It took well over a century for the crucial lesson from Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian to be successfully applied to another hieroglyphic system, that of the Lowland Maya. 1 Like Egyptian, Maya hieroglyphic writing is highly iconic, firmly anchored in Maya iconography and full of human, animal, and divine faces and body parts.
The Maya script was used from the third century A.D.—and probably, though it's not yet provable, much earlier than that, it's possible even until the end of the seventeenth century. Its geographic range stretched from the Yucatán Peninsula, southward to what is now the north of Honduras, and from the Atlantic coast of Belize west to the mountains of Chiapas.
Much of the reason the principles of Maya writing were not “cracked” until the mid-twentieth century had to do with a paucity of source material. For one thing, the dense jungles covering most of the southern Lowlands concealed most of the ancient Maya cities in that area, delaying discovery and publication of the many monumental inscriptions the Maya had carved on stelae, altars, and stone wall panels.
For another, Spanish colonial authorities had burned nearly every sixteenth-century Maya paper book they found—in the words of Bishop Diego de Landa, one of the worst offenders—on the theory that they contained “nothing in which there was not superstition and lies of the devil”. 2
Nevertheless, four codices survived: three of them in archives in Europe, where they had been sent as curiosities shortly after the Conquest, and a fourth in a cave in Yucatán, where it was not discovered until the 1970s.
Between 1887 and 1926, scholars were able to work out the Maya calendrical system and its correlation to the Gregorian calendar using the three known codices and the published inscriptions. The meanings and probable phonetic readings of a few glyphic compounds, including the cardinal directions and words like k’in, “sun” or “day,” were worked out from context.
The non-calendric portion of the script resisted decipherment, however. It was not that Mayan languages were no longer spoken—Yucatec Mayan was, and remains, one of the most robust indigenous languages of the Americas. Encouragingly, too, there was what purported to be a bilingual text.
As a friar without the authority to do so, Bishop Landa had carried out his book burnings in the context of an inquisition into the survival of pre-Christian religious practices among his Maya parishioners in the town of Maní.
Summoned to Spain to answer for his conduct, he wrote a treatise, the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (“Relation of the Things of Yucatán”), partly in an attempt to exonerate himself. (The attempt was successful, and Landa returned to Yucatán as its new bishop.) The Relación includes a presentation of a Maya “alphabet,” two “spellings” of words (“noose” and “water”), and one phrase (ma’ in k’ati, “it is not my wish”). Yet early attempts to apply Landa’s alphabet to the codices produced no coherent readings. The hieroglyphic script used hundreds of characters; Landa recorded a little more than thirty, which did not appear to work in the script as single letters.Because of failed early attempts at decipherment, the possibility that Maya hieroglyphic writing had a significant phonetic component fell into disrepute.
On one extreme, some scholars argued that the hieroglyphic texts, for all their organized complexity, were basically supplements to pictorial presentations, able to express only calendric information and some personal names on the rebus principle. 3 According to this view, the Maya had glyphs for numbers and units of time, but when they needed to express other kinds of information they could only draw pictures of things that sounded like the words they wanted.
On the other extreme,J. Eric. S. Thompson , one of the great Mayanists of the twentieth century, insisted in 1950 that Maya signs were “anagogical,” using images of gods and animals to allude to deeper spiritual meanings associated with them in Maya mythology. 4 Just as in the neo-Platonic view of the Egyptian system, spoken language was rarely if ever involved. As for the “alphabet” in the Relación, Thompson proposed that Landa had read out the Spanish names of the Latin letters—a, be, ce—while his informant, a nobleman named Gaspar Antonio Chi, had drawn symbols for things or concepts whose names in Yucatec resembled those sounds.
Clearly, Landa had misunderstood the nature of Maya writing. Yet in a 1952 article, a young Russian scholar named Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov argued that the misunderstanding had been of a different kind than Thompson suggested. 5 Pointing explicitly to Egyptian as an example, he raised the possibility that most of the signs in Landa’s “alphabet” were phonetic: that they stood for consonant-vowel syllables, not single phonemes or abstract concepts. Clues in the Relación supported this interpretation.
The “alphabet” included letters for syllables like ka, ku, and k’u. The spellings for “water,” "ha" in Yucatec, and ma in k’ati used signs not included in the “alphabet” for the syllables ha, ma, k’a, and ti.
In one of the codices, Knorosov observed, the sign for ku in Landa’s “alphabet” plus a second, unknown sign appeared with a picture of a turkey, kutz in Yucatec.
Could the second sign stand for a syllable starting with tz? Perhaps so: the same sign plus another glyph labeled a dog, tzul, in the same codex. Knorosov thus proposed that this third glyph was lu. The reading worked well in another spelling that should have been buluk, “eleven,” apparently written bu-lu-ku (the bu sign was eroded).
Landa’s ku also appeared with another sign above a picture of the Moon Goddess carrying a burden, or kuch. That other sign formed part of a glyphic
compound with Landa’s ca and ha (or ja, in contemporary epigraphic orthography) with an image of a god who had been “captured” or “tied up,” chuhkaj, suggesting that it was syllabic chu. From the glyphs for “east” and “west,” lak’in and chik’in, Knorosov identified the syllables la and chi and the logogram for “sun” or “day,” K’IN. Knorosov had discovered the basic principles of the script. Far from a system of language-free, visual metaphors, or a collection of improvised rebus spellings, it turned out that Maya hieroglyphic writing worked a lot like Japanese. Maya scribes could fully and accurately record their spoken language by combining signs for whole words with signs for consonant-vowel syllables.
By contrast with Champollion, Knorosov’s syllabic decipherments, while generally correct, did not immediately lead to the full decipherment of the script. Instead, progress was incremental, impeded by the belief that Maya monumental texts recorded astronomical and religious matters, not human history. Yet as time went on, it became harder to maintain that belief.
In a 1960 article, epigrapher Tatiana Proskouriakoff proposed that a pattern of dates on a set of monuments from the site of Piedras Negras corresponded to events in the lives of human beings. She identified the glyphs for “birth,” “coronation,” and the feminine title ix, “lady,” along with what were surely the personal names of several Maya rulers. 6
In 1962, the archaeologist Dave Kelley managed to read such a personal name, this time at Chichen Itza in northern Yucatán. He showed that Knorosov’s syllables ka, k’a, k’u, la, and pa were used to write the name of K’ak’upakal, described as a famous war leader in Maya documents written in the Latin alphabet after the Conquest. 7
By the 1970s, the delayed flood of decipherments was underway. Publication of the newly established Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, headed by Ian Graham, facilitated the new discoveries.
Dave Kelley and Michael Coe independently discovered the principles of substitution and phonetic complementation in the glyphs: the word pakal, “shield,” could be written with a single logogram, PAKAL; syllabically, as pa-ka-la, or
with a combination of both, as PAKAL-la. This principle, called phonetic complementation, works similarly in Maya and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
A group of epigraphers including Linda Schele, Floyd Lounsbury, and Peter Mathews showed how the syntax of monumental texts corresponded to the grammatical rules of living Mayan languages. Other young epigraphers, many of them students of Schele or Coe—my professors David Stuart and Stephen Houston among them—added enormously to the stock of logographic and syllabic readings over the next few years, and have kept it up to the present day.
Houston, Stuart, and the linguist John Robertson identified the language of the Maya inscriptions 8, identified special syllabic signs that could stand for grammatical particles, and discovered that scribes applied syllabic spellng rules to show subtle but meaningful variations in vowel pronunciation. 9
Today, the Maya script has been almost fully deciphered, and the monumental texts turn out to be mainly historical, not mystical in nature.
The language they record is now considered to be an ancestor not of Yucatec, with over a million speakers in the Yucatán Peninsula, but of Ch’orti’ Mayan, spoken today by a dwindling population in southern Guatemala and northern Honduras.
With the heroic work of decipherment largely complete, Maya epigraphy appears to be taking a turn towards history, using inscriptions as primary sources, and towards distributional studies of paleographic and linguistic variation. As this trend continues, Maya epigraphic studies will contribute more and more to an anthropological understanding of language.
The Maya script was used from the third century A.D.—and probably, though it's not yet provable, much earlier than that, it's possible even until the end of the seventeenth century. Its geographic range stretched from the Yucatán Peninsula, southward to what is now the north of Honduras, and from the Atlantic coast of Belize west to the mountains of Chiapas.
Much of the reason the principles of Maya writing were not “cracked” until the mid-twentieth century had to do with a paucity of source material. For one thing, the dense jungles covering most of the southern Lowlands concealed most of the ancient Maya cities in that area, delaying discovery and publication of the many monumental inscriptions the Maya had carved on stelae, altars, and stone wall panels.
For another, Spanish colonial authorities had burned nearly every sixteenth-century Maya paper book they found—in the words of Bishop Diego de Landa, one of the worst offenders—on the theory that they contained “nothing in which there was not superstition and lies of the devil”. 2
Nevertheless, four codices survived: three of them in archives in Europe, where they had been sent as curiosities shortly after the Conquest, and a fourth in a cave in Yucatán, where it was not discovered until the 1970s.
Between 1887 and 1926, scholars were able to work out the Maya calendrical system and its correlation to the Gregorian calendar using the three known codices and the published inscriptions. The meanings and probable phonetic readings of a few glyphic compounds, including the cardinal directions and words like k’in, “sun” or “day,” were worked out from context.
The non-calendric portion of the script resisted decipherment, however. It was not that Mayan languages were no longer spoken—Yucatec Mayan was, and remains, one of the most robust indigenous languages of the Americas. Encouragingly, too, there was what purported to be a bilingual text.
As a friar without the authority to do so, Bishop Landa had carried out his book burnings in the context of an inquisition into the survival of pre-Christian religious practices among his Maya parishioners in the town of Maní.
Summoned to Spain to answer for his conduct, he wrote a treatise, the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (“Relation of the Things of Yucatán”), partly in an attempt to exonerate himself. (The attempt was successful, and Landa returned to Yucatán as its new bishop.) The Relación includes a presentation of a Maya “alphabet,” two “spellings” of words (“noose” and “water”), and one phrase (ma’ in k’ati, “it is not my wish”). Yet early attempts to apply Landa’s alphabet to the codices produced no coherent readings. The hieroglyphic script used hundreds of characters; Landa recorded a little more than thirty, which did not appear to work in the script as single letters.Because of failed early attempts at decipherment, the possibility that Maya hieroglyphic writing had a significant phonetic component fell into disrepute.
On one extreme, some scholars argued that the hieroglyphic texts, for all their organized complexity, were basically supplements to pictorial presentations, able to express only calendric information and some personal names on the rebus principle. 3 According to this view, the Maya had glyphs for numbers and units of time, but when they needed to express other kinds of information they could only draw pictures of things that sounded like the words they wanted.
On the other extreme,J. Eric. S. Thompson , one of the great Mayanists of the twentieth century, insisted in 1950 that Maya signs were “anagogical,” using images of gods and animals to allude to deeper spiritual meanings associated with them in Maya mythology. 4 Just as in the neo-Platonic view of the Egyptian system, spoken language was rarely if ever involved. As for the “alphabet” in the Relación, Thompson proposed that Landa had read out the Spanish names of the Latin letters—a, be, ce—while his informant, a nobleman named Gaspar Antonio Chi, had drawn symbols for things or concepts whose names in Yucatec resembled those sounds.
Clearly, Landa had misunderstood the nature of Maya writing. Yet in a 1952 article, a young Russian scholar named Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov argued that the misunderstanding had been of a different kind than Thompson suggested. 5 Pointing explicitly to Egyptian as an example, he raised the possibility that most of the signs in Landa’s “alphabet” were phonetic: that they stood for consonant-vowel syllables, not single phonemes or abstract concepts. Clues in the Relación supported this interpretation.
The “alphabet” included letters for syllables like ka, ku, and k’u. The spellings for “water,” "ha" in Yucatec, and ma in k’ati used signs not included in the “alphabet” for the syllables ha, ma, k’a, and ti.
In one of the codices, Knorosov observed, the sign for ku in Landa’s “alphabet” plus a second, unknown sign appeared with a picture of a turkey, kutz in Yucatec.
Could the second sign stand for a syllable starting with tz? Perhaps so: the same sign plus another glyph labeled a dog, tzul, in the same codex. Knorosov thus proposed that this third glyph was lu. The reading worked well in another spelling that should have been buluk, “eleven,” apparently written bu-lu-ku (the bu sign was eroded).
Landa’s ku also appeared with another sign above a picture of the Moon Goddess carrying a burden, or kuch. That other sign formed part of a glyphic
compound with Landa’s ca and ha (or ja, in contemporary epigraphic orthography) with an image of a god who had been “captured” or “tied up,” chuhkaj, suggesting that it was syllabic chu. From the glyphs for “east” and “west,” lak’in and chik’in, Knorosov identified the syllables la and chi and the logogram for “sun” or “day,” K’IN. Knorosov had discovered the basic principles of the script. Far from a system of language-free, visual metaphors, or a collection of improvised rebus spellings, it turned out that Maya hieroglyphic writing worked a lot like Japanese. Maya scribes could fully and accurately record their spoken language by combining signs for whole words with signs for consonant-vowel syllables.
By contrast with Champollion, Knorosov’s syllabic decipherments, while generally correct, did not immediately lead to the full decipherment of the script. Instead, progress was incremental, impeded by the belief that Maya monumental texts recorded astronomical and religious matters, not human history. Yet as time went on, it became harder to maintain that belief.
In a 1960 article, epigrapher Tatiana Proskouriakoff proposed that a pattern of dates on a set of monuments from the site of Piedras Negras corresponded to events in the lives of human beings. She identified the glyphs for “birth,” “coronation,” and the feminine title ix, “lady,” along with what were surely the personal names of several Maya rulers. 6
In 1962, the archaeologist Dave Kelley managed to read such a personal name, this time at Chichen Itza in northern Yucatán. He showed that Knorosov’s syllables ka, k’a, k’u, la, and pa were used to write the name of K’ak’upakal, described as a famous war leader in Maya documents written in the Latin alphabet after the Conquest. 7
By the 1970s, the delayed flood of decipherments was underway. Publication of the newly established Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, headed by Ian Graham, facilitated the new discoveries.
Dave Kelley and Michael Coe independently discovered the principles of substitution and phonetic complementation in the glyphs: the word pakal, “shield,” could be written with a single logogram, PAKAL; syllabically, as pa-ka-la, or
with a combination of both, as PAKAL-la. This principle, called phonetic complementation, works similarly in Maya and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
A group of epigraphers including Linda Schele, Floyd Lounsbury, and Peter Mathews showed how the syntax of monumental texts corresponded to the grammatical rules of living Mayan languages. Other young epigraphers, many of them students of Schele or Coe—my professors David Stuart and Stephen Houston among them—added enormously to the stock of logographic and syllabic readings over the next few years, and have kept it up to the present day.
Houston, Stuart, and the linguist John Robertson identified the language of the Maya inscriptions 8, identified special syllabic signs that could stand for grammatical particles, and discovered that scribes applied syllabic spellng rules to show subtle but meaningful variations in vowel pronunciation. 9
Today, the Maya script has been almost fully deciphered, and the monumental texts turn out to be mainly historical, not mystical in nature.
The language they record is now considered to be an ancestor not of Yucatec, with over a million speakers in the Yucatán Peninsula, but of Ch’orti’ Mayan, spoken today by a dwindling population in southern Guatemala and northern Honduras.
With the heroic work of decipherment largely complete, Maya epigraphy appears to be taking a turn towards history, using inscriptions as primary sources, and towards distributional studies of paleographic and linguistic variation. As this trend continues, Maya epigraphic studies will contribute more and more to an anthropological understanding of language.
***
Nicholas Carter was born in Houston, Texas. He received his BA in philosophy from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. He the attended the University of Texas in Austin where he earned an MA in Latin American Studies, specializing in the study of the Mayan civilization. There he studied with Dr. David Stuart. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in archaeology at Brown University, where he studies under Dr. Stephen Houston.
***
1. Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code. Thames and Hudson, New York. Coe presents a full and detailed history of the decipherment, skimmed over here.
2. Fray Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán.
3. Ignace J. Gelb, A Study of Writing. Second edition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974.
4. J. Eric S. Thompson, 1950, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, D.C.
5. Yuri V. Knorosov, 1952, “Drevniaia pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noi Ameriki. Sovietskaya Etnografiya, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 100-118.
6. Tatiana Proskouriakoff, 1960, “Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.” American Antiquity, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 454-475.
7. David H. Kelley, 1962, “Fonetismo en la Escritura Maya.” Estudios de Cultura Maya, vol. 2, pp. 277-317.
8. Stephen D. Houston, John S. Robertson, and David Stuart, 2000, “The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions.” Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 321-356.
9. Stephen D. Houston, David Stuart, and John S. Robertson, 2004, “Disharmony in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Linguistic Change and Continuity in Classic Society.” In The Linguistics of Maya Writing, edited by Søren Wichmann. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.