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I was just listening to my voicemails,
and you might find this one interesting. Let’s hear what they have to say.
“Hello, David. Following your fascinating video on the decipherment of cuneiform, I was wondering:
what was the process for the decipherment of the Maya scripts, the Mayan hieroglyphics and
therefore their language that lies behind it? I’d be curious to hear. Thank you.”
And thank you for your question. Yes, the decipherment of Maya writing is one of the great
achievements of the past century. I will tell you what happened to the best of my knowledge.
The earliest known Maya texts date back to the third century BCE,
and glyphic writing continued all the way up to the time of the Spanish Conquest, although
it is possible that the tradition of writing with hieroglyphs remained until the seventeenth century
in regions that remained far removed from Spanish control. It is estimated that there are more than
five thousand individual texts, including those that have been discovered archaeologically and
those found in public and private collections around the world. Most of these texts were
written during the Classic period (200-900 CE) on ceramic vessels and on stone monuments, such as
stelae and stone lintels. Hieroglyphs also appear on other media, such as codices, wooden lintels,
facades, interior walls of buildings and caves, shells, bones, jade, obsidian and clay objects.
The Maya hieroglyphic writing system consists of more than a thousand different signs. However,
many of them are variations of the same sign (allographs), different elements
but with the same reading (homophones), or variants that were used in a certain period
or in a certain area. Therefore, the total number of hieroglyphs used at a given time
did not exceed 500. The Maya writing system can be described linguistically as a logo syllabic
system, composed of signs that represent whole words (logograms) of that represent syllables.
There are about 80 phonetic syllables in the Classic Mayan language, but because there are
many homophones, there are more than 200 syllabic graphemes in the script. When compared with other
Mesoamerican writing systems, the one used by the Maya could better record the complex syntax
present in the oral manifestations of their language. In practice, however, the writing
system developed abbreviations of highly complex syntactic structures, requiring us to reconstruct
the omitted elements that ancient readers familiar with the language would have had no problem with.
The story of the decipherment of the Maya script is an exciting tale, spanning nearly
five centuries, during which an understanding of a writing system that, at first glance, appeared to
be unimaginably strange, has been sought. In 1839 American writer and traveler John Lloyd Stephens,
along with English draftsman Frederick Catherwood, had left New York for the Maya area via Belize.
From 1839 to 1842, in successive annual trips, they explored Maya ruins, wrote articles,
sketched maps and made sketches of ancient sculptures and buildings. Thanks to their efforts,
the lost cities of the Maya were made known to the general public in two lavishly illustrated
volumes: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). In the first of these Stephens wrote:
This challenge was proposed by Stephens due to the decipherment of the Egyptian
script by Jean-François Champollion only a few decades before the publication of his book.
However, in Stephens’ time, no “Rosetta Stone” was available in the fledgling field of Mayan
studies. All this changed in 1862, when a French clergyman, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg,
while searching for research material on the New World at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid,
found a manuscript entitled Relación de las cosas de Yucatán written by Bishop Diego de
Landa. Two years later, Brasseur de Bourbourg published the manuscript in a bilingual (Spanish
and French) edition with the title Relation des choses de Yucatán. The discovery of Landa's work
made researchers both skeptical and mesmerized by the possibilities of their “Rosetta stone”.
All the excitement was because, on one of the pages, was Landa’s description of what he thought
were Mayan alphabetic characters. But the Landa alphabet, as it was called, was considered by many
to show a lack of understanding on the part of the Spanish clergy of the Maya language (which it
really was to a certain extent), so it was assumed that this alphabet was of no use. Consequently,
no attempt at decipherment worth mentioning was undertaken during the century that followed.
One of the problems consisted in the belief from the late nineteenth century until 1950
that the Maya script was purely alphabetic or purely phonetic, or, for that matter,
simply logographic. At first researchers tried to apply Landa's alphabet directly to the Maya script
without success. It was noticed that logograms appearing in Landa’s work represented calendrical
signs, so they were beginning to realize, that this system could not be completely phonetic.
Largely due to the unsuccessful attempts of linguists, such as Benjamin Lee
Whorf, who aimed at demonstrating that Maya writing was provided with both phonetic
and logographic signs, Eric Thompson wrote in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing:
An Introduction (published in 1950), the following comment, which demonstrates the
unpopularity among scholars at the time of interpreting any of the signs as phonetic:
By the 1950s, research on Maya glyphic writing was advancing steadily, especially in aspects related
to those parts of the texts with calendrical content. Perhaps as a direct consequence of this,
the ideas that took firm root considered it purely logographic. All attempts to
read Maya hieroglyphs phonetically were doomed to failure or, in other words, rejected by the most
influential specialists of the time. Along the same lines, an idea that prevailed in
the academic circles of the time was that the content of the inscriptions was almost
exclusively astronomical and did not deal with historical matters. This is not to say everyone
agreed. As early as the 19th century, a handful of researchers were exploring other possibilities,
but so far none of them was able to find a systematic method to clarify their ideas.
All of this changed in the early 1950s, when Yuri Knorozov, a researcher at the Leningrad Institute
of Ethnology, tried again with the Landa alphabet, comparing it with the few copies available at that
time of the three known Maya codices up to that time with those found and "rescued" by the Red
Army in 1945 in Berlin. The method employed by Knorozov consisted of studying different writing
systems that had already been deciphered. Based on the features they shared among them, and on the
number of signs used by each system, Knorozov proposed that the Maya script was composed of
logograms and phonetic signs. It appeared to be broadly similar to the Japanese writing system.
Thus, Knorozov began to test his ideas by using the Landa alphabet, as if it consisted, at least
in part, of syllables instead of alphabetic signs. The syllabic approach was supported by the fact
that it was a common feature of other ancient writing systems that had already been deciphered.
Knorozov applied some of these signs directly to their corresponding signs in the codices. For
example, on one of the graphemes present in the codices was that corresponding to the cu of Landa,
followed by a sign whose reading was unknown at the time. Both elements appeared above the figure
of a turkey, so he assumed that these glyphs referred to the animal represented below them.
This assumption was justified, since it was observed that this compound appeared
repeatedly next to representations of this animal in the codices. The word for "turkey"
in old Yucatecan Mayan is cutz. Knorozov thought that the first of the signs should represent the
syllable “cu” which also appeared in Landa's alphabet, while the second should read “tzu”,
but assuming that the last vowel should be suppressed, since most Mayan words end in a
consonant. Knorozov concluded that the signs should be written cu-tz(u) and read cutz.
In order to verify this, he looked for a glyphic compound beginning with tzu,
finding that it appeared over the figure of a dog, which is “tzul” in Yucatec Mayan, so he deduced
that the elements of this compound should read tzu and “lu” with the final vowel being silent
(the sign “lu” appears in the Landa alphabet as the letter "l", by the way).
Knorozov continued to apply this method to the codices, obtaining good results,
which began to cause a division within western academia dedicated to the investigation of the
Mayan script. This theoretical framework, quite simple in essence, together with the
associated method provided the necessary keys to obtain phonetic readings of various glyphs,
changed the course of research in Maya epigraphy. However, the change did not become visible until
two decades later, largely due to the political scenario marked by the Cold War and the Iron
Curtain, as well as language barriers and lack of communication between schools of thought.
Now what about the content of the inscriptions. Well, the great names in
the field of ancient Maya culture research, J. Eric S. Thompson and Sylvanus G. Morley,
were asserting that the corpus of inscriptions contained only calendrical content without any
historical information. Likewise, these scholars maintained that the texts recorded in ceramics
were simple copies of the monumental inscriptions without any type of meaning or linguistic value
of their own (Thompson, 1962). They were wrong. In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, an American of
Russian background, published for the first time evidence showing that the inscriptions
contained historical records. Proskouriakoff noted a “peculiar pattern of dates” on monumental stone
inscriptions at the Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras. She determined that these represented
events in the life of an individual, rather than being related to religion, astronomy, or prophecy,
as held by the "old school." This proved to be true for many Maya inscriptions and revealed
that Maya epigraphic records were telling actual stories of rulers, stories of dynasties similar
in nature to those recorded in literate human cultures around the world. Suddenly,
the Maya had entered the realm of written history. Although it was already clear what was in many
Maya inscriptions, they could not yet be literally read. Nevertheless,
further progress was made during the 1960s and 1970s, using a multitude of approaches including
pattern analysis, Landa's alphabet, and Knorozov's findings. In the history of Maya decipherment,
the work of archaeologists, art historians, epigraphers, linguists, and anthropologists
could not be separated. All contributed to a truly and essentially multidisciplinary process.
Findings were made in the 1970s, particularly at the first Palenque Round Table,
an academic conference organized by Merle Greene Robertson at the Classic Maya site of Palenque in
December 1973. A working group was led by Linda Schele, an art historian and epigrapher at the
University of Texas at Austin, which included Floyd Lounsbury, a linguist at Yale University,
and Peter Mathews, then a student of David H. Kelley at the University of Calgary (whom
Kelley sent because he was unable to attend). In one afternoon, they managed to decipher the
first dynastic list of Maya kings, the ancient kings of the city of Palenque.
By identifying a sign as an important royal title (read “k'inich”), the group was able to identify
and read the lives, from birth to ascension to the throne to death, of six kings of Palenque.
From that point, progress continued at an exponential pace, not only in deciphering
Maya glyphs, but also toward building a new understanding of Maya civilization based on
history. A decisive event that helped shift the wind of public opinion in favor of the
new approach occurred in 1986, in an exhibition entitled "The Blood of Kings: A New Interpretation
of Maya Art". This was organized by InterCultura and the Kimbell Art Museum and was curated by
Linda Schele and Yale art historian Mary Miller. This exhibition and the catalog for attendees,
with international publicity, revealed to a vast audience the new world that had recently
opened up, thanks to the breakthrough in the decipherment of Maya inscriptions.
Now not only could a real history of ancient America be read and understood, but this shed
light on the material remains of the Maya and showed them as real and recognizable persons.
They were revealed as a people with a written history like that of other human societies, full
of wars, dynastic struggles, shifting political alliances, complex religious and artistic systems,
expressions of personal ownership and sovereignty, and so on. Plus the new interpretation, as the
exhibition demonstrated, made sense of many works of art whose meaning had been obscure, and showed
how the material culture of the Maya represented a fully integrated cultural system and worldview.
Gone was Thompson's old view of the Maya as peaceful astronomers without conflict
or other attributes characteristic of most human societies. With this theoretical framework a lot
of deciphering has been done since the 80’s, so much so that now we're already able to understand
the sound of about 90% and the meaning of about 80% of the Mayan glyphs. The decipherment of
the Mayan language is a fascinating tale that shows how much scholars from different fields
can achieve when working together. I hope that answered your question. If
anyone else would like to ask me a question, about ancient history, you can leave it on my
voicemail at speakpipe.com/DavidMiano, and maybe I will answer it in a video.
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