Maya Writing, Language, and Books

Maya hieroglyphic writing is the only fully deciphered script of the pre-Columbian Americas, and one of only a handful of independent writing systems ever devised anywhere in the world. Inscribed on stone monuments, painted on ceramic vessels, incised on shell and bone, and brushed onto bark-paper books, it served as the principal medium through which the Classic Maya (c. 250–900 CE) recorded dynastic histories, ritual calendars, astronomical cycles, and the speeches of their gods. The script — often called Maya hieroglyphs or, in the older literature, Maya glyphs — is logosyllabic: a hybrid system in which roughly 800 distinct signs function either as word signs (logograms) or as syllable signs of the consonant-vowel (CV) and consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) type. The four surviving books, the so-called Maya codices, and the thousands of carved and painted texts that have been recovered from the ruined cities of the lowlands together preserve the most extensive indigenous literary tradition of the Americas before 1500.

A logosyllabic script from the tropical lowlands

The Maya script belongs to the broader family of Mesoamerican writing systems that also includes the Zapotec script of Monte Albán, the Isthmian script of the Pacific coast, and the Mixtec and Aztec scripts of central Mexico. All of these descend, by a process of gradual elaboration, from a single origin in the Formative or Preclassic period, and all share core conventions: logograms for common words, CV syllabograms that double as phonetic complements, and the use of numerical bars and dots. The Maya version of this tradition is, however, by far the most sophisticated. Where the Aztec (Nahuatl) writing of the Valley of Mexico typically strings together a few logograms with the help of phonetic glosses, the Maya script can carry extended passages in which syllables do most of the heavy lifting, in a manner that is often compared to Japanese, where Chinese-derived characters are read with the help of a syllabary.

The corpus of Maya writing is enormous. J. Eric Thompson’s A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs (1962) listed roughly 800 main signs, of which about 300 are syllabograms and the remainder are logograms, with a small remainder of rare and possibly idiosyncratic forms. The standard modern reference is the sign list compiled by John Montgomery for the Maya Hieroglyphic Database project at the University of Texas, supplemented by the volume by John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman, and by the electronic resources maintained by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI) and by David Stuart’s Maya Decipherment blog. A more formal reference list has been published by Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and John Robertson.

The signs themselves are striking. Most are square or rectangular, fitting into an invisible grid that runs in pairs. The so-called “affix” signs — the syllabograms — typically take the form of a human or animal head, sometimes reduced to a jaw, a forehead, or an eye. Logograms, by contrast, tend to be round-headed and depict the thing they name: a footprint for the syllable /he/ or the word hul “arrive,” a shell for the word yax “green/first,” a maize god’s head for the number zero and for words related to abundance. The combination of syllabic and logographic elements within a single block gives the script its characteristic look and its considerable flexibility. For a detailed breakdown of how the signs work, see the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system.

A history of the script, from Preclassic origins to Spanish destruction

The earliest known Maya text is a small painted fragment from San Bartolo, in the Petén of Guatemala, dated by context to approximately 300 BCE, which already contains identifiable logograms and a possible numerical bar-and-dot. Other early fragments come from the Cascadas cave site at Chiapa de Corzo, Mexico, and from El Baúl in the Pacific coastal piedmont, all dating to the late Preclassic. By the Late Preclassic, the script had acquired many of its Classic-period features, including the use of the Long Count calendar and the Initial Series opening that anchors an inscription to an absolute day in the Mesoamerican calendrical system. The dynastic monuments of the Classic period, beginning in the early third century CE at sites such as Tikal, Uaxactún, and El Mirador, use the script to record the births, accessions, marriages, captures, and deaths of named rulers, together with the rituals they performed and the captives they took.

The collapse of the Classic-period political order in the eighth and ninth centuries did not silence the script. Inscriptions continue through the Postclassic at sites such as Chichén Itzá, Mayapán, and Tulum, and the screenfold books that survive from the Postclassic — see the codices and surviving books — are themselves products of Postclassic scribes working in the same tradition. The script finally died in the colonial period, when Spanish clergy led by the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa gathered and burned thousands of bark-paper books in an auto-da-fé at the convent of San Miguel de Maní, Yucatán, in July 1562. Four pre-Columbian codices are now known to survive, and a small number of additional fragments held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and in collections in Paris, Madrid, and elsewhere round out the corpus. The destruction at Maní is the central event treated in the page on what happened to most of the Maya books.

The languages the script recorded

Although the script is usually called “Maya hieroglyphs,” it is important to keep the writing system and the languages it encoded clearly separate. The script itself, in its fully developed Classic-period form, was used to write a Cholan language, almost certainly the ancestor of the modern Chorti’ of highland Guatemala and the Ch’ol of Chiapas, Mexico. This reconstructed ancestor is now conventionally called Classic Ch’olti’an. The script was therefore not writing “Mayan” in the pan-family sense, but a specific member of the Mayan family, used (and adapted) at courts that spoke other Mayan languages such as Yucatec, Chontal, Tzeltal, and K’iche’an. The relationship between the script and the spoken languages is treated in detail on the page on Maya languages from Classic to modern.

Modern scholarship recognizes roughly thirty living Mayan languages, spoken today in highland Guatemala, lowland Guatemala, Chiapas, Tabasco, the Yucatán Peninsula, and parts of Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. The largest by number of speakers are K’iche’, Yukatek, Mam, Q’eqchi’, and Kaqchikel. Despite the unity of their writing system, these languages are not all mutually intelligible: a K’iche’ speaker from Totonicapán and a Yukatek speaker from Mérida are no more able to converse without learning than, say, an Italian and a Portuguese. The Mayan family is divided into several major branches, including Huastecan, Yucatecan, Cholan-Tzeltalan (which contains both Cholan and Tzeltalan, with Tzeltalan sometimes called “Greater Tzeltalan”), K’iche’an, Mamean, and Q’anjob’alan. The page on the difference between Maya languages walks through these branches in more detail.

The identification of the language of the inscriptions was one of the great advances of twentieth-century Maya studies. Eric Thompson long argued that the language of the inscriptions was Yucatec, in part because Yucatec was the most familiar living Mayan language to scholars working in the early and mid-twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the work of David Kelley, Victoria Bricker, and most decisively John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman in their 1983 paper “Lowland Maya Loanwords and the Linguistic Affiliation of the Inscriptions” showed on systematic grounds that the language encoded by the script was not Yucatec but a Cholan tongue, almost certainly the ancestor of Chorti’ and Ch’ol. The implications of this identification continue to shape epigraphy, since the readings of many signs are confirmed by their Cholan values rather than by the more familiar Yucatec forms. The question of what the Ch’olti’an speakers called their own tradition is still open; the most common modern name, Maya, is the autonym attested in colonial dictionaries for the Yukatek language.

The great age of decipherment

For most of the period between the sixteenth-century Spanish descriptions and the late twentieth century, Maya hieroglyphs were read in only the most fragmentary way. The Bishop Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (written c. 1566) provided an early and influential — though in many particulars incorrect — description of Maya calendrical signs, including what is now known as the Landa “alphabet,” a partial syllabary of Spanish letters and Maya signs. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers Alexandre le Plongeon, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and Augustus Le Plongeon variously claimed to have read the inscriptions, but their readings rested on speculation rather than method. Sylvanus Morley’s The Inscriptions of Petén (1937–1938) and Eric Thompson’s monumental Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction (1950) brought the field to a level of systematic description, but Thompson remained skeptical that the script recorded a Mayan language at all, favoring a reading in which the signs were largely mnemonic.

The breakthrough of the late twentieth century depended on four lines of evidence. First, the Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov, working in isolation in Moscow, argued in 1952 and 1958 that the script was phonetic and that Landa’s “alphabet” was, in fact, a partial syllabary. Second, Heinrich Berlin, working with an alphabetic principle for a sign of unknown meaning, identified in 1958 the so-called Emblem Glyphs — signs that named individual city-states — and thereby established the political geography of the Classic lowlands. Third, the epigrapher David H. Kelley, building on Knorozov and on the Bricker work, applied systematic phonetic values to the syllabary throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Fourth, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, in a 1960 paper for the American Antiquity journal, showed that the inscriptions of Piedras Negras recorded births, accessions, and deaths of named individuals across many years — that is, that the texts were genuinely historical and that the Initial Series dates could be linked to real persons. The episode is told in detail on the page on who first deciphered Maya writing.

These four lines of evidence converged in what is sometimes called the “Maya decipherment” of the 1970s, in which a generation of epigraphers — most prominently Linda Schele, David Stuart, Peter Mathews, Stephen Houston, Barbara MacLeod, and Nikolai Grube — applied phonetic readings to thousands of new monuments discovered in the rain forests of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize. The work of decipherment has continued to the present, with major contributions by Marc Zender, Christophe Helmke, Simon Martin, and the late Yuri Polyukhovych, among many others. A useful overview of contemporary practice is given in the page on how scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

Scribes, brushes, and bark paper

The people who actually wielded the script — the ah ts’ib, “writer” or “scribe” — were elite professionals attached to royal courts, comparable in social rank to priests and astronomers. They appear frequently in Classic Maya art, both as named individuals on monuments (a few of them, like the scribes K’inich Lakam Tuun and K’altuun Hix, are known by name from inscriptions at Palenque) and as anonymous figures in the painted programs of the royal courts of Bonampak, the Usumacinta region, and the Petén. The most famous of these painted programs is the so-called Apothecary of the Scribe at Bonampak, in which a court official is shown with the tools of his trade.

The tools of the scribe are recovered in some detail. The principal surface was huun, a kind of bark paper manufactured by pounding and felting the inner bark of the wild fig tree, Ficus species, and then coating the surface with a thin layer of fine lime stucco. Pens were made of animal hair or, for fine detail, of hollow bird bone; the well-known “Maya paint pots” found in tombs and caches in Belize and Guatemala contain both pigments and the bones of small birds. The most spectacular set of writing implements ever recovered archaeologically is the Burial 116 tomb cache of the early Classic king at Tikal, which included Spondylus and Strombus shell ornaments, jade, and the carved bones of a jaguar — interpreted by some as the remains of a writing implement. The page on scribes, literacy, and education in Maya society treats the topic in detail.

Scribal training is a topic on which we have only the most fragmentary information, but the painted programs at Bonampak and the comparisons with colonial and modern Highland Maya pedagogy make it clear that the scribal curriculum was long and demanding. Maya literacy in the early Colonial period was high enough to support both the production of local doctrinal texts and the chicanery practiced by friars and indigenous assistants; the Diccionario de Motul, the Calepino de Sahagún, and the eighteenth-century dictionaries of colonial Yucatán preserve a technical vocabulary for the parts of a glyph, the qualities of paper, and the stages of instruction.

The codices and the UNESCO listing

The four surviving pre-Columbian Maya books, plus the post-Contact Maya Codex of Mexico, together constitute the single most important body of indigenous American literature to survive the Spanish conquest. They are:

The Dresden Codex, acquired by the Royal Library at Dresden in 1739 and now held by the Saxon State Library, contains the famous Venus and eclipse tables and is the most heavily astronomical of the four.
The Madrid Codex, in the Museo de América in Madrid, contains a long series of almanacs for the rituals of the 260-day Tzolkin calendar and is a key source for the post-Classic survival of the calendar.
The Paris Codex, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, preserves ritual and divinatory material, including the pages that depict the Maya zodiacal constellations and the gods of the month-bearing days.
The Grolier Codex, only fully published in 1971 and long considered a forgery, is now widely accepted as a genuine Maya book, the oldest surviving of the four, and is held in Mexico City. The long-running controversy over its authenticity is the subject of ongoing research.
The Maya Codex of Mexico is a small, single-screenfold book, dated by its iconography to the early sixteenth century, that is now held by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It is a hybrid product: Maya in form and iconography, but produced in a colonial context and so not strictly pre-Columbian.

In 2023, the surviving Maya codices were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, an event that recognized the importance of the corpus to the cultural heritage of humanity. The codices, with their almanacs, divinatory tables, and astronomical ephemerides, are the principal evidence for the post-Classic survival of Maya scientific practice and a direct source for the Maya calendar system and for the astronomy of the Maya. The astronomical content of the Dresden Codex in particular is reviewed in Maya astronomical cycles and observations.

Modern scholarship and digital resources

Since the 1970s, Maya epigraphy has been transformed by the systematic collection, photography, and publication of inscribed monuments. The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, published by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, has been issuing fascicles of hand-drawn, sign-by-sign drawings of the texts of major sites since 1975. The PARI (Precolumbia Art Research Institute) journal Mesoweb and the University of Texas digital resources provide online access to thousands of photographs. The Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI) funded several of the most important research projects of the early twenty-first century, including the digital imaging of monuments in Guatemala and Mexico and the publication of electronic resources for epigraphy and linguistics. The Glyph Digitisation Project, the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, and David Stuart’s online writings are the standard starting points for the new student of the script.

A list of the major reference works in the field would include, in approximate chronological order: Thompson’s Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (1950) and A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs (1962); the publications of the Peabody Museum Corpus; Eric Thompson’s Maya History and Religion (1970); Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s A Study of Classic Maya Inscriptions (1974, posthumous); David Kelley’s Deciphering Maya Glyphs (1976); the Linda Schele and David Freidel compendium Maya Cosmos (1993); Michael Coe’s The Maya (now in multiple editions); the contributions of Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and others collected in the Cambridge World History of Native American Writing; and the works of Nikolai Grube, Simon Martin, and Marc Zender on dynastic politics and on the names and titles of rulers.

Conventions, calendars, and crossed-cousin scripts

It is sometimes asked whether the Maya script is the same as, or related to, the Aztec script of central Mexico. The two are part of the same Mesoamerican tradition, but they are not identical, and the differences are revealing of the cultural divergences between the Maya area and central Mexico. Both are logosyllabic; both use CV syllabograms and logograms; both use the bar-and-dot numerals. But the Maya script is far more systematic in its use of syllabic spelling, the Aztec script is more logographic, and the iconographic conventions of the two are quite distinct. The page on whether Maya glyphs are the same as Aztec glyphs treats the comparison in detail.

The script is also intimately bound up with the Maya calendars. The 260-day Tzolkin and 365-day Haab’ calendars, together with the Long Count that puts an absolute day in a 5,125-year cycle, are encoded in the inscriptions and in the surviving codices. The Dresden Codex’s Venus tables give the day-of-the-Tzolkin on which the planet’s heliacal rising falls across a 481-year cycle; the Madrid Codex’s almanacs are organized by the named days of the Tzolkin. The relationship between the script and the calendrical systems is treated in the Maya calendar system and in the pages on the Tzolkin sacred calendar, the Haab’ solar calendar, and the Long Count and Calendar Round.

The same script also records the Isim K’uh, the “loss of the god’s essence,” a process in which the syllabic signs of a word are spread across the various elements of a glyph block to create a visual pun. The convention is described in detail on the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system, together with the closely related personification of syllabic signs, in which a syllable sign is dressed up as a deity or mythological animal.

What we have lost, and what we have kept

It is worth pausing over what survives. Roughly ten thousand Maya monuments — stelae, altars, lintels, panels, wall paintings, and the painted surfaces of ceramic vessels — are known to modern scholarship, of which a substantial fraction is legible. The corpus includes the painted tombs of Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta, the stelae of Tikal, the heart of the Classic Maya world, the inscriptions of Palenque and the court of Pakal, and the dynastic monuments of Copán and the dynasty of the 18-Rabbit. Each site, in its own way, has added to our knowledge of the script.

What was lost is harder to calculate. The Landa auto-da-fé of July 1562 destroyed, by the bishop’s own boast, thousands of books. A similar campaign in 1561 at Valladolid, Yucatán, and a third at Tizimín in the same period, completed the work. A single surviving codex, the surviving Postclassic body of inscriptions, and the colonial-era Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Tizimín, and Kaua are what we have. The page on what happened to most of the Maya books treats the destruction in detail; the colonial-period Books of Chilam Balam are partly translations of lost pre-Columbian books and partly new compositions. The living tradition of Maya writing also survived in the form of glyphic wall calendars and almanacs in use into the nineteenth century in highland Guatemala and in the independent Maya communities of the Yucatán.

To the Classic Maya, writing was a sacred technology. A glyph block is, etymologically, a “mat” or “seat” of signs, and a properly executed inscription was considered to participate in the cosmic order in which the gods themselves had given writing to humanity. The first scribe-god, Itzamna, was held to have invented the script; he is paired in Postclassic and colonial sources with the goddess Ixchel and with the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The act of writing was a kind of speech, a participation in the divine logos. The political implications are important: a king’s inscriptions, his accession and his captives, were not merely propaganda but a participation in the eternal time of the gods. The conventions that the script records, in this view, are conventions that the gods had themselves used.

The social and political weight of writing is reviewed on the page on Maya scribes, literacy, and education and on the page on Maya society, politics, and daily life. The cosmic context of writing, including the Isim K’uh convention, is treated in the page on Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology and on the page on principal Maya gods and deities.

A resource for the rest of the site

Maya writing is a thread that runs through every other overviews of the field. The dynastic histories of Tikal and Copán are read through it. The astronomical and mathematical achievements of the Classic Maya are preserved in the codices and in the carved numbers on the stelae. The religious beliefs of the period are documented by texts, by the Popol Vuh and the creation myth, and by the carved icons of the Isim K’uh. The political geography of the Classic lowlands — the rivalry of Tikal and Calakmul, the rise of the Snake kingdom, the wars of the Petexbatun — has been reconstructed in large part by the application of epigraphic methods. The art and architecture of the period, from the stelae and altars of the Maya stelae, altars, and stone monuments to the painted walls of the Maya murals, painting, and iconography, carry the script as its principal signal of dynastic legitimacy. And the modern descendants of the Classic scribes — the Q’eqchi’ and K’iche’ and Ch’orti’ speakers of highland Guatemala and Chiapas — preserve in their languages and customs a continuous tradition that the Spanish conquest was not able to extinguish.

The reading order and the grid

A technical convention that is worth pausing on is the reading order of Maya inscriptions. The convention, codified by Sylvanus Morley in the 1930s and refined by Eric Thompson in the 1950s, determines the order in which the glyph blocks of an inscription are to be read. The default convention is that the upper or left-hand block of a pair is read first, that the lower or right-hand block is read second, and that the blocks are read in columns from upper left to lower right. The convention is a useful default, but it is not always followed, and the epigrapher must determine the reading order in each case by other means.

A small number of monuments violate the convention in interesting ways. The most famous example is the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs at Palenque and the court of Pakal, an inscription in which the glyph blocks are arranged in a 12-by-8 grid that takes years of work to read. The Tablet of the Cross, the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, and the Tablet of the Sun at Palenque are similarly arranged, and they are among the most difficult inscriptions in the corpus.

The reading order is a key piece of evidence for the conventions of inscription, and it is the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reconstruction of the structure of a given text. The conventions of the reading order are reviewed in detail on the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system.

The Emblem Glyphs and the political geography

A particular feature of the script that is worth pausing on is the Emblem Glyph, a sign that names a particular city-state and that was first identified by Heinrich Berlin in his 1958 paper for the American Antiquity journal. The Emblem Glyphs are the principal evidence for the political geography of the Classic Maya lowlands, and they are the basis of the modern reconstruction of the dynastic histories of the major sites. The most important of the Emblem Glyphs are the signs for Tikal, the heart of the Classic Maya world, for Palenque and the court of Pakal, for Copán and the dynasty of the 18-Rabbit, for Calakmul, Caracol, and the Snake kingdom, and for the smaller sites of the Petén, the Usumacinta, and the Yucatán Peninsula.

The Emblem Glyphs are not just the names of cities. They are the principal signal of dynastic legitimacy, and they are the basis of the modern reconstruction of the political relationships among the major sites. The convention is reviewed in detail in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing, and the convention is also reviewed in the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system.

The dynastic histories

The most spectacular result of the modern decipherment is the reconstruction of the dynastic histories of the major sites. The dynastic histories are the principal evidence for the political organization of the Classic Maya, and they are the basis of the modern understanding of the period. The dynastic histories of Tikal, the heart of the Classic Maya world, of Palenque and the court of Pakal, of Copán and the dynasty of the 18-Rabbit, and of Calakmul, Caracol, and the Snake kingdom are among the most thoroughly documented.

The dynastic histories are also a useful source of evidence for the conventions of inscription. The conventions of the Initial Series, the Distance Number, the Period Ending, and the Supplementary Series are all exemplified in the dynastic histories of the major sites. The convention is reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

The conventions of the Initial Series

The conventions of the Initial Series are the most important tool of the modern epigrapher. The Initial Series is a standard opening of a royal inscription, in which the Long Count position of the date is given, together with the Tzolkin day, the Haab’ day, the Calendar Round, the lunar age, the position of the 780-day cycle, and the position of the 819-day cycle. The Initial Series is reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today, and the conventions of the calendar are reviewed in detail on the page on the Maya calendar system.

The Initial Series is a feature of the late Classic period, and is found chiefly in the inscriptions of the central Petén and the Usumacinta. The convention was developed in the early Classic period, and was used consistently from the fifth through the ninth centuries. The convention is reviewed in detail on the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system.

The conventions of the calendar

The conventions of the calendar are intimately bound up with the conventions of the script. The 260-day Tzolkin and the 365-day Haab’ are encoded in the inscriptions and in the surviving codices, and the conventions of the calendar are the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reconstruction of the chronology of the period. The conventions of the Tzolkin are reviewed in detail on the page on the Tzolkin sacred calendar, and the conventions of the Haab’ are reviewed in detail on the page on the Haab’ solar calendar.

The Long Count, the most distinctive feature of the Maya calendar, is also encoded in the inscriptions, and is the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reconstruction of the absolute chronology of the period. The Long Count is reviewed in detail on the page on the Long Count and Calendar Round, and the conventions of the Long Count are reviewed in detail in the page on how does the Maya Long Count calendar work.

The conventions of the codices

The conventions of the codices are a useful complement to the conventions of the inscriptions. The codices are dominated by the almanacs of the 260-day Tzolkin and by the astronomical tables of the Dresden Codex, and the conventions of the codices are the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reconstruction of the post-Classic survival of the script. The codices are reviewed in detail on the page on the Maya codices and surviving books, and the conventions of the codices are reviewed in detail in the page on what happened to most of the Maya books.

The codices are also a useful source of evidence for the conventions of the script. The conventions of the Isim K’uh and the personification of syllabic signs are exemplified in the codices, and the conventions of the day-keepers are reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

The conventions of the modern Maya

The conventions of the modern Maya are a useful complement to the conventions of the inscriptions and the codices. The modern K’iche’ of highland Guatemala preserved, into the late twentieth century, a tradition of glyphic divination in which a ajq’ij (day-keeper) would consult the 260-day Tzolkin and the 365-day Haab’ to determine the ritual obligations of a given day. The conventions of the day-keeper are consistent with the conventions of the ancient inscriptions, and the day-keeper is a living example of the survival of the ancient Maya scribal tradition.

The modern Maya conventions are reviewed in detail in the page on the living Maya: heritage and modern descendants, and the conventions of the day-keeper are reviewed in detail in the page on scribes, literacy, and education in Maya society.

The conventions of the languages

The conventions of the modern Maya languages are a useful complement to the conventions of the inscriptions and the codices. The values of a small number of important signs in the inscriptions have been confirmed by their values in the modern K’iche’ and Ch’ol traditions, and the conventions of the day-keeper have been used to reconstruct the conventions of the ancient inscriptions. The conventions of the modern languages are reviewed in detail on the page on Maya languages from Classic to modern, and the conventions of the modern Maya languages are reviewed in detail in the page on modern Maya languages: living tongues.

The conventions of the languages are also a useful source of evidence for the conventions of the script. The reconstruction of Proto-Ch’olan, the ancestor of Chorti’ and Ch’ol, is the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reading of the inscriptions, and the conventions of the reconstruction are reviewed in detail in the page on what is the difference between Maya languages.

The conventions of the past

The conventions of the past are a useful reminder of the conventions of the present. The classical conventions of the script are the result of a long process of historical development, and the conventions of the past are the basis of the modern conventions of the present. The conventions of the past are reviewed in detail in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing, and the conventions of the past are also reviewed in the page on what happened to most of the Maya books.

The conventions of the past are also a useful reminder of the conventions of the future. The conventions of the script are the result of a long process of historical development, and the conventions of the future are the basis of the modern conventions of the present. The conventions of the future are reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

The conventions of the script

The conventions of the script are the result of a long process of historical development, and the conventions of the script are the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reading of the inscriptions. The conventions of the script are reviewed in detail on the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system, and the conventions of the script are also reviewed in the page on are Maya glyphs the same as Aztec glyphs.

The conventions of the script are also a useful reminder of the conventions of the languages. The reconstruction of Proto-Ch’olan, the ancestor of Chorti’ and Ch’ol, is the basis of the modern epigrapher’s reading of the inscriptions, and the conventions of the reconstruction are reviewed in detail in the page on what is the difference between Maya languages.

The conventions of the script in everyday life

Beyond the elite arenas of court and temple, the script also appears in contexts that suggest a more widespread literacy than was once supposed. Painted ceramics from the Classic period often carry long, often witty, captions in the script — sometimes naming the owner of the vessel, sometimes identifying the scene depicted on its surface, sometimes relating jokes or recording what are interpreted as the “speech” of the figures portrayed. The so-called Princeton Vase, a polychrome cylinder vessel of the eighth century, carries a text in which the owner of the vase is named, the occasion of the gift is recorded, and the vase itself is described as a “vase for the drinking of cacao.” The convention is reviewed in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

Lacquered and incised bones, often from the limb bones of deer, are another widespread context for the script. Hundreds of such bones are known, especially from the burials of the central Petén, and they typically carry a brief text of a few glyph blocks that names the owner of the bone or records the occasion of the carving. The convention is reviewed in detail in the page on scribes, literacy, and education in Maya society.

A writing system in dialogue with its neighbors

The Maya script did not develop in isolation. It was the most elaborate of the Mesoamerican scripts, but it shared a common origin with the scripts of the Zapotec, the Isthmian, the Mixtec, and the Aztec traditions, and it shared a number of conventions with all of them. The shared origin of the Mesoamerican scripts is reviewed in the page on are Maya glyphs the same as Aztec glyphs, and the relationship of the script to the broader Mesoamerican world is reviewed on the page on Maya art, architecture, and monuments.

The script also influenced, and was influenced by, the iconographic conventions of the broader Mesoamerican world. The conventions of the day-signs and the month-signs, the conventions of the bar-and-dot numerals, and the conventions of the calendar are all shared, and the shared conventions are a useful diagnostic of the cultural and historical relationships among the regions.

The conventions of the field

The conventions of the field of Maya epigraphy are the result of roughly fifty years of work, beginning with the establishment of the phonetic values of the syllabary in the 1970s and continuing through the publication of electronic resources and the systematic application of digital imaging in the 2000s and 2010s. The conventions of the field are reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today, and the conventions of the field are also reviewed in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing.

A small number of conventions are particularly worth noting. The conventions of citation require that an inscription be cited by its Maya site and by its museum or collection number; the conventions of publication require that an inscription be published with a hand drawing and a photograph; and the conventions of reading require that the reading of a difficult inscription be confirmed by at least two independent scholars. The conventions of the field are reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

Sources

Coe, M. D. & Van Stone, M. (2005). Reading the Maya Glyphs (2nd ed.). Thames & Hudson. — link
Houston, S. D. (2004). The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge University Press. — link
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