Mayan Script

The Mayan civilisation lasted from 500 BC to 1200 AD, with a classical period from 300-900 AD. The earliest known writing in the Mayan script dates from about 250 BC, but the script is thought to have developed at an earlier date.

The Maya script, commonly known as Maya hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE, and writing was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century CE. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing. Maya writing was called "hieroglyphics" or "hieroglyphs" by early European explorers of the 18th and 19th century who did not understand it but found its general appearance reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, to which the Maya writing system is not related.

In about 1566, the first bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, compiled a key to the Mayan syllabary consisting of 27 Spanish letters and the Mayan glyphs with similar sounds. This became known as the Landa Alphabet and helped with the decipherment of the script, even though it was based on the false premise that the script was alphabetic.

For a long time many scholars believed that the script did not represent a language at all, or that it wasn't a complete writing system. The first major breakthrough in decipherment came during the 1950s when a Russian ethnologist, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, proposed that the Mayan script was at least partly phonetic and represented the Yucatec Mayan language. His ideas were not welcomed by other Mayanists, but he was eventually proved correct.

Further progress in the decipherment was made during the 1970s and 1980s when more linguistics began to take an interest in the script. Today most Mayan texts can be read, though there are still some unknown glyphs.

A gripping account of the decipherment of the Mayan script can be found in Breaking the Maya Code, by Micheal D. Coe.

The Yucatec Maya continued to use the Mayan script until at least the 16th century. Recently, their descendants have started to learn the script once again from the scholars who have deciphered it.

Notable features

- The Mayan script is logosyllabic combining about 550 logograms (which represent whole words) and 150 syllabograms (which represent syllables). There were also about 100 glyphs representing place names and the names of gods. About 300 glyphs were commonly used.

- Examples of the script have been found carved in stone and written on bark, wood, jade, ceramics, and a few manuscripts in Mexico, Guatemala and northern Belize.

- Many syllables can be represented by more than one glyph

- The script was usually written in paired vertical columns reading from left to right and top to bottom in a zigzag pattern.

The Mayan Syllabary