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Olmec

The only generally accepted Olmec text appears on La Venta Monument 13, dating to the Terminal Olmec period (ca. 450–300 BC). A column of three glyphs in front of the striding figure is widely thought to be a caption referring to that person. However, Lacadena (2008) plausibly suggests that the footprint symbol behind the striding figure, an iconographic indicator of travel in Postclassic screenfolds, on this monument is a hieroglyph that represents a verb and that it completes a two-column text stating something like ‘N traveled’—in Mixe-Zoquean word order.

A plausible one-glyph caption appears on a stela from San Miguel Amuco, Guerrero (600–500 BC; Grove and Paradis 1971: Fig. 2). A day name may be recorded on a jade “spoon” (evidently a paint/ink palette; Covarrubias 1946: Fig. 24), which might, for example, name its owner; there is another perhaps in a mural at Oxtotitlan (Grove 1970: Fig. 15). Other Middle Formative Olmec notations may be in an emerging writing system, but they are as likely to be part of specialized subsystems of Olmec iconography from which writing systems may have emerged (see “Precursors” below).

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Epi-Olmec

Currently just twelve epi-Olmec texts are known; six of these have substantially legible noncalendrical sign sequences. Although the earliest, on a potsherd from Chiapa de Corzo, dates to the Terminal Olmec period (450–300 BC), and some epi-Olmec signs plausibly have Olmec iconographic sources, there is no direct evidence that epi-Olmec writing is a later stage of an Olmec script.

During the Late Formative, the epi-Olmec script is associated with what has been traditionally recognized as the epi-Olmec cultural tradition (Lowe 1989: 61–65; Diehl 2004; Pool 2007). Cultural descendants of the Olmec tradition continued especially to the northwest, in the Tuxtlas and northward into the Papaloapan Basin, and in the southeast around Chiapa de Corzo. In the Isthmus—the zone of low elevation between the Gulf Coast and the Pacific—the Olmec tradition faded away. Epi-Olmec texts come exclusively from the two epi-Olmec zones; not one is known from the Isthmus proper.

During the Formative period, this script represented pre-proto-Zoquean, a Zoquean language descending from proto-Mixe-Zoquean but retaining archaic features lost by the proto-Zoquean stage (Justeson and Kaufman 1993; Kaufman and Justeson 2004: 1104). Two substantially legible texts dating to the Early Classic period—a brief text on Cerro de las Mesas Stela 6 dating to 468 AD, and a long text on a Teotihuacan-style mask arguably dating between 386 and 523 AD—provide no evidence concerning these archaisms.

Mayan

The earliest definitively Mayan texts—conforming throughout to Mayan grammar, phonology, and vocabulary (Mora-Marín 2001: Chapter 6)—date to the Late Formative period.

Several earlier texts are plausibly but not demonstrably Mayan. The earliest with signs in the Mayan tradition is on the El Portón stela (450–350 BC, Sharer and Sedat 1987; cf. Justeson and Mathews 1990: 97,115). More suggestive are texts from Takalik Abaj. Its recently discovered Altar 48, dating to ca. 350 BC, bears glyphs in definitively Mayan forms, but debate surrounds the identification of its language as Mixe-Zoquean versus Mayan. By the Late Formative, the site is pretty clearly Mayan. At 125 AD, Stela 5 from the same site has a sign for the title ?aajaaw ‘lord, ruler’ whose pronunciation is verified by the syllabogram wa that follows; while the spelling for this title could have been borrowed, it is so far unknown within demonstrably non-Mayan texts, and the same monument exhibits a stage in the development of a seemingly exclusively Mayan concept of zero out of a system of positional notation (Justeson 2010: 48–49).

Perhaps somewhat later are texts from Kaminaljuyú; the earliest, Kaminaljuyú “Stela” 10, dates to late in the Verbena phase (400–200 BC). Texts from San Bartolo, which date as early as 300–200 BC (Saturno et al. 2006), include not only signs but also sign groups that later have Mayan interpretations. The San Bartolo texts appear to be in the same or a closely related writing system as Kaminaljuyú Stela 10, given that so many signs in the tiny attested inventories are common to both; these include otherwise exclusively Mayan signs for the title ?aajaaw ‘lord, ruler’ and a variant of the otherwise epi-Olmec syllabogram for si.

There is not enough internal evidence for reading any Kaminaljuyú or San Bartolo text in a particular language, but location and overall continuities in sign forms and style suggest that San Bartolo’s texts represent a Mayan language. Vocabulary data so far are not definitive. Just three words seem relatively secure, all from Kaminaljuyú Stela 10 (Figure 63.3); each is calendrical and susceptible to borrowing in language or script. However, these words establish at least that a Greater Tzeltalan Mayan language, in or ancestral to the Ch’olan branch, was somewhere being written by 200 BC.

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