Mayan Epigraphy

Mayan hieroglyphic texts were probably created for two thousand years, from before 300 bce until the fall of the Itzás in 1697. Texts were mostly painted, and many writers were skilled artists. Most writers and readers were probably calendar priests who were members of royal families, but beautifully executed royal inscriptions were carved on stone monuments for semipublic display; most surviving texts are from this genre.

The language or languages written in these texts were ancestors of some of the roughly thirty Mayan languages spoken today. The Ch'olan and Tzeltalan languages may descend from the language of the earliest texts. There is consensus among epigraphers that, in the Classic period (c. 250–900 ce), Southern Lowland inscriptions were written in a form of Ch'olan, though they differ on whether it was an ancestor of all the Ch'olan languages or only of modern Ch'ortí and now-extinct colonial Ch'oltí. Many Lowland Northern texts exhibit Yucatecan features; some epigraphers argue that most or all texts at some of these sites were Yucatecan, others that they were written in Ch'olan as a prestige language.

PRINCIPLES

The basic principles of Mayan writing are well understood. Most signs are logograms, representing whole words; epigraphers transcribe them in capital letters, thus WHITE or SAK for the logogram spelling sak, "white." All other signs (syllabograms) represent syllables; they are transcribed in lowercase bold letters.

Because every syllable in ancient Lowland Mayan languages began with a consonant followed by a vowel, so does every syllabogram—indeed, almost all represent a simple consonant-vowel sequence (a few represent a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence). However, many Mayan syllables (including the last in most words) end in a consonant. Accordingly, in phonetic spellings there is a mismatch between the structure of the script and that of the language it represents. Faced with the final l of a word pronounced tajal, for example, scribes had two choices: they could fail to spell the consonant at all, or they could spell it as though it were a syllable beginning with l. Almost always, they chose to spell the consonant—in this case, using the sign la.

Words could be spelled by logograms alone or by syllabograms alone. Often, syllabograms were used as phonetic complements to logograms, indicating the pronunciation of the beginning or ending of a word. Grammatical affixes were spelled by syllabograms; when attached to logograms, these spellings may have originated as instances of phonetic complementation.

Several syllable types existed in early Lowland Mayan languages. Using C to stand for any consonant, and V to stand for any vowel, these syllables were CV, CVV, CVC, CVVC, CVhC, CVjC, or CV′C. However, individual syllabograms do not distinguish vowel length or the presence versus absence of preconsonantal h, j, or ′. Outside of compound words, there is no definite example of preconsonantal h, j, or ′ being written explicitly by a CV sign; epigraphers disagree on whether such distinctions were made in word-final syllables by spelling conventions, using unpronounced vowels in CV signs that spell word-final consonants.

Hieroglyphic writing was not a static system. Over time, Mayan scribes increased their use of phonetic spellings, seemingly in large part by extending the use of particular signs from contexts in which they were already established to other, phonetically or grammatically similar contexts.

DECIPHERMENT

Signs for numerals were recognizable from their tally-like structure, with bars for fives and dots for ones. They were usually juxtaposed with names of the months, or (1 through 13 only) with signs for the twenty named days of the 260-day divinatory calendar. This, together with ethnographic and ethnohistoric parallels, made it possible to reconstruct the calendar system. Calendrical data—especially differences among dates associated with specific glyphic expressions—permitted the recognition of a broad range of content, including a variety of calendrical expressions (e.g., names of days and months, and words for several time periods), astronomical phenomena (e.g., eclipses), and historical data (e.g., names of rulers and dates in their lives, whose span, at a particular site, do not exceed a human lifetime).

The most useful early aid to decipherment was the close correspondence between the content of text and imagery in divinatory manuals from Postclassic Yucatán. The Dresden and Madrid screenfolds in particular include hundreds of images accompanied by short hieroglyphic captions or comments. These image-caption pairs are grouped into "almanacs" treating particular topics; in the captions, at least one feature—the action, the location, the subject, or the object—remains relatively constant throughout the almanac, while at least one of them varies. This correspondence made it possible to identify glyphic expressions associated with particular supernaturals, plants, animals, birds, locations, and activities. Often, the correspondence had independent support, for example when a logogram closely resembled the corresponding element or the glyphic word occurred in the scene corresponding to itself. The imagery helped epigraphers understand the overt meaning of these passages, however obscure their point remained.

Large colonial dictionaries of Yucatec—the native language of the Mayas of Yucatán—were searched for words corresponding to these entities. A large number of signs could be assigned CV pronunciations because these signs occur in spellings of two or more words of appropriate meaning in which the corresponding CV sequence occurs; in many cases, the same sign spells a consonant at the end of a word. The close match of Yucatec vocabulary to that of these manuals was crucial to advancing Mayan decipherment; historically, this process was helped by a kind of bilingual text, Diego de Landa's representation of the Spanish alphabet in hieroglyphs, but this was not essential and was not even properly understood until the decipherment was well established.

Ethnographically attested Mayan month names made it possible to identify signs for several words and syllables in Classic spellings of these names. This provided the first direct evidence that the Classic month names were Ch'olan; a Ch'olan identity for the Southern Lowland inscriptions was already suggested (by 1920) on geolinguistic grounds.

Systematic grammatical analysis was, uncharacteristically, the last major phase of Mayan decipherment. The spelling system interfered with the recognition of some grammatical elements in the most complex part of Mayan grammar, the structure of verbs. To cite one example, intransitive verbs ordinarily ended with a suffix −i, as in Table 1.

This suffix was hard to recover because the same sign does not represent it in each occurrence: it must be spelled by a sign for the preceding consonant +i, so by at least with twenty different signs. As a result, this common verb type was one of the last to be understood or even recognized.

See alsoMayan Alphabet and Orthography; Knorosov, Yuri.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bricker, Victoria R. "Mayan." In Roger D. Woodard, editor, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Coe, Michael D. Breaking the Maya Code. Revised edition. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999.

Harris, John F., and Stephen K. Stearns. Understanding Maya Inscriptions: A Hieroglyph Handbook. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Kettunen, Harri, and Christophe Helmke. Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs. 2005. Available online at http://www.mesoweb.com/resources/handbook/WH2005.pdf.

                                            John Justeson