Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs

The introduction opens with some figures. Maya writing spans the centuries from about 300 BC to the arrival of the Spanish, roughly five thousand inscribed objects are known, and the script counts over a thousand signs, though no more than five hundred were ever in use together.

Then comes the story of decipherment, told as a long run of hits and misses. The manuscript credited to Diego de Landa, rediscovered in 1862, looked like the key, but its 'alphabet' was brushed aside for almost a century. Calendar signs were read early on, which hardened the belief that the script recorded no sounds. In the 1950s Yuri Knorozov showed that many signs were syllables, and the field changed course only slowly, held back by the Cold War and by the most respected scholars of the day. Heinrich Berlin identified the glyphs that name cities, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff proved that the stones told the history of kings as well as dates.

The language behind the texts has its own story. Almost every text is in Classic Mayan, an Eastern Ch'olan tongue whose nearest living kin is Ch'orti', still spoken around Copán. The highland tongues, K'iche' among them, played almost no part in the glyphs.

Maya writing mixes two kinds of signs: logograms, each worth a word, and syllabograms, each worth a syllable. Some two hundred syllable signs cover only about eighty syllables of the language, since many signs share a sound. The handbook walks through the reading order, in paired columns, signs that fuse or nest inside one another, phonetic complements that help identify a logogram, and signs that can be read more than one way.

A long note deals with spelling. Since Guatemala set standard ways of writing its Mayan tongues, in 1987 and 1988, most scholars write K'iche' rather than Quiché, and the handbook does the same, except for well-established place names.

The grammar section covers word order, verbs, nouns and pronouns in Classic Mayan, which marks the subject of a transitive verb one way and that of an intransitive verb another. It is the most technical part, meant for readers who have already met the script.

Then the handbook surveys where writing turns up: stone monuments, with the births, accessions and wars of kings; pottery, with the formula that dedicates a vessel and says what it was for; small objects of bone, shell and jade; and the codices. Only four Maya books have come down to us, and the handbook explains why: the burning at Maní in 1562 and, far more, damp weather, mould and insects, which destroyed almost all of them.

The calendar appendix is what matters most to readers who come by way of astrology. It explains counting in base twenty, with the 360-day tun that bends the rule; the 260-day tzolk'in, which meshes the numbers one to thirteen with twenty names; the 365-day haab; the 52-year round that joins them; and the Long Count, which runs from a mythical date in August 3114 BC.

It also covers the lords of the night, a nine-day cycle, and shows step by step how to turn a Long Count date into a date in our own calendar. Charts of day and month names, syllable tables and a thematic dictionary of Classic Mayan close the volume.

The mechanics. The site's engine does the sums the appendix teaches: thirteen numbers combined with twenty names, the return every 260 days, the 365-day year and the Long Count that ties each civil date to its day. The Chart's rules cite the handbook for this.

The rest stays out. The reading follows the living count of the highlands, which has no first day and uses K'iche' names, rather than the calendar of the Classic monuments that the handbook starts at 1 Imix. Epigraphy, the core of the book, does not enter the Chart.

It is a handbook, and the authors warn that it lays out only the bare frame of the script: it pays off best alongside the workshops, with teachers.

Some parts, such as the notes on grammar and spelling, are for readers who have already studied the subject. And the book deals with the ancient Maya: about how daykeepers use the calendar today it says almost nothing.