Mayan Writing: A history, language and culture written in stone
Mayan hieroglyphic writing evolved from the jungles and highlands of Mesoamerica to become one of the most flexible writing systems in the Americas. Sometime around the birth of Jesus Christ, the Maya began writing and painting with pictures or "glyphs," beginning to codify their meaning while experimenting with the signs. The glyphs began to appear on monuments around 250 A.D., the beginning of the Classic Mayan period. Scribes refined the innovative hieroglyphic text to record their people’s history, religious rituals and the births, achievements and deaths of Mayan nobility.
Mayan hieroglyphs are preserved throughout Guatemala, Belize, Southern Mexico and Northern Honduras on approximately 15,000 stelae, lintels, zoomorphs, hieroglyphic staircases, pottery and wall hangings. They also appear in four known codices, whose pages are made of hammered bark, and on the walls of caves, entrances to Xibalba, the underworld in Mayan mythology.
Kings used the renowned 260-day, Mayan calendar to name heirs, to predict the future and to attempt to direct the course of history. They relied on the calendar to decide when to start wars, when to begin long-distance expeditions, to determine whether or not certain people should marry and the like.
To priests the duty fell of keeping the books and the calendar, as well as overseeing festivals, conducting baptisms and officiating at human and animal sacrifices.
Similar to the artistry inherent in Chinese characters, the Mayan script served aesthetic and practical concerns, often employing calligraphic elements. Unlike alphabetic writing systems in which a single symbol generally represents a single sound, the Mayans used a combination of logographic and syllabic glyphs, including phonetic markers to represent their morphologically complex language. A logogram is a picture or glyph representing a morpheme (part of a word, such as sad and ly from the word "sadly") or, rarely, all of a word. A syllabic script is generally comprised of consonant-vowel combinations (CV), such as "ca," "la," or "bo." The Mayans also developed phonetic markers to clue the reader how to read glyphs that might otherwise be confusing. In some cases, a single glyph represented one thought. In others, the Mayans used two glyphs instead of one to say the same thing. The scribes employed great variability in their writing, sometimes creating as many as five variations on a single glyph.
Archaeologists have recently discovered Maya "houses of writing or sculpture" at Aguateca, Guatemala and a "scribe’s house" at Copan, Honduras with scribal equipment – implements for grinding pigment, hammering bark and storing ink in sectioned conch shells.
But few Mayans were literate. Nobles, priests and scribes appear to have restricted knowledge of the writing system to themselves. Their children learned to read and write in elite schools that excluded the lower classes. In the case of the Yucatec Maya in what is Southern Mexico today, the elite class maintained an esoteric language, Zuyua, which only they could speak. As such, it worked to exclude and disqualify those who were not true nobles. For reasons still unknown to Mayan experts, the Classic Maya period ended by about 900 A.D., and production of new glyphic monuments ceased.
Spanish conquest & loss of knowledge
Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado reached Guatemala in 1524 and promptly set about bringing the Mayans into submission. His efforts helped to plunge what knowledge remained of the Mayan script into outer darkness. The Spanish Bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa, regarded Mayan religious books as "words from the devil." As such, he burned 27 Mayan books at Mani, Yucatán in 1562. The Spaniards killed many who could read the codices.
The Maya lamented the loss. They are recorded as having said, "There is no great teaching. Heaven and earth are truly lost to them; they have lost all shame. Then, the territorial rulers of the towns, … the prophets of the towns, the priests of the Maya are hanged. Understanding is lost; wisdom is lost."
Since so few Mayans could read their language, De Landa’s bonfire and brutality proved effective. But he ultimately helped scientists revive knowledge of the script by writing down a Maya "alphabet," crudely sketching Mayan glyphs beside the Spanish alphabet – a Rosetta Stone of sorts. For centuries, however, knowledge of the Mayan writing system virtually disappeared. The stele, codices, hieroglyphic staircases and lintels fell silent.
Decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphs
Despite success interpreting the highly accurate Mayan calendar, scholars made few advances in deciphering Mayan hieroglyphic writing until the 20th century. Even when efforts at decipherment began in earnest, the Maya script confounded archaeologists and linguists for more than a century. Influential Mayanists held up the decipherment, especially Sir Eric Thompson, who rejected the notion that the hieroglyphs actually represented language. But in the second half of the 20th century, Russian Mayanist Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov argued that the roughly 1,000 glyphs represented a language system similar to other hieroglyphic writing systems such as Chinese, Sumerian and Egyptian. This school of thought eventually proved true, and the dam holding back decipherment broke.
A major advance occurred one day in August 1973 at Palenque, Mexico, according to Michael D. Coe, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University. At Palenque, a small group of collaborating linguists and Mayanist scholars used their familiarity of the local Mayan ruins, knowledge of the glyphs and familiarity with the Mayan Yucatec language to "read" the life history of six successive kings from Palenque’s stones. Finally, the stones had regained their voices and began to speak again. "What they came up with was nothing less than the history of the Palenque from the onset of the Late Classic period, at the beginning of the seventh century, through the city’s demise – the span covering almost all of its architectural and artistic glories. History had been made before our very eyes," writes Coe in "Breaking the Maya Code." Eventually, scores of other Mayanists built on the work of Knorosov and the Palenque discoverers to prove the Mayans actually did write down their language.
Experts continue to discover more Mayan texts today from various sources, and to unravel their meaning glyph by glyph. "Complete decipherment is unlikely, given our tattered, if slowly expanding, epigraphic record, and scholars must, for reasons of truth in advertising, curb triumphalist declarations about the state of glyphic readings," writes Stephen Houston, Anthropology professor at Brigham Young University.(1)
Mayan writing today
Unlike the Chinese who have preserved their logographic writing system, Mayan glyphs are no longer used to represent the modern Mayan tongues. Linguists and Bible translators today use an alphabet based on the Roman script to represent Mayan languages. The texts rely on markers to indicate glottalization and other features of the languages.
Formal instruction in reading and writing Guatemala’s Mayan languages remains inconsistent and underdeveloped. Some instruction is available at a basic level, but schools quickly switch to Spanish for learning in higher concepts and literature. Virtually all of the country’s mass-produced newspapers and road signs are published in Spanish. Likewise, government bureaucracies, educators and businesses print all their documents only in Spanish.
Like their ancestors, few modern Mayans can read and write in their own language. The Mayan languages are mostly confined to oral use in every day life. As such, Scriptures in audio and video formats remain vital means of communicating the truth of God’s word to Guatemala’s more than 6 million indigenous Mayans.
- (1) Houston, Stephen D., “Into the Minds of Ancients: Advances in Maya Glyph Studies,” Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2000.
For further reading:
Coe, Michael D., 1992, Breaking the Maya Code, 304 pages, Thames & Hudson Inc., (revised 1999).
1966, The Maya, London: Thames & Hudson (4th edition 1987.)
Freidel, David and Linda Schele and Joy Parker, 1993, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path, New York: Quill William & Morrow, 543 pages.