Maya script

The Maya script, commonly known as Maya hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE,^* and writing was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century CE. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing. Maya writing was called "hieroglyphics" or "hieroglyphs" by early European explorers of the 18th and 19th century who did not understand it but found its general appearance reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, to which the Maya writing system is not related.

The languages

As far as is currently known, the Maya script of the Classic era was primarily used to write two Mayan languages, Cholan (in the central parts of the Maya lands around Palenque and Tikal, and and far south as Copán) and Yucatecan (in the Yucatán Peninsula). Cholan is believed to have been a single language at the time, as was Yucatecan; since then both languages have split. However, Cholan may have been a lingua franca over much of the Maya area, and local influences of varying degrees have been detected. Yucatecan was frequently written with Cholan elements, suggesting that the city states of the Yucatan employed Cholan scribes. There is also some evidence that the script may have been occasionally used to write Mayan languages of the Guatemalan highlands.

Structure

Maya writing consisted of a highly elaborate set of glyphs which were laboriously painted on ceramics, walls or bark-paper codices, carved in wood or stone, or molded in stucco. Carved and molded glyphs were painted, but the paint has not often survived.

About three-quarters of Maya writing can now be read with varying degrees of certainty, enough to give us a general idea of its structure.

The Maya script was a logosyllabic system. Individual symbols ("glyphs") could represent either a word (actually a morpheme) or a syllable; indeed, the same glyph could often be used for both. For example, the calendrical glyph MANIK’ was also used to represent the syllable chi. (It's customary to write logographic readings in all capitals and phonetic readings in italics.) It is possible, but not certain, that these conflicting readings arose as the script was adapted to new languages, as also happened with Japanese kanji. There was ambiguity in the other direction as well: Different glyphs could be read the same way. For example, half a dozen apparently unrelated glyphs were used to write the very common third person pronoun u-.

Maya was written in blocks arranged in columns two blocks wide, read as follows:

^*" target="_blank" >^* ^*" target="_blank" >^* ^*" target="_blank" >^* ^*" target="_blank" >^* ^*" target="_blank" >^*

Within each block, glyphs were arranged top-to-bottom and left-to-right, superficially rather like Korean Hangul syllabic blocks. However, in the case of Maya, each block tended to correspond to a noun or verb phrase such as his green headband. Also, glyphs were sometimes conflated, where an element of one glyph would replace part of a second. Conflation occurs in other scripts: For example, in medieval Spanish manuscripts the word de 'of' was sometimes written Ð (a D with the arm of an E).

Maya glyphs were fundamentally logographic. Generally the glyphs used as phonetic elements were originally logograms that stood for words that were themselves single syllables, syllables that either ended in a vowel or in a weak consonant such as y, w, h, or glottal stop. For example, the logogram for 'fish fin' (Maya ^* — found in two forms, as a fish fin and as a fish with prominent fins), came to represent the syllable ka. These syllabic glyphs performed two primary functions: They were used as phonetic complements to disambiguate logograms which had more than one reading, as also occurred in Egyptian, and they were used to write grammatical elements such as verbal inflections which did not have dedicated logograms, as in modern Japanese. For example, balam 'jaguar' could be written as a single logogram, BALAM, complemented phonetically as ba-BALAM, or BALAM-ma, or ba-BALAM-ma, or written completely phonetically as ba-la-ma.

Phonetic glyphs stood for simple consonant-vowel or bare-vowel syllables. However, Mayan phonotactics is slightly more complicated than this: Most Maya words end in a consonant, not a vowel, and there may be sequences of two consonants within a word as well, as in xolte’ 'scepter', which is CVCCVC. When these final consonants were sonorants (l, m, n) or glottals (h, ’) they were sometimes ignored ("underspelled"), but 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. That is, the word ^* 'fish fin' would be 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. Here's our current understanding:

A CVC syllable was written CV-CV, where the two vowels (V) were the same: yo-po ^* '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 ^* 'younger brother'
A syllable with a glottalized vowel (CV’C or CV’VC) was written with a final a if the vowel was o, u, or with a final u if the vowel was or ^*" target="_blank" >'paper', ba-tz’u [ba’tz’ 'howler monkey'.

A more complex spelling is ha-o-bo ko-ko-no-ma for kohkno’m 'they are the guardians'. (Vowel length and glottalization are not always indicated in common words like 'they are'.) A minimal set, not fully translated, is,

ba-ka ^*

ba-ki ^*

ba-ku or [ba’ak

ba-ke ^* (underspelled)

See here for a more substantial discussion and, from page 70 on, a partial list of glyphs and glyph blocks.

History

It was until recently thought that the Maya may have adopted writing from the Olmec or Epi-Olmec. However, recent discoveries have pushed back the origin of Mayan writing by several centuries, and it now seems possible that the Maya were the ones who invented writing in Mesoamerica.

Knowledge of the Maya writing system continued into the early colonial era and reportedly a few of the early Spanish priests who went to Yucatán learned it. However, as part of his campaign to eradicate pagan rites, Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the destruction of all written Maya works, including a library full of bark-paper codices. Later, seeking to use their native language to convert the Maya to Christianity, he derived what he believed to be a Maya alphabet. 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 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 the equivalent of write H: a i tee cee aitch "aitch", and glossed a part of the resulting gibberish as "H".

Landa was also involved in creating a Latin orthography for the Yucatec Maya language, meaning that he created a system for writing Yucatec in the Latin alphabet. This was the first Latin orthography for any of the Mayan languages, which number around thirty.

Only four Maya codices are known to have survived the conquistadors. Most surviving texts are found on pottery recovered from Maya tombs, or from monuments and stelae 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

The decipherment of the writing was a long and laborious process. 19th century and early 20th century investigators managed to decode the Maya numbers and portions of the text related to astronomy and the Maya calendar, but understanding of most of the rest long eluded scholars. In the 1960s progress revealed the dynastic records of Maya rulers. Since the early 1980s it has been demonstrated that most of the previously unknown symbols form a syllabary, and progress in reading the Maya writing has advanced rapidly since.

The Maya may seem to have inherited some elements, and perhaps the entire basis, of their ancient writing system from the Olmecs, which was significantly modified and expanded by the Maya of the Pre-Classic era. Pre-Classic texts are less numerous and less well understood by archaeologists than the later Classic and Post-Classic texts. (However, the Epi-Olmec script once thought of as a possible direct ancestor of the Mayan script is now known to be several centuries too recent, and may instead be a descendant.) Other related and nearby Mesoamerican cultures of the period were also heirs to the Olmec writing system, and developed parallel systems which shared key attributes (such as the base-twenty numerical system written with a system of bars and dots). However, it is generally believed that the Maya developed the only complete writing system in Mesoamerica, meaning that they were the only civilization that could write everything they could say.

The linguistic breakthroughs

What was only in retrospect widely-recognized as a major breakthrough was made by Yuri Knorosov in the 1950s, when he published a paper arguing that the so-called "de Landa alphabet" contained in Bishop Diego de Landa's manuscript Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán was actually made of syllabic, rather than alphabetic symbols. As Knorosov's early essays contained few new readings, and the Soviet editors added propagandistic claims to the effect that Knorosov was using a peculiarly "Marxist-Leninist" approach to decipherment, many Western Mayanists simply dismissed Knorosov'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 be developed. Prominent older epigrapher J. Eric S. Thompson was one of the last major opponents of Knorosov and the syllabic approach. Thompson's disagreements are sometimes said to have held back advances in decipherment.

However, it was the combination of the work of Knorosov with a historically-oriented approach first outlined by Russian-American scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff that truly set in motion the winds of change in Maya decipherment. In 1959, examining what she called "a peculiar pattern of dates" on stone monument inscriptions at the Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras, Proskouriakoff determined that these represented events in the life-span of an individual, rather than relating to religion, astronomy, or prophesy, as held by the "old school" exemplified by Thompson. This proved to be true of many Maya inscriptions, and revealed the Maya epigraphic record to be one relating actual histories of ruling individuals: dynastic histories similar in nature to those recorded in literate human cultures throughout the world. Suddenly, the Maya entered written history.

Although it was now 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," Knorosov's breakthroughs, and others. In the story of Maya decipherment, the work of archaeologists, art historians, epigraphers, linguists, and anthropologists cannot be separated. All contributed to a process that was truly and essentially multidisciplinary. Key figures included David Kelley, Ian Graham, Gilette Griffin, and Michael Coe.

Dramatic breakthroughs occurred in the 1970's - in particular, at the first Mesa Redonda de Palenque, a scholarly conference organized by Merle Greene Robertson at the Classic Maya site of Palenque held in December, 1973. A working group was led by Linda Schele, an art historian and epigrapher at the University of Texas at Austin, which included Floyd Lounsbury, a linguist from Yale, and Peter Mathews, then an undergraduate student of David Kelley's at the University of Calgary (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. By identifying a sign as an important royal title (now read as the recurring name k'inich), 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 at an exponential pace, not only in the decipherment of the Maya glyphs, but also towards the construction of a new, historically-based understanding of Maya civilization. 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 " A New Interpretation of Maya Art". It was organized by InterCultura and the Kimbell Art Museum and curated by Schele and Yale art historian Mary Miller. This exhibition and 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 so forth. 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, a final counter-assault was launched by supporters who were still resisting the modern decipherment interpretation. This occurred at a conference at Dumbarton Oaks. 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 us only about the concerns and beliefs of the society's elite, and not about the ordinary Maya. Michael Coe in opposition to this idea 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).

Progress in decipherment continues at a rapid pace today, and it is generally agreed by scholars that over 90 percent of the Maya texts can now be read with reasonable accuracy. As of 2004, at least one phonetic glyph was known for each of the syllables marked in in this chart:

{| class=wikitable

! !!(’)!!b!!ch!!ch’!!h!!j!!k!!k’!!l!!m!!n!!p!!p’!!s!!t!!t’!!tz!!tz’!!w!!x!!y a•••••••••••• •• ••••• e••• ••••••• • • i••• •••••••• •• ••••• o•••••••••••• • ••• u••• •••••••• ••••• •

Current leaders in the field of interpreting Maya culture and Maya decipherment include many archaeologists, epigraphers, linguists, and art historians. Key names working at present are:

David Friedel at SMU,
David Stuart at the University of Texas,
Nicolai Grube in Hamburg,
William Fash at Harvard,
Diane Chase and Arlan Chase at the University of Central Florida,
Steven Houston at Brown University,
Arthur Demarest at Vanderbilt,
Robert Sharer at the University of Pennsylvania,
William Sanders of Pennsylvania State University,
Marc Zender of Harvard University
linguists Nicholas Hopkins and Katherine Josserand,

and many others, including a growing number of scholars in Latin America, in the nations of the Maya area.

References

External links

Maya writing | Mesoamerican writing systems | Hieroglyphs

Maya-Schrift | Écriture maya | マヤ文字 | Maya-hieroglyffar

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