Maya Writing

by David Stuart and Stephen D. Houston

from: Scientific American August 1989

Prehistory is the study of peoples without writing, whereas history is the study of people who possess written texts. Yet, although the Maya had the most highly developed system of writing in pre-Columbian America, until recently they were studied largely as a prehistoric people. The reason was simple: their writing could not be read. Within the past decade all that has changed. Building on critical insights into the structure and content of Maya writing put forward in the 1950's, a fairly small group of scholars, including the two of us, has puzzled out a sizable fraction of the known writings of the Maya. These writings, inscribed on stone monuments or painted on ceramic vessels, have begun to augment the picture of Maya society that was derived from the patient work of excavation.

Some of the new findings confirm that rites of personal bloodletting, carried out by a noble elite, had an important role in Maya society. Less dramatic but perhaps more significant is what the inscriptions tell us about politics and geography. Most of the inscriptions are, after all, chronicles of specific rulers, marking their births, ascensions, rituals, conquests and deaths. Through careful study of these writings scholars are beginning to get a sense of the volatility of Maya politics, in which shifting alliances and wars among city-states led to rapid changes in the geopolitical landscape. This emerging picture is among the first fruits of a decipherment that, after a century of frustration, is bringing the Maya into history.

Set in the tropical region defined by what is now eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and the western parts of Honduras and El Salvador, Maya civilization escaped thorough archaeological study until the beginning of the 20th century. Since then surveys and excavations have shown that by about 1500 B.C. people who probably spoke an ancestral form of Mayan had settled in the forested lowlands. For a thousand years the forest villages flourished largely unchanged. By about 250 B.C., however, fundamental changes were taking place in social life and political structure. The next two or three centuries witnessed the rise of powerful city-states whose lords, as the earliest hieroglyphic texts indicate, claimed for themselves a divine role on earth.

The glyphic system in which these early texts (and the subsequent ones) were written was not invented by the Maya. On the contrary, it seems they built on an ancient form that had been in use for centuries among advanced cultures to the west. Writing was present in what is now the state of Oaxaca by about 700 B.C., as is shown by the discovery there of a monument inscribed with early glyphs. A related system was developed in the modern state of Veracruz, as was demonstrated by the dramatic recent discovery of a stone monument inscribed with 420 glyphs at a site called La Mojarra. Although much of the text cannot be deciphered, two dates on it clearly correspond to A.D. 143 and 156. The writing on the La Mojarra stone may share antecedents with the earliest Maya hieroglyphs, dating from the second century A.D.

Whatever the precise origins of Maya writing, by the beginning of the Classic period of Maya culture in about A.D. 250 hieroglyphs were in use at hundreds of sites. During the Classic period, which lasted until A.D. 900 and represents the zenith of Maya culture, countless stone monuments had hieroglyphic signs carved on their surfaces. Writing also appeared in books made of bark paper and covered with jaguar skin, on painted and molded ceramics and on other portable objects. The Maya polities, in which such writings were produced, were generally small and possibly weak in infrastructure. Such infrastructural weakness may have contributed to the sudden collapse of Classic Maya society that occurred in about A.D. 900 (although the cause is still being debated by scholars).

In the Postclassic period that followed the collapse, writing was still used on some stone monuments and architecture and in bark-paper books, of which only four survive. Indeed, in the last unconquered Maya enclave (in northern Guatemala), writing probably continued until the 17th century. Today, although the written tradition has been lost, four million speakers of two dozen Maya languages still inhabit the Maya homeland. Their presence has been a boon for scholars studying Maya writing, because Colonial and modern dictionaries and studies by linguists have provided a way to check the decipherment as it proceeds, an advantage often denied those who seek to puzzle out ancient scripts.

The efforts at deciphering Maya writing actually began soon after the Spanish conquest of 1520. Indeed, the first students of Maya hieroglyphs were Spanish friars who were attempting to convert the Maya to Christianity. The most famous of these was Diego de Landa, third bishop of Yucatan, who in 1566 compiled a treatise called Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan (roughly, "An account of the Things of Yucatan"). In that work Landa included a brief summary of his understanding of Maya writing. In his view the glyphic signs were letters of an alphabet comparable to that of the Indo-European languages. He offered sketches of signs labeled A, B, C and so on. Unfortunately, what Landa had failed to perceive is that the Maya signs are anything but alphabetic. In any event, his treatise lay undiscovered by scholars for three centuries after it was written.

The first great scholarly effort at deciphering Maya writing was carried out by Ernst Forstemann royal librarian at Dresden. In 1880 Forstemann began studying the hieroglyphs in the codices (the surviving bark-paper books, the most famous of which, the Dresden Codex, was close at hand) and the few inscribed stone monuments then known. Within 14 years Forstemann had unraveled the complex workings of the Maya calendar. He showed that the calendar is based on paired cycles of 260 and 365 days and that a date is generally expressed by noting its position in both the 260 and the 365-day cycle. Since that combination repeats itself every 52 years, the Maya chroniclers also recorded a date's position in a more precise "long count," a linear reckoning whose starting point is the year 3114 B.C.

Through the work of Forstemann and others, such as the American Joseph Goodman (who in 1905 proposed the correlation between the Maya and Christian calendars that is still widely accepted), it became clear quite early that the reckoning of time was of great importance to the Maya scribes. The notation of time, however, has many possible uses including history, religion and myth and it was not clear to scholars what was included in the noncalendrical portions of the Maya inscriptions.

A first step toward understanding the noncalendrical inscriptions was made by another German scholar, Paul Schellhas, who identified many Maya deities and their names in the codices. Schellhas's work on the codices raised the possibility that the inscriptions might be largely religious or mythical in character, and this remained the view of many scholars well into the 1960's. As Maya archaeology expanded in the early decades of the 20th century, many new texts were discovered on stone and pottery, providing material for testing this hypothesis. Unfortunately, in spite of significant efforts by the leading epigraphers of the day - Sylvanus G. Morley and Sir J. Eric S. Thompson - little headway was made with the noncalendrical texts.

Curiously, none of the early attempts at decipherment made much use of Landa's intriguing "alphabet" after it was rediscovered in the 1860's. Perhaps the main reason for the lack of scholarly interest was that it seemed clear that at least some of the Maya glyphs were logographs: signs standing for entire words. For example, one of the 20-day "months" in the 365-day cycle is named for the bat, and the sign for the name of the month depicts a bat. Where Landa saw letters, early epigraphers saw whole words. As a result Landa's work languished.

Ironically, the first breakthrough in understanding the formal aspects of Maya writing was made by a young Soviet scholar who went back to Landa and took his work quite seriously. Yuri Knorozov of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in Leningrad accepted the conclusion that Landa's list was not an alphabet. But he did not reject it entirely for that reason. Instead Knorozov concluded that what had happened to Landa in making up his list was a form of intercultural miscommunication. For example, in asking his native informant to write the letter "B" (pronounced beh in Spanish) Landa had elicited the Maya sign for the syllable beh.

Graphic variation enabled Mayan scribes to write each word in several ways. Shown here are three variants of the verb ts'apah ("was set upright"). Each example includes signs for three syllables: ts'a, pa and ha. In the first (left) the signs are in conventional order. In the second (middle) the pa sign has been inserted into the ts'a sign, which is vertical. In the third variant (right) the scribe has made use of a "full-figure" glyph for pa: a seated man with a bulbous nose who cradles a ts'a sign.

Knorozov proposed that Landa's list was actually a syllabary, or list of syllables. Each sign in the list stood for a specific combination of one consonant and one vowel. When the signs were joined, they phonetically spelled words; frequently the words were of the form consonant-vowel-consonant. Because few Maya words end in vowels, the final vowel would have been dropped in pronouncing the word. But when the word was written, the scribe would, according to Knorozov, have chosen a syllable that included the same vowel as the initial syllable. The principle of consonance between the initial and final vowels Knorozov called synharmony.

To test his theory, Knorozov turned to the codices. He began with a word that was thought on the basis of ancillary evidence to mean "turkey." In Yucatec Maya (a major group of modern Maya languages and one of those most closely related to the language of the ancient inscriptions), the word for turkey is kutz . Knorozov began with Landa's glyph for "K," which he interpreted as the syllable ku. The second sign in the pair of "turkey" glyphs was, on the principle of synharmony, likely to stand for the syllable tzu. He then turned to the two glyphs that made up a word in the codices that was thought to mean "dog." The first glyph was the hypothetical tzu The second was Landa's "L," now interpreted syllabically as lu. Tzal (or tzu- l(u), as the ancient Maya would have spelled it) was an old Yucatec word for dog.

Knorozov's work represented a remarkable breakthrough, and its fundamental principles consonant-vowel (C-V) syllables and synharmony are now accepted as valid. Yet for a variety of reasons it took many years after his work was done in the 1950's for it to be accepted in the West. In the meantime two Western scholars were making equally great strides in understanding the content of the inscriptions. Heinrich Berlin, an independent scholar who lived in Mexico City and supported himself as a businessman, pointed out that a certain category of glyphs seemed to stand either for places or for the ruling families affiliated with those places; these Berlin called Emblem Glyphs. As we shall describe, the Emblem Glyphs are now a significant focus of work on Maya writing.

In 1960, only two years after Berlin's work Tatiana Proskouriakoff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provided another turning point in the investigation of Maya writing. Proskouriakoff, who had entered Maya studies as an architect, was charting changes in Maya artistic styles. That work called for precise notation of the dates on monuments as a means of dating stylistic phases. The unexpected result was that the pattern of dates on the monuments corresponded to periods in the span of individual human lives. Using inscriptions from Piedras Negras in Guatemala as a case study, Proskouriakoff demonstrated convincingly that the recorded dates marked historical events in the lives of named rulers and their families

The contributions of Knorozov, Berlin and Proskouriakoff constituted a revolution that applied both to the form of Maya writing and to its content. For the first time it was understood that the writing system includes both logographs and signs for C-V syllables. At the same time it was understood that the content of the inscriptions generally applies to historical events in the lives of the ruling elite and not, by and large, to impersonal mythical or religious narratives. The implications of this revolution are still being worked out, and in the past decade progress has been particularly rapid.

As a result it is now possible to provide a tentative overview of the writing system and its contents. The basic elements of Maya writing arc signs, of which about 800 are known. Individual signs usually have a square or an elongated oval appearance; one or more of them may be found together in what is known as a glyph block. Many such blocks are arranged in a rectilinear grid that provides the spatial framework for most of the known inscriptions. Within the grid, glyph blocks are arranged in rows and columns whose order of reading is prescribed by specific rules.

Signs are by nature highly pictorial, often representing in considerable detail animals, people, body parts and objects of daily life. The pictorial principle is taken to the extreme in inscriptions composed of "full-figure" glyphs, in which individual signs and numbers become animated and are shown interacting with one another. None of this should be taken to mean that the Maya had simple picture writing. On the contrary, the combination of C-V syllables and logographs enabled the scribes to write the words of their texts in detail.

Some of this flexibility comes from the availability of the two types of signs. For example, one very common honorific title in Maya texts is ahaw, meaning "lord" or "noble." Ahaw may be written in logographic form as a head in profile, with the distinctive headband or scarf that marked the highest nobility in Maya society. But it is also possible to write the word as a combination of three phonetic, syllabic signs: a-ha-wa Likewise, the word pakal ("shield") can be indicated by a depiction of a shield or by the combination of syllabic elements pa-ka- la

Because many Maya signs remain undeciphered, it is not possible to state precisely the relative proportions of logographic and syllabic signs. The number of deciphered syllabic signs keeps growing, and today about half of the syllabic grid is filled. (The syllabic grid plots the consonants of the spoken Maya language against its vowels and thus represents the totality of signs needed to write the language.) Half of the grid may seem a meager proportion, but it must be remembered that the discovery of the structure of the syllabic elements Knorozov's main contribution was made only a little more than 30 years ago. Furthermore, the C- V syllables that are already understood are the common ones. Many of the empty spaces in the syllabic grid remain so because they are linguistically rare; rare signs are more difficult to translate than common ones.

Nonetheless, the pace of phonetic decipherment is bound to increase in the coming years as more resources are trained on it. One aspect of Maya writing that may complicate this progress is the fact that different signs can have the same value. Two signs that share a value are known as allographs. Such equivalences are common in Maya texts, and in evaluating a particular phonetic interpretation of a syllable, it is very helpful to identify as many as possible of the variant forms. The process of recognizing allographs depends on the slow work of comparing many texts in order to find variant spellings of the same word.

Allographs are not restricted to phonetic syllables. In a logographic form of substitution, more than one sign can be employed to represent the same word. For example, the Maya word kan (or knan) may mean "snake," "sky" or "four," just as the English word "tie" may mean an article of clothing worn around the neck or an equal score in an athletic contest. The shared sound of these words provided the ancient scribes with a basis for word play. Indeed, the substitution of one sign for another sometimes approaches punning, as when a "sky" sign is found in a context where "four" is to be understood.

Such equivalences are not easily recognized, and they exemplify some of the difficulties that confront students of Maya texts. In spite of such problems, the pace of decipherment in the past few years has been particularly rapid. In fact, it has been so rapid that scholarly publication has sometimes failed to keep up with the proliferation of inscriptions newly translated in the field.

What has this recent progress revealed about the Maya themselves? In interpreting the information from the inscriptions, it must be kept in mind that the glyphs shed light on only one stratum of the pyramid of Maya society: the apex. Inscriptions were commissioned by the ruling elite, and they include only the information that the rulers thought was important. Such information is most welcome to scholars, but it must be kept in perspective. In relation to the great majority of Maya people - farmers, minor artisans, traders, masons - the written record is silent.

Emblem glyphs are groups of signs associated with specific political units. They provided one of the first indications that Maya texts have historicl themes, not mythical or religious ones. These Emblem Glyphs are from Dos Pilas, Palenque in Mexico, and Copan in Honduras. All three are based on the Maya title k'ul ahaw, meaning "divine lord". The first sign is k'u or k'ul ("holy" or "divine"); the second is ahaw ("lord"). The variable third sign presumably refers to the specific city-state.

And what were the concerns of the ruling elite? Of paramount concern were lineage ties and political authority. Hints of this preoccupation became clear quite early. Berlin and Proskouriakoff uncovered the names of the rulers and their consorts at sites such as Palenque, Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan and constructed king lists. Later work has gone beyond lists of rulers to clarify the family relationships among the people named in the inscriptions, and it has become clear that during the Classic period rule in Maya society was passed from father to son, much as it was in the hereditary monarchies of Europe.

Much space in the inscriptions is devoted to relations between fathers and sons in the ruling lineages and to other kin relations, and it can be assumed that kinship was a topic of special importance to Maya rulers. Family connections appear to have been fundamental to the political organization of Maya society. Marriage between ruling lineages of different polities had an important role in diplomacy and in the forging of alliances. Within individual polities, members of the royal family who were not in direct line to the throne sometimes filled bureaucratic roles.

Other members of the nobility became skilled craftsmen, as is shown by a ceramic vessel from the Naranjo area of northern Guatemala. This vessel, which unfortunately was looted (a process that deprives indigenous peoples of their heritage and archaeologists of crucial information about origins of artifacts) is signed by its maker. The signature reads in part: "the son of the Naranjo ahaw and the Lady of Yaxha." Many artists left their signatures on pottery and on stone monuments. More than one name frequently appears on a single sculpture, which testifies to the collaborative effort required to make large works as well as to the value put on the work of celebrated artists.

As the preceding paragraphs suggest, many rulers, their relatives and their immediate subordinates can now be identified by name and by position in the rigid Maya social hierarchy. Yet such identifications provide only the bare outline of a culture. Of the rest - how those so identified actually spent their time - only tantalizing glimpses are available. Most Maya texts describe only major episodes in the lives of rulers and only those that bear directly on their status as lord, such as birth, accession to the throne, death and burial. Getting an idea of Maya society from such information is a little like trying to reconstruct the society of 19th-century England by analyzing the gravestones in Westminster Abbey.

Other inscriptions are a bit more bountiful, describing something of the ritual life of the elite, including the ball game played by all Mesoamerican peoples, which is still poorly understood by scholars. A number of fascinating texts accompany stone "snapshots" of richly clad ballplayers in action Usually two men are shown in competition bouncing a large rubber ball back and forth. It is a pity that the accompanying texts say nothing about the rules or scores of the games. Yet they do inform us that the rulers themselves sometimes played the game; often the ruler is called ah pits, or "ballplayer."

Of the special rituals described in the texts, the most common were personal rites of bloodletting and incense burning in which members of the nobility offered their most precious commodity - their blood - to the gods in exchange for divine favor and sustenance. These rituals were frequently carried out at such critical times as an enthronement, the designation of an heir or the celebration of a particular calendrical cycle. Although the rituals were significant -