What appears to be intricately carved pictures in a grid-like pattern are in fact a complex and sophisticated system of writing. Decipherment of Maya glyphs then picked up speed in the 1970s, thanks to key figures such as David Stuart, who found that there were many repeated elements in Maya glyphs, and that there were phonetic substitutions, allowing words to be written in multiple ways. Proskoriakoff then made the revolutionary breakthrough that Maya glyphs depicted not mystical stories of the heavens, but actual historical events. She spent more than 20 years doing fieldwork, working on drawing or reconstructing the Maya ruins at Piedras Negras. Along came Tatiana Proskoriakoff in the 1930s, fresh out of Architecture school. Knorosov’s work, unfortunately, was met with critics and came to a halt for several decades. While previous scholars believed that the Maya script was a limited logographic system, Knorosov proposed that the Maya writing system was a mixed system that consisted of logographs and symbols that represented actual sounds from the Classic Mayan language. The Maya script has about 800 different symbols. Scripts with fewer than 30 signs are usually alphabetic, 50–100 signs are likely to represent a syllabic system, and anything in the hundreds would be logographic. According to the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Frawley, 2003), the first step to deciphering a writing system would be to count the number of signs. Coe explains in the documentary Cracking the Maya Code, Russian linguist Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov was another key figure in the decipherment of Maya glyphs in the 1950s (LeBrun et al, 2008). He proposed that there wasn’t a system within these depictions of gods and priests. According to Thompson, the people of the Maya civilization were gentle folk who focused on time and created inscriptions about the mysteries of the skies. He failed to grasp that Maya symbols depict morae (consonant-vowel sequences), instead of individual consonants or vowels.īetween the 1930s and 1960s, the field of Maya glyph studies was dominated by British archeologist J. This alphabet proved to be problematic due to communication errors between Landa and his Yucatec Mayan-speaking consultant. Landa’s alphabet was established, as an attempt to write out Maya equivalents in the Roman alphabet. As part of his rehabilitation, Landa worked on a publication that described Maya life, their calendar, as well as their writing system. Some of Diego de Landa Calderón’s actions were considered so extreme, to the point where he was recalled back to Spain. How were these glyphs deciphered to begin with and who were involved? According to Rogers (2005), decipherment of Maya glyphs began with the very same person who repressed Maya culture and ordered for Maya texts to be burnt during the Spanish conquest. The Maya writing system of Mesoamerica is one of 3 writing systems in the world that developed independently (the other two being Cuneiform from Mesopotamia and oracle bone writing in China). Seemingly reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, early discoverers termed the Maya script as hieroglyphs-or glyphs-despite there being no relation between the two writing systems. The Maya script was used to write the Classic Mayan language, ancestral language to the other Mayan languages of the modern world such as Yucatec, Ixil, and Q’echi’. Serpent Head and Maya Glyphs at Ek’ Balam (Source: Wikipedia )įor years, the Maya script remained a mystery to the world, even to the Maya people of today. Particularly mesmerized by the detailed inscriptions on the stelae (stone monuments) and building walls, I was intrigued: Are these simply pictures? Logograms? Was there a systematic way to interpret these symbols? The ancient Maya civilization existed from around 2000 BC to 1600 AD, and left behind a plethora of cultural artifacts. Nevertheless, I was fascinated and amazed by the sophisticated pyramids, monuments, and carvings that had weathered the test of time.Ĭhichén Itza, like other famous cities such as Palanque, Uxmal, Copan, and Tikal, flourished while Europe was trudging through the Dark Ages. I had the chance to visit the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico in January 2017, but I only managed to visit Ek’ Balam and Chichén Itza while I was there. As I stood atop the Acropolis in Ek’ Balam, an archeological site in Yucatán Mexico, I was overwhelmed by the vast expanse of lush forestry that engulfed the Maya ruins. “Only a small percentage of the actual site has been unearthed,” I overheard a local guide explain, as he pointed toward a nearby hill that was covered in trees.Įk’ Balam (which means “black jaguar” in Yucatec Maya) is one of many Maya sites in the regions of Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Campeche, Chiapas en Tabasco in Mexico Guatemala Belize El Savador and parts of Honduras.
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