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Mayan Glyphs The Peoples And Civilizations Of The Americas Author: Michael Schwartz Date: 1999
Document: Deciphering The Maya Glyphs
Of all the peoples of ancient America, the Maya developed the most complex system of writing to record their history, religion, philosophy, and politics. Maya hieroglyphs have baffled and fascinated researchers since the 1820s, when the first steps toward deciphering the rich glyphs and symbols of Maya monuments, ceramics, and the few surviving Maya books were made. This process continues, and although we are not yet able to read all the surviving texts, those that have been deciphered have altered our view of Maya society and its underlying beliefs.
One of the problems of decipherment was a false start. In the 16th century, a Spanish bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, burned many books in an attempt to stamp out Maya religion. Landa's attempt to describe the Maya writing based on his questioning of Indian informants was badly flawed. Landa thought the glyphs were letters, not syllables, and so his description confused scholars for many years. Despite his deficiencies, however, for many years Landa provided the only guide available. Unlike the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, no text with Maya and some other known language side by side exists, and so the problem of reading the Maya glyphs remains difficult.
The first modern advances were made in reading Maya numbers and identifying glyphs for the months in the calendar cycle. By the 1940s, scholars could read the dates rather well, and because so many inscriptions and the four remaining books seemed to be numerical and related to the calendar, most specialists believed that the Maya writing was primarily about the calendar system and that the Maya were obsessed with time. Many things complicated the reading of the other glyphs, such as the fact that scholars were not sure which of the various Maya languages that survive was the language of the inscriptions. In 1952, a young Russian researcher argued that the Maya glyphs combined signs that stood for whole words with others that represented sounds. In this, the Maya script was like ancient Egyptian and cuneiform writings. Although the theory was not fully accepted at first, it has proven to be accurate.
A major breakthrough took place in 1960, when art historian Tatiana Proskouriakoff noted that on certain sets of monuments the earliest and last dates were never more than 62 years apart, and that the first date was always accompanied by one certain glyph and the next always by another. She recognized that the images on the monuments were not gods or mythical figures, but kings, and that the first glyph indicated birth and the second accession. Sixty-two years was consistent with a human life span. With this approach, scholars have figured out the names of the rulers and their families and something about the dynastic history of a number of Maya cities.
Scholars now understand that, despite regional variations, the texts were written in a language widely understood throughout the Maya region. The glyphs combine syllables, symbols, emblems, and ideas in what is basically a complex phonetic system. Now that we are able to read numbers, dates, place or city emblems, and a few nouns and verbs, a new window has been opened on the ancient Maya.
Art historians Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, in their excellent volume The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (1986), provide a reading and interpretation of a famous Maya sculpture. Here Lord Shield Jaguar, a ruler of Yaxchilan who was between 40 and 60 years old at the time, holds a torch to illumine a ceremony of blood-letting self-sacrifice. His wife, Lady Xoc, draws a rope with thorns through her tongue, after which he too will sacrifice his blood to sustain the gods. This ceremony took place on October 28, 709. The short accompanying text in glyphs dates the ceremony, identifies the people portrayed, and describes their actions.
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