating, vigesimal (base 20) and octodecimal (base 18) calendar used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is often known as the Ma ...
. Modern poems such as "Cigarra" by Martín Gómez Ramírez have also been recently written entirely within the script.
Computer encoding
With the renewed usage of Maya writing, digital encoding of the script has been of recent interest.
[Joseph DeChicchis (2012), Current Trends in Mayan Literacy, In: John C. Maher, Jelisava Dobovsek-Sethna, and Cary Duval (eds.)]
Literacy for Dialogue in Multilingual Societies. Proceedings of Linguapax Asia Symposium 2011
Tokyo 2012, p. 71-82 but currently Maya script cannot be represented in any computer character encoding. A range of code points (U+15500–U+159FF) has been tentatively allocated for
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
, but no detailed proposal has been submitted yet. The Script Encoding Initiative project of the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, was awarded a grant in June 2016 to create a proposal to the Unicode Consortium for layout and presentation mechanisms in Unicode text, which was expected to be completed in 2017; though as of 2022 they have not completed this project.
The goal of encoding Maya hieroglyphs in Unicode is to facilitate the ''modern'' use of the script. For representing the degree of flexibility and variation of ''classical'' Maya, the expressiveness of Unicode is insufficient (e.g., with regard to the representation of infixes, i.e., signs inserted into other signs), so, for philological applications, different technologies are required.
[Diehr, Franziska, et al.]
Modelling vagueness-A criteria-based system for the qualitative assessment of reading proposals for the deciphering of Classic Mayan hieroglyphs
" ''COMHUM''. 2018.
The
Mayan numerals
The Mayan numeral system was the system to represent numbers and calendar dates in the Maya civilization. It was a vigesimal (base-20) positional numeral system. The numerals are made up of three symbols; zero (a shell), one (a dot) and f ...
, with values 0–19
10 creating a base-20 system, are encoded in block
Mayan Numerals
The Mayan numeral system was the system to represent numbers and calendar dates in the Maya civilization. It was a vigesimal (base-20) positional numeral system. The numerals are made up of three symbols; zero (a shell), one (a dot) and f ...
.
Notes
References
Bibliography
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External links
*The European Association of Mayanists (Wayeb) has resources, including full books, on thei
Electronic Resources pageA partial transcription, transliteration, and translation of the Temple of Inscriptions text by Michael D. CarrascoA Preliminary Classic Maya-English/English-Classic Maya Vocabulary of Hieroglyphic Readings by Erik BootFAMSI resources on Maya Hieroglyphic writingWolfgang Gockel's morphemic interpretation of the glyphsCorpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard UniversityCorpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volumes 1–9. Published by the Peabody Museum Press and distributed by Harvard University Press* (in Ukrainian)
{{Authority control
Mayan languages
3rd-century BC establishments in the Maya civilization
Writing systems introduced in the 3rd century BC