This already begins to make the system feel more familiar to me, and at least comparable with others I have studied in the past, such as various forms of cuneiform in which Akkadograms and Sumerograms have a logographic function alongside the more common syllabographic signs – although the abstract wedge-shaped nature of cuneiform signs is a far cry from the pictorial Mayan ones, and Mayan allows far more flexibility in the different ways in which signs can be combined. We can describe the Mayan script as a logosyllabic system, with some signs standing for whole words (logograms) and some for syllables (syllabograms), which can also be combined with each other. Order of reading of the beginning of a stele from Yaxchilan. Figure 3 illustrates this more effectively (though in this case the top of the first double column contains a single wider glyph).įigure 3.

Firstly, there is a standard way of reading columns of glyphs, which tended to involve reading two glyphs in a dextroverse direction (left to right), then moving down to the next row and doing the same until you get to the bottom, after which you start at the top of the next double column. However, while the degree of variation is almost alarming to someone like me who deals with more standardised writing systems most of the time, there are some reassuringly systematic features that I found it easier to relate to. At a basic level, if a writer has freedom to be so creative in the way a sign is depicted, then the reader has to be prepared to put in considerable effort to read the message. Even very pictorial sorts of writing system from the Mediterranean, like the Egyptian hieroglyphic one, tended to have much more limited variation in sign shapes. These types of variation make the writing process appear both complex and rather playful, and imply that the reading experience involved more than a simple sign-decoding process: a certain amount of interaction with and interpretation of pictorial elements is required. to a face, or they can include the person/animal’s whole body. Glyphs can interact with each other, and they can be limited e.g.

Many glyphs are (more or less obviously to the non-expert eye) pictures of things, animals and people, and can be represented in different ways and doing different things. Three different ways of writing AJAW ‘lord’.įor one thing, Mayan glyphs display a great deal more variation in shape than one would expect in most writing systems. It is important to begin with an appreciation that the Mayan writing and reading experience is very different to what we are used to when we write or read today.įigure 2. NB Most of the illustrations used in this post are drawn from Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke’s Introduction to Mayan Hieroglyphs (2014), which is freely available online and which I would recommend as a much more detailed introduction to the writing system (I thank Steve Houston for the recommendation):Īt the seminar, I was first alerted to the fact that Mayan was going to be very different from my previous experiences of ancient writing systems when Professor Houston began using phrases like ‘stepped decoding’ and ‘slow reading’ to describe the reading process and ‘intrinsically efficacious’ to describe the script. I will add a disclaimer here that I am not in any way an expert on Mayan, but I would nevertheless like to share a few thoughts on the system as I understand it from my limited experience. Although it is often referred to, especially by non-experts, as a sort of ‘hieroglyphic’ script, I think applying labels like this can be somewhat misleading so we will instead try to think at a very basic level about what sort of writing it constitutes. The Mayan writing system was in use from the 3 rd century BC to the 16 th-17 th century AD (and related languages are still spoken today, which I believe was one of the aids in the writing system’s decipherment). One of the earliest examples of Mayan writing, c.100 BC. Mural from San Bartolo, with glyphs top left. It struck me that Mayan provides a fascinating alternative view of the concept of writing – ‘alternative’ because it seems in many ways counter-intuitive, not only to a modern literate person, but even to someone like me who has been working on ancient writing systems for years.įigure 1. Recently I had the pleasure of attending a seminar on Mayan glyphs, given by Steve Houston (of Brown University). Firstly, let me welcome any new readers who have come over from Twitter (where the project now has a presence as For this post we are going on an exotic excursus away from the Mediterranean, to ancient(ish) Mesoamerica.

Mayan glyphs quizlet