WRITING

Anthropologists point to writing as one of the great milestones on a civilization’s road of advancement. The ancient Maya are heralded for the development of their writing system, one of the few in the New World prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. Recording family genealogies, the movement of plants and stars, the history of centers, and religious philosophy, hieroglyphs are an important link to understanding ancient Maya thought and cosmogony, information that has been difficult to piece together as much of it was oppressed and destroyed in the wake of the Spanish Conquest.

Stelae

Some say the Maya filled their centers with stone trees and stone mountains, that the Maya always looked to recreate the sacred, natural world in their constructed one. Standing slabs of carved or blank stone found in Maya sites, called stelae by archaeologists, are referred to as te-tun (“stone trees”) in Mayan. Plazas are full of stone trees; they stand like swaths of tropical rain forest. Surrounding them are temples, or sacred stone mountains, with lofty doorways, opening into a hollow space, like the mouth of a cave at a mountain’s peak. Even today, caves are seen as the maws into the Otherworld (Schele and Freidel 1990).

Stelae dot the plazas of Copan, Tikal, Quirigua, Calakmul, and many other Maya sites. The carved stone trees tell of the lives of ahaws, the Maya long associated trees with lineage (Pohl 1981). Hieroglyphs record a ruler’s lineage—who his mother, father, and grandfathers were—and tell of the ahaw’s greatest successes in war, of marriages, and of ahaw inaugurations. Testament to one’s heritage was critical to the Maya. Ahaws were rulers because sacred blood circulated through their bodies. Illustrating their relationship to past ahaws and proving their descent from this spiritual line was the premise on which they maintained the right to rule.

An ahaw commissioned an artist to carve into stone the history of his rulership. The artists were studied craftsmen (predominately male), celebrated and sought after for their expertise. They carved limestone or in some areas sandstone shafts with flint chisels and hammers. Once designed, many stelae were covered with a layer of stucco and then painted with red, orange, blue, green, and cream-colored paints; pigment was probably mixed with copal resin, creating a durable varnish (Sharer 1994). Traces and pockets of the color can still be found on some stelae. Quality was defined by the detail and depth of a cut, and how three-dimensional a portrait looked. The stelae of Copan, carved in a volcanic rock called trachyte, are particularly renowned for their beauty; many of them border on sculpture. In later times styles changed and the stone slabs were not carved upon. It has been speculated, but not proven, that these blank slabs were instead painted.

The carved, low cylinders set in front of many stelae are called throne stones, suggesting that ahaws sat on the decorated seats as ceremonies proceeded in the surrounding plazas. The thrones tones, also called altars (although epigraphic evidence suggests that they were not used as altars), generally depict a prisoner lying face down with ankles and hands tied behind the back. Hieroglyphs on the throne stones and stelae indicate that the prisoners were in fact captured ahaws or nobility from other centers who were demonstrated his worth and mettle as a leader. The capture, rather than the sacrifice, of an ahaw was the victory worth committing to stone, although, ultimately, high-ranking captives appear to have been sacrificed, often in conjunction with the ritualized ball game (discussed later in this chapter). Carvings of these bound and captive prizes are often associated with inauguration ceremonies of kings who did the capturing.

Hieroglyphs

The first attempt to decipher the Mayan glyphs was made in 1556 by the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa. He likened various glyphs to letters in the Spanish alphabet but failed to understand that the Mayan writing system was not based on an alphabet; his work has, however, made an invaluable contribution not the understanding of Mayan writing. The next major attempt at decipherment was undertaken in 1880 by Ernest Förstemann, a librarian at the Dresden Royal Library. His breakthroughs in untangling the Maya calendar led to the theory that recording time held great importance to the Maya. Scholars continued to chip away at the deciphering process through the twentieth century but without great success—or not until Yuri Knorozov, from the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, closely examined Landa’s alphabet in the 1950s and made revolutionary strides in understanding the Maya’s use of syllables. For various reasons his work was not accepted by the western academic community until the 1960s. Contemporary with but unaware of the work of Knorozov, an independent scholar, Heinrich Berlin, made discoveries about a type of glyph known today as an emblem glyph. In the recent past emblem glyphs have played a key role in reconstructing the political history of the Maya.

An important discovery, made by Russian-American scholar Taiana Proskouriakoff in the late 1950s, demonstrated that the dates on many monuments were marking important events in the lives of ahaws and their families. By the 1960s scholars were beginning to understand that the Mayan writing system consisted of a combination of syllables and logographs and that the message they scrolled out was the history of Maya ahaws. Decipherment has since made rapid strides, particularly in the last fifteen years (Stuart and Houston 1989). The breadth of knowledge about, and decipherment of, the glyphs is expanding quickly, and no doubt new insights will be uncovered in coming years.

Symbols used in Mayan writing, like most aspects of Maya life, were sacred, quite unlike the currently used symbols of the alphabet, which have no commonly accepted transcendental significance. The Spaniards, who sought to destroy the spirit of the Maya, forced them to abandon the use of hieroglyphs and to adopt the Spanish alphabet. Meaning was drained from written symbols, serving to further distance the Maya from their spiritual life and knowledge.

The use of hieroglyphs in Mesoamerica date back as early as 700 B.C. to an inscribed monument at Oaxaca. The Maya eventually took from this established system, expanded it, and made it their own (Stuart and Houston 1989). Hieroglyphs were not only carved into stelae and altars but also sides of buildings, stairways, boulders, rock outcroppings, benches, and wooden beams, as well as being painted on almost any smooth surface and I bark paper codices.

The Maya combined writing and drawing when expressing themselves in hieroglyphs. Their writing consisted of both logographs (a picture representing a word) and syllables (a picture representing a syllable). Most often, syllables and pictures were combined to form glyph blocks—these are the square shapes lining the sides and backs of many stelae and monuments. They read from left to right and top to bottom in pairs of two. Many Mayan words can be written as groups of syllables or as a single word. For example, in Mayan, the term ahaw (meaning “lord” or “noble”) can be carved as three syllables—A HW WA combined together—or as a single picture depicting he profile of a man with the headband of a noble (see Fig. 3) (Stuart and Houston 1989).

Just as in modern languages, one word could have a variety of meanings, allowing the Maya to create puns within their texts. The Maya scribes combined writing, humor, and art to the point of bringing their expressions and numbers to life: humans and animals became words and interacted with syllables as well as one another. These most stylized signs are called full-figured glyphs (Sharer 1994).

When a Maya center reached a notable level of power, it developed a special glyph to identify and distinguish itself from other centers—this “emblem” glyph acted as a signature. Composed of three parts, the emblem glyph has a superfix, a special prefix, and a third main sign specifying the particular center. For example, Copan’s main sign is that of a bat with noseleaf (see Fig. 4 and Jamaican fruit-eating bat); the meaning of this and many other main emblem glyph signs remain elusive, although they may refer to a particular ruling lineage or place, or perhaps both (Sharer 1994). Emblem glyphs have played an important role in archaeologists’ reconstruction of Maya political history.

Codices

As Spanish friars tried to convert the Maya to Christianity, great effort was made to destroy all Mayan literature; the friars felt the books only promoted the Maya’s paganism. In Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatan, he describes an incident of book burning and comments, with a note of surprise, at how greatly the maya were pained by the destruction (Tozzer 1941). Parts of a few of the books remain today and are known as the codices.

At least three Maya codices exist each named after the city in which they now reside: Dresden, Madrid, and Paris. They are the writings of the Maya before Spanish influence; the Dresden Codex, for example, dates to the thirteenth century (Tedlock 1985).

Strips of bark from the strangler fig were polished smooth, washed in a white stucco, and then folded like an accordion into screens to make the codices. Hieroglyphs and pictures painted in black, red, and other colors recorded astronomical and mathematical information on the screens. Some pages contain numerical calculations into the millions, counting out cycles of the moon, its eclipses, as well as the complex movements of Venus and Mars. Many of the planetary positions were accurately figured to the day (Aveni 1992).