5

Maya Glyphs: Calendars of Kings

The Earth’s geography played a strong supporting role in giving the world a script so distinctive and visually complex that its nature as a true writing system was widely misunderstood until the late twentieth century. The Bering land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska had allowed human migration to the New World in Paleolithic times. But with the end of the last ice age the land bridge was submerged, leaving today’s Bering Strait, and the New World was cut off from the Old World until the voyages of Leif Erikson and Christopher Columbus. In the absence of any outside stimulus, the New World fostered its own civilizations and its own scripts. While the civilizations of Peru used nongraphical record-keeping systems, such as the Inca’s quipu system of knotted cords, those of Mesoamerica (a cultural area stretching from southern Mexico to northwest Costa Rica) developed a number of graphical recording systems. Some of these systems were developed to the point of true writing while others remained conventionalized pictographic systems that were used to record certain types of information but not the full language of the speakers.

Of these Mesoamerican scripts and proto-scripts, the most advanced – and the most amply preserved for modern epigraphers – was the hieroglyphic system of the Maya. Carved on monuments in the cities of the Classic Maya and painted on their fine polychrome vases, the script was also used to make books through Post-Classic times until the Spanish conquest. It was then neglected, actively repressed, and ultimately forgotten. But the carved monuments remained, increasingly hidden by the encroaching jungle, to enthrall later generations of explorers, art historians, and decipherers.

The ultimate origin of the Maya script lies with the cultural predecessors of the Maya, the Olmec. The Olmec were the first civilization to arise in Mesoamerica, flourishing between 1200 and 400 BC (see map in the appendix, figure A.5). A number of distinctive aspects of common Mesoamerican culture had their roots in Olmec traditions: all the successors of the Olmec used a distinctive 52-year calendar (with local variations), and many of them developed writing or advanced pictographic systems that verged on true writing. The various Mesoamerican scripts are quite diverse, but they share a bar-and-dot system of numerals and the signs for the names of the calendar days. As the very earliest surviving inscriptions record almost exclusively dates, it seems likely that all the Mesoamerican scripts evolved from a calendrical system of the Olmec period.

In fact, the use of a complex calendar seems to have been the intellectual stimulus for developing writing in Mesoamerica. The 52-year Calendar Round consisted of two pieces, the Sacred Round and the Vague Year. The Sacred Round was in use before 600 BC and is still used among the Maya today. Its 260-day ritual cycle pairs 13 numbers with 20 named days. Each day that dawns has a number and a name associated with it; the following day will have the next day number in the sequence, coupled with the next name. Thus 1 Imix is followed by 2 Ik, which is followed by 3 Akbal – not unlike the way Monday the 1st (of some month) is followed by Tuesday the 2nd and Wednesday the 3rd. The fourteenth day of the sequence has the number 1 again, but not the name Imix, as the list of 20 day names will not yet be exhausted. Rather, it will be 1 Ix, followed by 2 Men, and not reaching Imix until the eighth day. It takes 260 days to run the cycle all the way around from 1 Imix through to the last day, 13 Ajaw, arriving back at 1 Imix on the two-hundred-and-sixty-first day.

Running concurrently with the Sacred Round was the calendar of the Vague Year, so called because it contained 365 days, nearly a true solar year. The Vague Year contained 18 named months of 20 numbered days each (progressing in a way more familiar to us – Pop 1 decorously followed by Pop 2, Pop 3, etc.), with an extra inauspicious five days at the end. Just as it took several individual cycles of the names and numbers of the Sacred Round to complete a full cycle from one 1 Imix around to the next 1 Imix, so the combination of the Sacred Round and the Vague Year – the time it took for a date in the Vague Year to correspond to the same number and day in the Sacred Round again – took many turns to complete, a total of 52 years. A Calendar Round date will thus repeat after 52 years, and inscribed dates using only the Calendar Round must be interpreted with the help of other archaeological evidence to determine which 52-year cycle they occur in.

The urge to record important dates seems to have spurred the forebears of the Maya to take the intellectual and technological leap into writing. Just as Sumerian writing developed in the context of conjoining numbers with words, in the need to record how many of what were to be entered in the accounting system, so the conjunction of numbers and words (here day names) may have first stimulated writing in Mesoamerica. Primitive tallies record numbers, but do not record what is being counted. Pictures, on the other hand, may record objects, but show a given number of objects by drawing that number of objects. Neither tallies nor pictures of objects are writing. But when the two are put together, they connect numbers and objects in the same way that language does, allotting one sign to the number and one to the object, just as language gives one word to each. This allows the signs to be read back in phrases, such as “four oxen” (as in Mesopotamia) or “1 Imix” (as in Mesoamerica), and the germ of writing is born. Thus while the uses of the first writing in Mesoamerica appear to be for historical rather than economic records, the intellectual roots of the system may be the same here as in Mesopotamia – in the conjunction of numbers with other words in the context of record keeping.

The Olmec had taken their first steps toward writing, based on their calendrical system, by about 650 BC. To what extent they elaborated the system into full-fledged writing is still unknown. When Olmec influence began to decline, other cultural groups asserted themselves, and by the Late Pre-Classic Period (400 BC to AD 200), three related scripts had arisen out of the Olmec prototype: the Isthmian, the Oaxacan, and the Maya. These cultures used writing as a way of legitimizing the newly developed concept of divine kingship in the emerging states. Writing served as a powerful form of propaganda, literally fixing in stone the lineage of the kings, their great deeds, and the ritually significant dates on which these deeds were supposed to have occurred. Of these writing systems, only that of the Maya is known to have reached full maturity, able to faithfully record anything they might have wanted to say.

Maya writing never forgot its debt to the calendar. Crucial to the recording of official history, in the minds of the Mesoamericans, was the recording of dates. The Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples were preoccupied with time, and dates take up a great deal of space in the ancient inscriptions.

Perhaps because of the ambiguity of the Calendar Round, the Maya of the Classic Period (ad 200 to 900) added to their dating system an additional calendar called the Long Count. The Long Count was a tally of the passage of days, retroactively begun on August 13, 3114 BC. Twenty days, or k’ins, made 1 winal. Eighteen winals made a tun of 360 days, 20 tuns made a k’atun, and 20 k’atuns a baktun (for pronunciation guidance, see figure 5.1).

Modern Mayanists have also adopted the Long Count, in the sense that it now defines the Classic Period of Maya civilization, the time during which the Maya were erecting monuments inscribed with Long Count dates. In the previous, Late Pre-Classic Period, however, much of Maya civilization was set in place. Cities were built, centered on temples and pyramids which, as in Egypt, housed dead kings. Writing appeared, and the first stelae (commemorative stone pillars) were erected in temple plazas. The earliest dated, readable Maya inscription is from AD 199.

It is during the Classic Period, however, that Mayan writing truly flourished. Although no writing on perishable materials survives from that time, there is writing painted on murals, ceramics, and cave walls, as well as carved on stelae, tombs, lintels of durable sapodilla wood, and smaller objects of pottery, jadeite, bone, and shell (see plate 4).

Maya civilization was concentrated around relatively small city-states, the chief of which seem to have been Calakmul and Tikal. Society was divided into commoners and nobility, with a hereditary king at the top. Scribes – both those who painted glyphic dedications on pottery and those who carved official history on stelae – were members of the nobility. As in other parts of the ancient world, writing was an exclusive skill, not intended for the common people, and never meant to be easy.

The Maya city-states seem to have waged nearly constant small-scale warfare with each other. A large number of the surviving records revolve around battle and the taking and subsequent torture and sacrifice of high-ranking captives. Another important theme is the ritual shedding of blood by the king and other important nobles, apparently intended to nourish the earth and to bring on visions of gods and ancestors.

In the end, the kings failed in their efforts to sustain their people and their land. The ninth century was one of increasing environmental degradation, overpopulation, and warfare. The city-states fell, and no more monuments were erected. Yet the Post-Classic Maya went on writing. They wrote in books, made of a paper-like substance produced from the inner bark of fig trees by a method reminiscent of papyrus making. Pieces of this paper were joined together into a long strip which was then folded, fan-like, into a book with pages. The surface was coated with a thin layer of a plaster-like substance, and the texts and illustrations were painted on the surface in much the same way that the stucco murals of Classic times were painted. Books are depicted in vase paintings from the Classic period, but the only Maya books now extant are four codices from Post-Classic times, one of which even post-dates the Spanish Conquest. A fifth codex exists as a decomposing fused lump of paper and plaster, unreadable and even unopenable, at least with today’s technology.

The Spanish Conquest of the Maya area began in 1527. In the eyes of the Christian Spaniards, the Maya books were filled with the most horrific idolatry, celebrating bizarre-looking gods with a gruesome taste for blood. The sooner the native people were converted to Christianity, they felt, the better. Mission schools were established to teach the Christian faith and the Roman alphabet, though academic instruction was not the only means of persuasion the early Spanish missionaries used to convert the Maya.

One man stands out, paradoxically, as both the great destroyer and the great preserver of Maya culture and writing. Diego de Landa, a Franciscan priest and later bishop of Yucatán, had a genuine interest in Maya culture and a love for the Maya people. He even went so far as to learn at least a portion of the Maya script. Yet when he saw that the Maya books were sustaining traditional beliefs and encouraging backsliding among new Christian believers, he held a now infamous grand bookburning in 1562. Other Franciscans had already burned books on smaller scales, but Landa also inflicted torture on unrepentant backsliders in his zeal to redeem their souls. Recalled to Spain to explain his actions, he wrote his Account of the Affairs of the Yucatán, giving a detailed description of all aspects of Maya life.

Among other things, Landa provided in his Account the names and glyph signs for the 20 named days of the Sacred Round and the 18 months of the Vague Year. He also recorded what he called an “ABC,” giving Maya signs as equivalents of Spanish letters, admitting that this was only a small sample of the system. Although many would-be decipherers were thrown, either by taking Landa’s ABC to mean that the Maya script was alphabetic or by dismissing Landa altogether on the grounds that the script was clearly not alphabetic, Landa’s text was in fact the only Rosetta Stone the Maya script was ever to have. What Landa had written down were signs which stood for the syllables that the Spanish pronounced as A, B, C ([a], [be], [se]), etc.

Exonerated by the authorities in Spain, Landa returned to Yucatán as bishop and died there seven years later. His Account presumably stayed in Spain, but all that now remains is an abridged copy made a century later. Thanks in part to his repression, knowledge of the Maya script was probably gone from the northern part of the Yucatán Peninsula by 1600. Yet the Spanish Conquest of Mesoamerica was a piecemeal operation, and the last Maya kingdom, that of the Petén Itza of Guatemala, remained independent until 1697. Sometime after that, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the last Maya scribe must have died.

The literacy rate had never been high among the Maya, writing having been the sacred preserve of the nobility. Knowledge of the script was therefore relatively easy to stamp out, leaving only an unusually tough puzzle for decipherers.

Meanwhile, the copy of Landa’s Account languished uncatalogued in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. Three of the four surviving Maya codices, having been brought to Europe at some point in early colonial times, led similarly obscure lives in Dresden, Paris, and Madrid. The fourth led an even more obscure existence, possibly in a cave in Chiapas, Mexico. The jungle continued to hide the great Classic cities.

The first decipherment of an ancient script was published in 1754, when the Abbé Barthelémy read his paper on the Palmyrene script to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris. Decipherments of Phoenician and Sassanian Persian followed; these scripts were all consonantal alphabets of a general type already familiar to scholars of Hebrew. In the nineteenth century came decipherments of the great logographic scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. Thus the combination of curiosity and academic rigor that made ancient scripts both intriguing and decipherable was an Enlightenment phenomenon which the living Maya script missed by mere decades.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth, explorers began to visit the ruins of Palenque and Copán and eventually the other great cities of the Classic Maya, publishing reports of the great ruined buildings, the imposing pyramids, and the stelae with their intricately carved pictures and accompanying hieroglyphs.

Even when it was realized that the Maya codices were in the same script as the monumental inscriptions of the ruined cities, progress on decipherment was slow. First there was a scarcity of accurate reproductions from which to work. Then there was the trouble of identifying the language. Despite the continued presence of the Maya people (today numbering 5 or 6 million speakers, divided among the 31 related languages of the Mayan language family), it was some time before scholars accepted that the language the script recorded actually was Mayan, and that the cities had been built by the Maya people. Surely, they thought, such a great civilization must have belonged to a more advanced people than the North Americans – perhaps even to the citizens of lost Atlantis. The rediscovery of Landa’s Account in 1862 put paid to that idea, but making a careful study of the modern Mayan languages, such as Champollion made of Coptic, did not occur to most of the early Mayanist scholars. Similarly, very few of those working on Maya glyphs had a background in other ancient scripts, a background which would have suggested a number of useful parallels.

Misapplication of Landa’s ABC as an alphabet rather than a syllabary delayed the decipherment as well. The other information Landa recorded, regarding the day and month names, proved much more useful, but paradoxically the progress made on deciphering Maya dates slowed the linguistic decipherment of the script and its acceptance as a full writing system rather than merely an intricate calendar. The extant codices dwell heavily on astronomical cycles and calendrical almanacs, while the monumental inscriptions give pride of place to dates; so the misperception of the Maya script as being almost entirely calendrical in nature was an easy one to acquire.

A typical Maya inscription begins with the so-called Initial Series. First there is the Initial Series Introductory Glyph (shown in figure 5.2), usually given double sized, not unlike the capital letters that begin chapters in many modern books. Then follows a Long Count date, usually given in full, with the number of baktuns, k’atuns, tuns, winals, and k’ins that had passed since August 13, 3114 BC. Then follows a Calendar Round date, with the day name and number of the Sacred Round, and the numbered day and named month in the Vague Year. Between the two parts of the Calendar Round date there is usually inserted a Supplementary Series indicating which of the nine Lords of the Underworld ruled that particular day, the phase of the moon, the name of the current lunar month, and the length (29 or 30 days) of that month. All this before any content regarding what happened on that date and who did it!

It is no surprise, then, that the astronomical and calendrical aspects of the Maya script were the first to be understood. Much of the credit goes to Ernst Förstemann, who in 1867 became the librarian at Dresden and thus curator of the Dresden Codex. The basic system of numerals was very simple and already understood: the Maya used a dot to represent one, and a bar to represent five. Förstemann realized that the Maya number system was vigesimal (base 20), rather than decimal (base 10) like ours, and that it used a sign for the completion of a unit of 20 that could function as a place-holder in larger numbers – effectively the equivalent of the place-holding zero that makes our decimal system of Arabic numerals so efficient. He worked out how the Long Count and the Sacred Round worked, and identified tables in the Dresden Codex that referred to cycles of the planet Venus and of the Moon.

Were the Maya inscriptions, then, just records of sacred dates carved by a race of calendar priests? Given that the dates could be read, while any other content remained undeciphered, this was a reasonable hypothesis. But that view was to change, starting in 1958 when Heinrich Berlin, a German settled in Mexico, published his discovery of what he called Emblem Glyphs. These were glyphs of a particular structure: the upper and left-hand parts were invariant, while the main signs varied according to the location where they were found – Tikal, Naranjo, Yaxchilán, Palenque, Copán, etc. Whether they recorded the names of these cities or their dynasties, tutelary deities, or rulers, the Emblem Glyphs seemed rooted in the geo-political world of the Maya rather than in abstract dates.

Then in 1960 the Russian-American Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff made a remarkable discovery. Studying the rows of stelae standing in front of the Maya pyramids, she noted that each row of stelae recorded dates within a relatively narrow range – arguably a single lifespan. Perhaps the dates recorded the reigns of individual rulers, she reasoned. Two dates in each series received special prominence and occurred with particular glyphs; these particular dates were not repeated on rows of stelae found elsewhere, but the accompanying glyphs were. So the specific dates, which were separated by a period ranging from 12 to 31 years, were significant to only one ruler, but the events that occurred then (recorded in the accompanying glyphs) were shared by other rulers. Proskouriakoff concluded that the dates recorded the birth and accession of the Maya kings.

With Berlin’s and Proskouriakoff’s discoveries, it became clear that the stelae of the Maya cities recorded actual historical events (at least the “official” history) rather than being dedicated to the abstract concept of time. The stelae were actually saying something, and it became the more incumbent upon Mayanists to find out what.

With careful analysis it became possible to identify which glyphs were the names of rulers and which identified the events they commemorated. But as there was yet no way to actually read out the glyphs in Mayan, the glyphs took on colorful nicknames. The “upended frog” glyph indicated birth, while the “toothache” glyph represented accession to the kingship (figure 5.2). Royal personages were given nicknames like Shield Jaguar, 18 Rabbit, and Lady Beastie.

In retrospect we know that by the time Proskouriakoff published her discoveries, an important breakthrough in unlocking the linguistic content of Maya glyphs had already been made. But it had been made in Russia, by Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov in the 1950s. Cold War politics did little to make Knorosov’s ideas attractive to Western scholars, and certain inconsistencies in his approach left him open to much criticism. In fact, few of the specific decipherments that he put forward have stood the test of time, though his general approach marked a significant turning point.

Unlike many other Mayanists, Knorosov was well acquainted with other ancient scripts. Given the number of signs in the Maya script (around 700), he reasoned that it was likely to be a logosyllabary, like Akkadian cuneiform. Landa’s alphabet, he correctly guessed, was actually a disguised syllabary, the signs standing for the syllables with which the Spanish pronounced the letters of the alphabet. This would explain why Landa had listed, along with the letters of the alphabet, some clearly syllabic signs, including ones labeled “ca” and “cu.” The syllabic signs, Knorosov assumed, would often be used as phonetic complements, so that if he knew how a syllabogram was pronounced, he could find (at least part of) the phonetic value of the accompanying logogram, and vice versa. Confirmation of correct readings came from the pictographic nature of the logograms, from illustrations accompanying the text in the Dresden Codex, and from Mayan dictionaries of the colonial period. Thus the syllable tzu plus the syllable lu made tzul, which was recorded to mean “dog” in an early post-Conquest Maya dictionary. Furthermore, the word tzul appeared over a picture of a dog god in the Dresden Codex. This confirmed the decipherment of the syllables tzu and lu.

As is usually true in a syllabary, the signs stood for a consonant–vowel (CV) sequence. But since Mayan words generally end in a consonant if they do not have suffixes appended to them, spelling a word out syllabically often left a silent vowel at the end of the word. By a principle Knorosov called “synharmony,” the silent vowel would match the previous vowel, a spelling strategy reminiscent of the recently deciphered Linear B script of Crete (see chapter 6). So tzu plus lu was to be read tzul, not tzulu. There turned out to be many exceptions to the principle of synharmony, and these apparent inconsistencies helped to justify the disbelief with which Knorosov’s work was almost universally greeted in the West. The exceptions have only recently been given a satisfactory explanation: when synharmony fails, and a final silent vowel is different from the previous, pronounced vowel, it indicates something about the quality of the previous vowel – that it is long, or followed by [h] or a glottal stop ([?], the unspelled sound that begins both syllables of uh-oh). At first this seems to be a bizarre interpretation, but it is in fact not unreasonable: after all, the length of vowels in English is frequently indicated by a final silent vowel, in words such as make, line, and home.

Despite Knorosov’s progress, some Western scholars continued to deny that there was any phonological component to Maya writing at all, and to claim that the glyphs were not true writing but merely ideograms, representing concepts but not actually recording language. Things began to change in the 1970s, however, as more American Mayanists became convinced that Knorosov had been on the right track. Mayanists began to get together to collaborate on decipherment and exchange ideas in brainstorming sessions, often at the instigation of art historian Linda Schele.

The linguist Floyd Lounsbury gave the decipherment efforts some much-needed rigor with his study of substitutable glyphs. Glyphs that could be substituted for each other in the same context must either (a) represent the same sound, (b) represent the same meaning, or (c) be contrasting members of the same category (in the sense that, for example, the English suffixes -ed and -ing are both in the category of verbal inflections – they can both be used as suffixes to a verb like walk, but they cannot be used simultaneously).

The decipherment crept forward, slowly gaining momentum, until the 1980s, which saw the opening of the floodgates. This was in part thanks to the young David Stuart, who was raised on Maya archaeology and presented his first paper on Maya decipherment in 1978 at the age of 12. Since then Stuart has remained at the forefront of Maya decipherment, rigorously applying the principle of phonetic complements and substitution patterns, and carefully testing his proposed decipherments both in the context of associated illustrations and in the context of other texts. Does a proposed reading of a glyph, he asks, produce a meaning that squares with what the associated illustrations suggest is being discussed in the text? And does the reading combine with glyphs in other texts to produce a meaningful reading?

Other Mayanists, many of them art historians, have contributed to the effort. Just as Champollion’s recognition of the ibis as a symbol for the god Thoth was important to his breakthrough in Egyptian hieroglyphs, so a growing understanding of Maya iconography has been important to the Maya decipherment.

The decipherment is now significantly advanced. Many logograms can be read, and reconstruction of the syllabary is nearly complete (figure 5.1). In recent years the phonological decipherment has advanced to the point where texts can be read well enough to give linguistic detail on the language, rather than just bare outlines. This means that a particular question can now be considered with some hope of an answer: which Mayan language, exactly, do the inscriptions record? Earlier work suggested either a language of the Ch’olan subfamily or the Yucatecan subfamily, or a mixture of both; but recently David Stuart and collaborators Stephen Houston and John Robertson have made a strong case that the language of the glyphs was a prestige language they have dubbed Classic Ch’olti’an, which belonged to the Ch’olan subfamily. In other words, the Maya followed the same pattern as other literate cultures: a particular version of the language, once written down, became fossilized and spread beyond its original sphere to others who wished to acquire writing. The written language ignored many of the differences of language and dialect that occurred over time and space in the spoken language.

Even without an individual Champollion, the Maya glyphs have finally been persuaded to divulge the majority of their secrets. While early Mayanists may be faulted for their lack of cross-cultural training (of the sort that allowed Knorosov to make his breakthrough) or for their lack of interest in actually learning Mayan languages, it is nevertheless true that the Maya decipherment has been an objectively difficult task. For one thing, there simply has not been available the extensive corpus that exists for Egyptian hieroglyphs or for Mesopotamian cuneiform (most of whose hundreds of thousands of excavated tablets have yet to be read, due to their overwhelming quantity). The longest Maya inscription ascends along the hieroglyphic stairway of Copán. It describes Copán’s dynastic history in the space of about 2,500 glyphs. Most surviving Maya texts are much shorter. Many of the longer texts are painted or carved on ceramics; these may number up to 84 glyphs. This is very short indeed compared to the Egyptian funerary papyri of the Book of the Dead, or the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh. The range of topics dealt with is also limited: dates take up much of the inscriptions, and virtually all texts are in the third person singular. First- and second-person forms are so rare that they have only recently been identified.

Figure 5.1 The Maya syllabary (incomplete). Additional variant signs exist, and continued decipherment is identifying further signs.

A final and not insubstantial reason for the slow decipherment of Maya glyphs is the system’s complexity. It was difficult to decipher because the system just plain is very difficult. Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, where each sign stands alone as a discrete picture of something that is often recognizable even to modern eyes, Maya glyphs are hard to take in visually. Complex patterns and grotesque faces are jammed together into ornate, dice-shaped blocks. While the principles of Maya writing may be familiar to those acquainted with cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, visually Maya glyphs are like nothing found outside Mesoamerica.

Here, roughly, is how the system works. A Maya text is composed of visually discrete glyph blocks. These are nearly square, but with rounded corners, like dice. The glyph blocks are laid out in one of several possible arrangements: a line, column, L- or T-shape, or grid. The reading order is face-on, which is almost always left-to-right, and top-to-bottom. A grid of glyph blocks is read in double columns, so that the leftmost two glyphs of the top row are read first, followed by the leftmost two of the second row, until the bottom is reached and the reading picks up at the third and fourth glyphs of the top row, etc.

A glyph block is usually composed of two or more pieces – the individual signs of the Mayan logosyllabary. (This is like the Egyptian practice of putting hieroglyphs into square or rectangular arrangements, or the Chinese practice of squeezing together compound characters, but there is no open space left between individual parts of a glyph block.) Within a glyph block, one sign – the main sign– will be shown larger than the others, and squarer (though still with rounded edges). The main sign will often be a logogram and represent the root of a word, but syllabograms may also occur as main signs. Surrounding the main sign will be one or more affixes (meaning here graphical signs added to the main sign, not linguistic affixes added to the root of a word). The affixes are longer and narrower than the main sign. They may be appended on the left, top, right, or bottom of the main sign and are hence known as prefixes, superfixes, postfixes, and subfixes respectively. Affixes tend to be numbers, phonetic complements, pronouns, or verbal suffixes. Yet there is no formal distinction between what may be a main sign and what may be an affix: the affix of one glyph block may appear, plumped out, as a main sign in another. The orientation of an affix will change according to whether it is being used horizontally (as a superfix or subfix) or vertically (as a prefix or postfix). Thus an affix that stands tall and narrow as a prefix to the left of one main sign will appear rotated 90 degrees as a short and wide superfix on another main sign. A glyph block is generally, but not always, read in the order prefix, superfix, main sign, subfix, postfix (in other words, left, top, center, bottom, right). Figure 5.2 shows examples of glyph blocks.

A glyph block can be further complicated by including two slightly overlapping main signs, or by conflating signs – that is, adding distinctive aspects of one sign to the general shape of another.

One bewildering aspect of the Maya script is its rich variety. As in other early scripts, spellings could alternate between phonological and logographic forms, and vary in the number of phonetic complements used. Sometimes the variations were due to the requirements of space, but the Maya scribes appear to have taken special delight in using as many different spellings as possible. Even logograms could occur in more than one form. Humans, animals, gods, and other supernatural creatures (which included units of time in this calendrically obsessed culture) often had both a symbolic (abstract) form and a head variant, showing the individual in profile with its identifying features. Even numbers, normally the easiest part of the Maya system, had head variants, the numbers 1 through 12 represented by their patron deities, and 13 through 19 represented by a conflation of the deity for 10 and those for the numbers 3 through 9. As if two versions of the logograms were not enough, sometimes a being rated a full-figure glyph, a miniature-scale portrait, complete with associated objects and attributes, embedded in the text.

To further complicate matters, the Maya system, like cuneiform, contains a fair amount of polyvalence, by which a single sign may be read in more than one way. This on top of the various ways to spell a single word, or to spell two words that are homonyms! This apparently inefficient variety is typical of early writing systems, and Knorosov’s education prepared him for this aspect of Maya. Other Mayanists, however, found the complication unintuitive and were the less inspired to believe that Knorosov’s approach to decipherment was going in the right direction.

Figure 5.2 Examples of Maya glyphs. Top two rows: variant spellings of balam (“jaguar”) and pakal (“shield”), using logograms, phonetic complements, and syllabic spellings. Third row, a date in the Sacred Round, 13 Ajaw, showing the bar-and-dot system of numerals and the tripod cartouche for day signs. Also shown are the head variant form of 13 and a version of the Initial Series Introductory Glyph. Bottom row: the “upended frog” and “toothache” glyphs identified by Proskouriakoff, signifying birth and accession to kingship.

In one way, however, Maya does not behave like other early scripts. Given a logosyllabic system with heavy use of phonetic complements, where are the semantic determinatives? If the Maya did use determinatives, it was on nowhere near the scale of the Akkadians, the Egyptians, or even the Chinese with their system of radicals. The cartouche on three legs that surrounds the day signs of the Sacred Round may be a determinative; as far as anyone knows there was no pronunciation associated with it. But it is still not settled which signs or parts of signs, if any, may have functioned as determinatives. The less conspicuous presence – or even absence – of determinatives in the Maya system serves as a reminder that each of the ancient traditions of writing was an intellectual accomplishment in its own right, created with its own quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Despite the restricted content of surviving Maya material, it is clear – from the extent of the syllabary, if nothing else – that the Maya could have written down anything in their language that they cared to. In this respect they outstripped their neighbors, and even their cultural successors. The Aztecs, whose empire rose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only to be destroyed by the Spanish in 1521, used their proto-writing as a labeling or captioning system in their illustrated books, but not to write out texts.

Though knowledge of the Maya script was lost in the eighteenth century, the Maya themselves are still there, still living and speaking Mayan languages in their traditional homeland. Since the days of Bishop Landa, those languages have been written in the Roman alphabet. But with the advances in modern decipherment and a new spirit of cooperation between Mayanist scholars and the modern Maya, the script is now being returned to its original people. Maya glyphs can finally be removed from the long and tragic casualty list of the Old World’s collision with the New.