Mayan Writing

The Mayan script was only first deciphered in the 1980s. That might seem ages ago to you but compared to other scripts like Sumerian or ancient Egyptian, it is as though it was cracked yesterday!

And you have to add in the fact that a Spanish bishop once piled up all the Mayan books he could get his hands on and set them on fire. So only four books are known to have survived – the Dresden Codex, Paris Codex, Madrid Codex and Grolier Codex.

The codices seem to be mostly concerned with astronomy and religious matters. They don’t seem to be historical accounts from when they were written.

 The other place where you find writing is on the temples and monuments. Some of the most interesting recent findings have come from translating glyphs on a staircase at Copan and Dos Pilas. These inscriptions tell us about some of the history of those cities and their rulers.

If you’d like to know more about Mayan writing, check out the Decipherment blog of Professor David Stuart, the world’s leading Mayan epigrapher, or follow Dr. David Stuart on a tour of Copan, including some of his ground-breaking work on inscriptions.

A long misunderstanding

It took many years before the Mayan writings could be understood. Most Mayan scholars followed the ideas of reknown British archaeologist Sir J Eric Thomspon*, who did not believe the Mayans had written their own history on temples and in books. Instead he believed that the symbols represented metaphorical ideas. He also didn’t believe that the writing used structure like words and grammar.

Thompson was wrong. After he died, Russian and US scholars of Mayan epigraphy (including a teenage David Stuart!) were able to use their own radically different ideas to understand the Mayan script.

The story of how the Mayan hieroglyphic script was finally deciphered in the 1980s and 1990s is itself fascinating. You can read about it in Michael Coe’s book Breaking the Maya Code.

Some facts about Mayan writing:

1. There are over 800 glyphs representing different words or syllables
2. Words can be one symbol OR a combination of several different symbols in one glyph.
3. Glyphs were written in 2-block columns read top-to-bottom.
4. The Mayan were one of only THREE civilisations ever to have invented writing.

* Eric Thomspon appears as a fictional historical character in the 2nd book of The Joshua Files – Ice Shock.