http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Mesoamerican Writing Systems <#>Maya Quick Facts Type Logophonetic Genealogy Mesoamerican Location Americas > Mesoamerica Time 100 BCE to 1697 CE Direction Top to Bottom in Double Columns Contents: Introduction <#intro> | The Decipherment <#decipher> Once considered an unsolvable enigma, recent advances in the decipherment of the Maya writing system has not only shed light on the mechanics of the script, but also on the socio-political, artistic, and historical aspects of Maya civilization. The Maya people as a whole is considered the longest lasting civilization of the New World. It became distinguishable from other early farming cultures of Mesoamerica by about 100 BCE, when the first great Maya cities were constructed. Their culture endured through changes, wars, and disasters until it was destroyed by the Spanish conquest in the 16th and 17th centuries. The last indepedent Maya kingdom of Tayasal, fell as late as 1697. However, the Maya survived and there is estimated to be at least one million Mayans living in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras today. General Overview The Maya hieroglypic writing is arguably one of the most visually striking writing systems of the world. It is also very complex, with hundreds of unique signs or /glyphs/ in the form of humans, animals, supernaturals, objects, and abstract designs. These signs are either logograms (to express meaning) or syllabograms (to denote sound values), and are used to write words, phrases, and sentences. In fact, the Maya can write anything that they can say. The visual construction of Maya glyphs is very interesting. At first inspection, the glyphs appear to be very intricate squares laid out in a gridlike pattern. In reality, a square could itself be one or more glyphs. Preclassic Maya Writing The earliest examples of Maya writing dates from the Late Preclassic, perhaps as early as 100 BCE, although many are on portable objects that are hard to date archaeologically. A good example of Late Preclassic Maya writing is a jade mask found in the Petén Department of Guatemala, now housed in the Dumbarton Oaks. Like later monuments, the theme of this mask is political power. While no dates are inscribed, and most of the glyphs undeciphered, what can be interpreted suggests that the mask records the accession of a ruler by the name of Chan Muan, which is most prominently inscribed to the right of the ruler's figure. These two same glyphs appear again in the text cells C2 and D2, and also /conflagrated/ or merged into a single glyph in cell B6. The phrase consisting of A5, B5, A6, and B6 together Another early Maya text comes the famous, recently-discovered site of San Bartolo. However, some of the first dated monuments sometimes around 1st century CE. You can also find more information about the beginning of Maya writing in Origins and Developement of Mesoamerican writing . The Decipherment of Maya Hieroglyphs The story really started with Bishop Diego de Landa, who avidly committed to destroy every Maya book that he could find. Ironically, though, when he was composing his /Relación de las cosas de Yucatán/, he included a very sketchy and rather erroneous "summary" of Maya hieroglyphics. Apparently, he assumed that Mayas wrote with an alphabet, and so he asked his native informants on how to write "a", "b", "c", and so forth, in Maya. The Mayas, on the other hand, heard the syllables "ah", "beh", "seh" (as "a", "b" and "c" would be pronounced in Spanish), and so forth, and naturally gave the glyphs with these phonetic values. So, in a sense, Landa recorded a very small section of the Maya syllabary, and the Mayanist equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. In a sense, for all Landa did to destroy any traces of Maya writing, he also unwittingly preserved for us the key to rediscovery and decipherment. He, therefore, defeated himself. One point for knowledge and zero for ignorance. The next step came really when the Maya civilization was rediscovered by *John Lloyd Stephens* and his talented artist companion *Frederick Catherwood* in the mid 19th century. Not only were their books bestsellers but also the drawings in them were (and still are) extremely accurate. No doubt *Sir Eric Thompson* is one of the greatest Mayanist ever lived. Among his greatest contribution to the field was a systematic catalog of all Maya hieroglyphs. He divided the glyphs into three sets, /affixes/, /main signs/, and /portraits/. The affixes are usually the little squished glyphs while the main signs are usually somewhat square in shape. The portraits are usually heads of humans, gods, or animals, and usually can appear as either affixes or main signs. Thompson gave each one a number, the lowest number going to the most frequent glyph to appear on texts, and higher numbers for less frequent signs. Affixes start at 1 and stops at 500. Main signs go from 501 to 999. And Portraits from 1000 up. You can take a lot at this cataloging by going to Maya Epigraphic Database . However, Thompson was set in his mind that Maya hieroglyphs were "ideographic", which literally means that each glyph expresses an abstract idea in the human mind. These ideograms were, according to him, the main signs, while the affixes were modifiers of the ideogram (like numbers, verbal endings, plurals, etc). As for phoneticism, he thought that rebus was the major way for the Maya to "spell" something. He considered the Landa's "alphabet" completely wrong. On the other side of the coin was *Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov*, who advocated phoneticisms, and saw the key in Landa's work. He was not the first to advocate a phonetic approach to Maya glyphs, though. The great linguist *Benjamin Whorf* had also tried to "read" Maya glyphs earlier without success, because he took Landa's alphabet as if it really was an alphabet. What set Knorozov apart was that he realized Landa's alphabet was really part of the Maya syllabary, and he succeeded in identifying many of the syllabic glyphs. As for the content of the texts, Thompson strongly argued for esoteric knowledge like astrology and pointless mathematics. This view was derived from his opinion that the Maya were peaceful astronomy priests. However, evidence soon emerged that the texts recorded something other than Maya science. The German-Mexican *Heinrich Berlin* identified a set of glyphs with similar affixes but different main signs. Each of these glyphs appear most frequently in one site, so it is quite possible to assume that each glyph identifies a site. He called these "Emblem Glyphs". But perhaps the greatest advance was made by *Tatiana Proskouriakoff*, who took a logical approach to monuments and texts on them. She noticed that stelas come in groups. Many of the recorded dates in a group do not seem to apply to any religious or astronomical events. In fact, the dates on these monuments fit with that of a person's life time. Proskouriakoff therefore theorized that at least some of Classic Maya texts recorded the lifetime of a ruler. Once the historical approach is opened, myriad of glyphs were identified with events in life, such as birth, accession, death, and so on. In the early seventies, it became possible for the first time to work out dynastic lists of rulers in particular sites. From around the same time, Knorozov's phoneticism became more widely accepted, and further advances in deciphering syllabic signs continued. With these major tools of decipherment in hand, Maya texts started to come to light for the past 20 years. New discoveries continue to pile out, and any paper published six months ago might already be obsolete. Copyright © 1996-2005, Lawrence Lo. All Rights Reserved