The Mayan script is one of five original writing systems, which included the Sumerian cuneiform (the very first dating to 3500 BCE), closely followed by Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Indus script (still undeciphered and debated only to be a set of symbols, not writing), and Chinese characters (first engraved on animal bones as divine oracles for the Shang dynasty in 1200 BCE).
Sumerian Cuneiform
Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Indus / Harappan
Chinese Oracle
Maya Script
Phoenician Alphabet
But the Mayan script, which first appeared around 300 BCE and contains over 800 glyphs, was more than just a writing system, it was an art form. In fact, the Mayan word for painter and writer is the same – ahts’ib. Scribes were free to choose different glyphs for the same syllable, often writing a word differently within the same body of text. A single word can contain several glyphs incorporated in a number of ways. It would take hundreds of historians, archeologists, anthropologists, epigraphers, cryptologists and artists several centuries and the world over to decipher. Although no longer in use, it’s still considered the most elaborate and elegant written language in the world.
Conservation and Destruction
Dresden Codex
Although the Mayan culture still survives, the empire collapsed long before the Spanish set foot on the New World. When Hernán Cortéz arrived in the Yucatán Peninsula, then a Mayan territory, in 1519, he sent one-fifth of his bounty back to Spain for the royal treasury. The “Royal Fifth” was a decree that reserved 20% of all treasure and commodities acquired by any subject for the monarchy. Cortéz sent several cloth books he regarded with little value, along with men and women (commodities included slaves) he claimed he saved from captivity and ritual sacrifice.
The drawings were mislabeled as art, Arabic or Egyptian. Out of innumerable books, few survived. In 1739, the Royal Library in Dresden purchased a rare and strange book from a private collection in Vienna. It would become known as the Dresden Codex.
Dresden Codex
The Maya invented paper out of tree bark around 300 CE. Their books were fold-out accordion style, painted on both sides with glyphs and images. Historical records show that up to 480,000 pieces of paper were produced in Mesoamerica per year. But only about 15 surviving books are legible, including four Mayan codices. The Dresden Codex has 350 unique glyphs.
De Landa’s Auto-da-fé
Soon after Cortéz’s arrival, Franciscan friars were sent to the New World to convert the natives to Christianity. In 1549, Father Diego de Landa arrived in the Yucatán. In his quest to convert the indigenous Maya, he studied their customs, language and writing, ordering a local scribe to translate the Mayan glyphs into the alphabet. But in his religious zeal, he ordered an inquisition, burning books and people in an infamous auto-da-fé (act of faith) to eradicate idol worship. The Maya were forced to give up their writing system and learn the alphabet instead. By the 1600s, the Mayan script had all but died – there was no one left who could read or write it.
Komkom Vase
Recovered in Belize, this vase has a dedication date of 812 and one of the longest Maya texts - with 202 glyphs - describing a king and a city under attack. Although few books survived, the Maya kept meticulous historical accounts on engravings, paintings and ceramics.
Because he didn’t seek prior approval, he was called back to Spain to stand trial for an illegal inquisition. While awaiting trial, he went over his notes and published Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, a thorough documentation of what he learned about Mayan religion, customs, speech and writing, including the translated alphabet.
The First Illustrations
As news of vast jungle ruins began circulating in Europe, explorers came to investigate. Starting in 1785, with the rediscovery of Palenque, they brought back illustrations of the structures and inscriptions they found. The Maya were prolific painter-writers, and engravings covered countless stelae, lintels and temple walls on the sites. But the inscriptions were intricate and unfamiliar, and believing these were lost cities of the Babylonians or Hindus, the explorers’ illustrations were inaccurate, depicting glyphs of elephants nonexistent in the New World.
Numbers Deciphered
In 1810, German geographer Alexander von Humboldt traveled through the Americas and published an atlas including five pages of the Dresden Codex. The pages, which tracked the movement of Venus in the night sky, were out of order, but they were the first accurate reproductions of Mayan glyphs. A French polymath, Constantine Rafinesque, deciphered the dots and lines as a number system. And despite the few sketchy illustrations of the Mayan sites he’s come across, he believed the engravings represented the same written language as the codex.
Maya Numbers
A dot equals 1, a line equals 5, and a shell/flower is zero. They used a base-20 counting system and could manipulate large numbers with just these three signs. Although Babylonian texts were the first to use zero, they didn't use it as clearly, sometimes leaving a blank space instead of using a symbol. Most of Europe also omitted zero from mathematics until the late 16th century, thinking it was the sign of the devil - this is part of why friars burned Mayan books.
In 1841 and 1843, two travel books were published. They included explorer Frederick Catherwood’s drawings, which were done using a camera lucida – an optical device that superimposed an image of the subject on paper so the artist could trace it. They were the most accurate representations of the stela glyphs to date and included illustrations from his travels to Tulum, Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Palenque and Copán. He affirmed that they all shared the same writing system as the Dresden Codex, dispelling any notion that these were anything other than Mayan cities.
The Mayan Calendar
Still, it wouldn’t be until 1880, when a librarian in Dresden, Ernst Förstemann, came across the codex that the next breakthrough was achieved. Following Rafinesque’s footsteps, he deciphered the grouped numbers in the codex as dates, written in a base system of twenty. He then referred to de Landa’s Relación, which listed the glyphs for the months and days of the Mayan calendar.
Mayan Calendar
The Tzolk'in is a sacred 260-day calendar consisting of 20 unique days combined with 13 numbers that was used throughout Mesoamerica. The Haab was the Mayan 365-day solar calendar for agriculture and civil purposes. The two calendars realign every 52 years. In addition, the Maya used the Long Count calendar to mark events in their inscriptions. It's a linear day count that starts from the Mayan date of creation - August 11, 3114 BCE on the Gregorian calendar.
He identified parts of the codex relating to astronomy. One section, the Venus Table, is a precise calculation of the movement of Venus in a 584-day cycle as seen from Earth. It was used to plan for warfare. While the ancient Greeks and Egyptians mistook the morning and evening appearances of Venus as two different stars, the Maya tracked its single cycle over 400 years with an error of only two hours. Another section, the Lunar Series of the codex, recorded and predicted solar eclipses over 32 years, accurate to within seven minutes. To the Maya, eclipses signaled calamity.
Venus Pages
By tracking the movement of Venus, the Maya were able to correct for the extra .25 day in a solar year. The Haab calendar is based on a hyper-precise calculation of 365.242 days. The seated gods under the dates represent when they had to plant, harvest, hunt or go to war.
He also identified a historical date in the Venus Table that appears in numerous inscriptions throughout the Mayan world. It is retroactive and represents the Mayan date of creation. In 1905, journalist Joseph Goodman published a correlation between Mayan dates and the Gregorian calendar in American Anthropologist. Archeologists could then put together a chronology of Mayan history and civilization using the dates on the monuments and stelae.
Decipherment and Archeology
In 1882, an American scholar, Cyrus Thomas, studying photographs of Palenque published by the Smithsonian Institute established that the correct reading of Maya glyphs was left to right, top to bottom, in pairs of two. Although incremental discoveries were being made, the ability to read the glyphs still eluded everyone.
Between 1889 and 1902, British archeologist Alfred Maudslay published the multivolume Biologica Centrali-Americana. It was the first to include large-scale and complete sets of Mayan texts. Epigraphers finally had access to a broader corpus for translation. Maudslay’s use of plaster casts, a camera and glass-plate negatives developed onsite resulted in incredibly accurate representations and 3-D models – techniques that would be adopted for future archeological surveys.
Quiriguá Monument
In 1883, Maudslay returned to Quiriguá with equipment to fully survey and photograph the site. He made moulds of the monuments, including this one, which were shipped to London. They were used for reproductions, often by rubbing charcoal or tracing them onto paper to achieve exact replicas of the glyphs. This photograph was also taken by him, using an immense wet-plate camera for higher resolution.
The Maya Research Program
When the newly-established Carnegie Institute invited scholars to submit proposals for anthropological research, they chose to sponsor epigrapher Sylvanus Morley’s comprehensive plan to excavate ancient Mayan cities. Beginning in 1915, he embarked on several large-scale archeological projects, including Copán, Chichén Itzá and Uaxactun. In 1925, Maya academic J. Eric Thompson joined his team. Together, they chronicled the history of Mayan cities from Mexico to Honduras, recording the dates on all the inscriptions they found.
Thompson also conducted extensive ethnographic research on the Maya people and became the foremost expert in Mayan iconography and archeology. He cataloged the glyphs, assigning succeeding numbers to over 800 signs. But unable to decipher them, he concluded that other than numbers and calendrical dates, the rest of the glyphs were only religious and astronomical symbols, not a writing system.
Cancuén, Seated Ruler
Thompson initially believed these figures were gods and divine beings and the glyphs were nothing more than mystical symbols. Because only the dates could be translated, he thought the Maya were ruled by astronomer priests and were a peaceful people.
Dynastic Rule and Emblem Glyphs
Subsequent research would disprove this. Beginning in 1936, architect Tatiana Proskouriakoff took part in archeological expeditions as a surveyor. She drew 3-dimensional reconstructions of the ruins in Piedras Negras, Copán, Chichén Itzá and Mayapán. At the Carnegie Institute and the Peabody Museum, she was tasked with piecing together artifacts and arranging them chronologically. She realized that in Piedras Negras, a new stela was erected in front of a temple every five years, according to their dedication dates.
She studied other dates on the stelae with the glyphs paired with them, and a pattern emerged coinciding with the possible lengths of human lives. She knew these had to be the glyphs for birth, ascension to the throne, and death. She chronicled the lives of seven kings, including their families and times of war, and published her discoveries in 1960. It was the first time real-life historical events were deciphered in the glyphs, disproving Thompson’s theory they were inanimate symbols.
Piedras Negras, A Feast for the King
The monument depicts a king hosting visitors from a city-ally. The glyph would later be deciphered and describes a dynastic succession, political fortunes and diplomatic relations between two Mayan cities.
At the same time, Proskouriakoff’s friend and colleague, German scholar Heinrich Berlin, was conducting research on numerous sites. He isolated a set of glyphs found in each site with similar characteristics. The prefixes were always the same, but the main component varied from city to city. He called them emblem glyphs and concluded they represented the names of each city. He identified the emblem glyphs for eight Mayan sites – Palenque, Piedras Negras, Tikal, Copán, Quiriguá, Naranjo, Yaxchilán and El Ciebal. Different cities were often mentioned in the same body of texts, possibly representing alliances, war, trade and other inter-city relations. Again, the glyphs proved to be a uniform system representing concrete words.
Breaking the Mayan Code
Meanwhile, trapped in the iron curtain of the Soviet Union, a brilliant linguist was also working on the Mayan script. In 1945, while fighting with the Red Army during WWII, Yuri Knorosov had to evacuate books from the Prussian Library in Berlin. Among them were copies of the Dresden Codex and Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. He had studied several written languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Coptic and Egyptian hieroglyphs. When he returned to university after the war, he learned Spanish, wrote his doctoral dissertation on de Landa’s studies on the Maya, and took a post at Leningrad’s Institute of Ethnology. In a small room, geographically and politically isolated from any Mayan ruins, he set to decipher their language.
Scholars had concluded the Mayan script was logographic, like the Chinese, which has thousands of signs for thousands of words. But the Mayan script only had 800 glyphs, so they figured it was a very limited number of signs that stood for only some of their words. Knorosov believed they were wrong, and that the Mayan script may be a combination of syllabary and logographs.
De Landa Alphabet
Alphabets have around 20-30 signs representing simple sounds. A syllabary represents consonant-vowel syllables and usually has 50-100 signs, such as the simplified Japanese katakana. A logograph has thousands of signs, each for a different word. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs had about 700, and they were for a combination of sounds, ideas and objects. Even our writing system is a combination - the numbers we use (1, 2, 3..) are logographic - a sign stands for a whole word.
Going back to Relación, he solved de Landa’s mistake. While asking the scribe to translate the alphabet into Maya, de Landa took the glyphs to represent letters. But epigraphers who’ve tried to use them found the translations never made sense and were, therefore, useless. Knorosov realized the scribe translated the alphabet into a syllabary or the sounds he was hearing, not the letters de Landa was saying. Knorosov used de Landa’s “Mayan alphabet” to analyze the Dresden Codex, translating glyphs into syllables using a Yucatec Maya dictionary. The theory that the glyphs corresponded to modern spoken Maya had long been disregarded, but Knorosov believed he was on the right path.
In 1952, he published his findings in a 19-page article in Sovietskaya Etnografiya. The Mayan texts he had access to were limited, and because many glyphs are both logograms and syllabic signs, they can be interpreted differently. Some Western scholars felt his work was full of mistakes and refuted it immediately. Thompson, especially, held onto his view that the Mayan glyphs did not represent a uniform writing system. While Knorosov found a few supporters in the West, Thompson still dominated the field of Mayan studies, and he remained largely unchallenged.
Mesa Redonda de Palenque
For the next two decades, epigraphers continued their separate, conflicting studies. This changed with the Palenque Round Table, spearheaded by Merle Robertson, an art teacher from Berkeley who took student groups to Mayan sites in the summer. In 1973, she invited “Mayanists,” including art historians, archeologists, astronomers, epigraphers, professors, students and mere enthusiasts, to a conference in Palenque. Talented artists were especially needed to draw the glyphs accurately. Representatives from 14 universities came. It was a weeklong meeting, and the audience continued to grow, with guests and tour guides from all over Mexico and Central America coming by the day.
A young Canadian student, Peter Matthews, had studied Knorosov’s theory and was paired to work with an art historian, Linda Schele. Matthews had transcribed every inscription he found in Palenque, and they were tasked with assembling a dynastic history. They used Berlin’s previous analysis, which deciphered a monument containing the city’s emblem glyph and the dates of the ascension of its kings. However, the glyphs in between, which he assumed were the names of kings, were still undeciphered.
Tablet of the 96 Glyphs
In 1968, Berlin identified the dates, the emblem glyphs, a symbol he figured meant a seated king, and a "sun" sign he figured meant the title "king" or "lord." There were four rulers on the tablet.
Assuming the seated glyph meant the title of “king,” they looked for it in all the inscriptions in Palenque, knowing that the glyph next to it must be the specific name of a king. They were able to trace a 200-year dynastic rule and the exact dates of each reign by matching the glyphs they knew. For the names, they used whatever the symbols resembled. In the Temple of Inscriptions, they found newly deciphered glyphs for “Lord Shield” and realized that the jade-covered crypt discovered underneath in 1952 by Mexican archeologist Alberto Ruz was that of the king. It was the first time the glyphs could be attributed to human remains.
But what was more revelatory came from a local guide, Moisés Morales, who insisted that the English names be translated into Maya. Morales was fluent in four languages and knew the subtle inflections of modern Mayan, which is associated with over 30 dialects. “Shield” was eventually translated into Pakal. They found the name spelled with different combinations of glyphs, but they found one variation that seemed to coincide with Knorosov’s translations for the pa, ka and la glyphs.
Lord Pakal’s Sarcophagus
Various "spellings" of Pakal were found in Palenque, including a solitary glyph that looked like a shield (a logogram), and a glyph combination that spelled pa+ka+la (a syllabic). Epigraphers began to realize that the same word could be written in different ways.
Subsequent round tables followed. The invention of the Xerox machine helped. Drawings of glyphs could be widely reproduced and shared. Schele invited anyone who wanted to participate and gather at offsite meetings. Master and amateur analysts cut the glyphs and arranged them horizontally to make them easier to follow. Although they still could not be deciphered, stories about cities, kings, gods and wars emerged.
While dynastic histories, dates and names of cities were recognizable, the remaining glyphs remained a mystery. Epigraphers were stuck. With the Mayan spoken language, a complete written syllabary needed at least 80 glyphs. But since Knorosov’s translations were finally accepted as correct, only 30 glyphs had been identified by the 1980s.
Breaking the Code Part II
The son of a National Geographic archeologist, David Stuart was analyzing the Mayan glyphs since he was eight when his father brought him to the ruins of Cobá. By age ten, he could recognize and name some glyphs and began attending the Round Tables in Palenque, mentored by Schele.
In 1983, he flew to Guatemala, again with his father and National Geographic, to analyze a cave whose walls were painted with Mayan glyphs. The stories were from well-known Mayan mythology, which helped give the glyphs context. There was one he had never seen before but deciphered as the syllable xa, which he had seen represented by another glyph. Returning to de Landa’s alphabet, he also realized the u, represented by a bracket symbol, was written with different glyphs in other contexts. Epigraphers now knew that the glyphs were interchangeable and scrambled to classify and decipher them.
Partial Mayan Syllabary
Epigraphers have found some syllables written in over a dozen different ways, incorporated together in even more ways. There are hundreds of syllabic glyphs that form the spoken Mayan language, while there are also hundreds of glyphs used as logograms, each one representing an entire word. The scribes were free to use and combine them however they chose. A simplified Mayan syllabary contains 200-300 of the most commonly used glyphs.
Mayan History
The floodgates of decipherment broke open. It broke the misconception that the Maya were peaceful people, telling just the opposite story. There were warring cities constantly under attack. Captives were needed for ritual sacrifice, and nothing pleased their gods more than noble blood.
The Lords of Copán
Copán ruled over a neighboring city-state, the smaller Quiriguá. But the glyphs depict that on May 3, 738, the tables were turned, and one of Copán's most distinguished kings, Lord K'awiil, was captured and beheaded. Constant warfare most likely contributed to the fall of the empire.
The decipherment also tells the story of those who created the glyphs – the scribes themselves. In 1966, photographer Justin Kerr began to systematically reproduce the glyphic paintings found on ceramics and other artifacts on photographs that could be rolled out horizontally. The collection, which contains six volumes, over 1,000 roll-out images, and a 3,500 Maya Vase Database, is the largest body of Mayan texts available.
They reveal many depictions of scribes and their workshops – artists who developed unique and intricate styles, competing for the most elegant designs of glyphs and other symbols. This explains why the writing was so elaborate, making glyphs hard to classify. Scribes were held in such high regard that they lived in palaces and were seated on thrones, just like kings.
Copán Hieroglyphic Stairway
When this was first discovered in 1885, only the first 15 steps were intact. The rest were reassembled out of order. After decipherment, only a 3D model was made to put it in the correct reading order, fearing that another reconstruction will further damage the blocks. With over 2,200 glyphs, this is the longest Mayan text known and depict the story of Copán's kings from the 5th to the 8th centuries. Nearby is the Palace of the Scribes, but it sits mostly in ruins among the residential court.
Most importantly, the breaking of the Mayan code has given an entire history back to its descendants. The story of one of the most advanced civilizations in the ancient world was finally added to school curriculums, and the glyphs are now taught so that they can be read once more.
