Maya writing: glyphs, burned codices and a long decipherment

Of all the scripts born in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans, Maya writing is the richest and the best understood. For more than a millennium, from the late phases of the Preclassic period to the Spanish conquest, the scribes of Yucatán, Guatemala and Honduras carved and painted glyphs on stelae, lintels, vases and bark books. For centuries those signs remained silent, until in the twentieth century a series of discoveries made it possible to read them again.

Logograms and syllables

Maya writing is logosyllabic: it combines signs that stand for whole words with signs representing syllables, formed by a consonant and a vowel. Scribes could write the same word with a logogram, with a sequence of syllables or with a combination of both, choosing for aesthetic reasons or for reasons of space. The signs were grouped into square blocks, usually read in pairs of columns, from left to right and from top to bottom.

Many monumental inscriptions concern the lives of rulers: births, accessions to the throne, wars, rituals and deaths, placed precisely in the Long Count calendar. At Palenque, in the Temple of the Inscriptions, a long series of texts celebrates King K'inich Janaab Pakal, who died in 683 and whose tomb was discovered in 1952 beneath the pyramid.

Bark books and the burning at Maní

The Maya also wrote books, folded like an accordion and made of bark coated with stucco. Only four survive: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex and a fourth, long known as the Grolier Codex and now called the Maya Codex of Mexico, whose authenticity was long debated. They contain mainly ritual almanacs, astronomical tables on the cycles of Venus and eclipses, and prophecies.

The scarcity of codices has a precise cause. In 1562, at Maní, the Franciscan Diego de Landa had many books and cult objects burned in an auto-da-fé, regarding them as the work of the devil. Paradoxically, a few years later Landa himself wrote an Account of the Things of Yucatán in which he recorded a supposed Maya «alphabet», obtained by asking local informants to write the Spanish letters.

The rebirth of reading

Landa's manuscript was found in Madrid in 1862 by the French abbé Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. For a long time his «alphabet» seemed useless. In 1952 the Russian Yuri Knorozov understood that those signs were not letters but syllables: the informants had written the sound of the name of each Spanish letter. It was the key to recognising the phonetic character of the script.

In 1960 Tatiana Proskouriakoff, studying the stelae of Piedras Negras, showed that the inscriptions recorded historical events in the lives of rulers, and not only calendars and deities. In the following years, thanks to the work of many epigraphers, a growing share of the texts has become readable. Among the divine figures linked to writing stand Itzamna and the monkey scribes, also recalled in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche' transcribed in the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century.

The story of Maya writing unites destruction and survival in exemplary fashion. A system of signs almost erased by colonial bonfires has spoken again thanks to stone, to a few surviving codices and to a document written by the very man who had burned those books. Today Maya communities are once again studying the glyphs of their ancestors.