Maya script (Mayan hieroglyphic writing)

Maya script is a system of writing used by the Maya civilization, one of the most accomplished societies of ancient Mesoamerica, a region that encompasses modern Mexico and Central America. Maya writing is an example of a hieroglyphic script, a system that uses pictorial symbols to represent words, sounds, syllables, or ideas. The system is believed to have originated about 300 BCE and was used up until the sixteenth century CE, when the already declining civilization fell victim to Spanish invaders. The translation of Maya writing was considered lost for centuries until modern researchers deciphered its meaning in the twentieth century.

Brief History

The Maya civilization has its roots in the culture of the Olmecs, a people who settled in the Gulf of Mexico region about 1800 to 1500 BCE and built large cities of stone and brick. It was the Olmecs who developed the first writing system in Mesoamerica about 700 to 500 BCE. The Maya culture grew out of the Olmecs and their successors and reached its peak between 250 and 900 CE. During this time, the Maya made notable achievements in architecture, mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, and art. They built spectacular temples, palaces, and great cities, some of which housed more than fifty thousand people.

By the eighth and ninth centuries, however, the Maya civilization mysteriously collapsed as many of their once-thriving cities were abandoned. Modern researchers are unsure of the exact cause of the decline but suspect it could have been warfare, drought, famine, or disease. The Maya culture lasted for the next few centuries in a diminished capacity. While some Maya continued to occupy a few cities in the highlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, most had adopted a rural agricultural existence by the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early sixteenth century. The Spanish soldiers subdued Maya lands, while European diseases to which the Maya had no resistance decimated the population. It is estimated that about 90 percent of the Maya population died in the years after the Spanish arrived.

Overview

At the height of their civilization, the Maya had developed the most sophisticated written language in the Americas. The first evidence of early Maya writing dates to about 300 BCE and is believed to have been influenced by the Olmec system. Knowledge of Maya writing was a closely guarded secret of the elite, who viewed reading and writing as a way to converse with the gods. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Maya script was suppressed by Christian missionaries who came to convert the indigenous people. Many of the bark-paper books of the Maya were burned as heretical, with only four pre-contact works known to have survived to present day. These works—the Madrid Codex, Dresden Codex, Paris Codex, and Grolier Codex—are named for the cities or libraries where they reside and are mostly collections of astronomical observations and prophecies.

In an ironic twist, Diego de Landa, a Spanish bishop responsible for ordering the destruction of thousands of Maya books, is also credited with preserving the language for future generations. In 1566, de Landa recorded twenty-seven Maya characters with what he thought were their corresponding Spanish translations. De Landa wrongly assumed that Maya characters represented sounds, as does the Latin alphabet. Using de Landa's alphabet and the surviving Maya books, researchers began working on translating the script in the 1830s but made only sporadic success for more than a century. In the 1950s, a Russian linguist discovered that the writing was a combination of symbols representing phonetic sounds, whole words, and ideas. For example, the spoken Maya word for "west" is chik'in. The hieroglyphic character for the word contains a symbol for the "sun," or k'in, and a partially closed hand representing "completion," or chi. Taken together, the symbol roughly translates as the place of the setting sun.

As other researchers also began studying Maya writing, a better idea of the language started to take shape. Carved hieroglyphs at Maya ruins in Mexico and Guatemala were discovered to be historical accounts of the linage of rulers. Using this historical record, researchers were able to add some pieces to the translation puzzle. Another breakthrough was accomplished in the 1980s when it was determined that many Maya words could be written in multiple ways. The word jaguar, for instance, could be written as a single symbol, two separate symbols representing the two syllables, or a combination of the two. By the twenty-first century, about 80 to 85 percent of Maya hieroglyphic writing was able to be understood.

The Maya writing system was a collection of more than eight hundred pictorial symbols called glyphs. Of these glyphs, more than five hundred represented words, one hundred and fifty represented syllables, and about one hundred represented place names and the names of gods. Some estimates place the number of Maya glyphs at more than one thousand, but many of these symbols were repetitive and may have only been used for brief periods of time. Only about three hundred to five hundred Maya glyphs were commonly used. In some cases, where the glyph symbol could be read in more than one way, the Maya script used phonetic symbols attached to the main character that changed the meaning of the glyph.

The glyphs were arranged in the form of a cartouche, a structure similar to a sentence in the English language. Maya cartouches could consist of anywhere from three or four glyphs to upwards of fifty. The script was usually written in two paired vertical columns and read from left to right and from top to bottom. Word order in Maya hieroglyphic text typically used a verb-object-subject pattern; however, the object was often missing. Since much of the Maya writing concerned historical records, a date was often inserted at the beginning of phrase or clauses. These dates accounted for a large part of the hieroglyphic symbols in a cartouche.

Bibliography

Ager, Simon. "Mayan Script." Omniglot the Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages, www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.

Chaddha, Rima. "Cracking the Maya Code: Time Line of Decipherment." PBS.org, 2008, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/time-nf.html. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.

Coe, Michael D. Breaking the Maya Code. Thames & Hudson, 2012.

"The Dresden Codex." World Digital Library, www.wdl.org/en/item/11621/. Accessed 27 Oct. 2016.

Kettunen, Harri, and Christophe Helmke. "Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs." Mesoweb, 2008, www.mesoweb.com/resources/handbook/WH2008.pdf. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.

"Maya." History.com, www.history.com/topics/maya. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.

"Maya Civilization." Canadian Museum of History, www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/maya/mmc04eng.shtml. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.

Sharer, Robert J., and Loa P. Traxler. The Ancient Maya. Stanford University Press, 2006.