A script that could be read all along
For roughly a century, Maya writing was widely seen as unreadable. Today most of the surviving texts can be read, at least in part, and they have transformed what we know about the Classic Maya. The script was not a code to be broken by a single flash of insight but a language that scholars gradually reconstructed over about two centuries of work. Its decipherment is one of the major achievements of modern archaeology and linguistics, and it is ongoing: some signs are still debated.
The Maya writing system is logosyllabic. That means it combines logograms, signs standing for whole words, with syllabic signs, which stand for a consonant-vowel sound. A scribe could write a word with a single sign, spell it out in syllables, or combine both, and the same word might be written in several ways. The language behind most Classic texts is a form of Ch’olan, related to Mayan languages still spoken today.
Maya glyph decipherment had no equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, the bilingual text that helped unlock Egyptian hieroglyphic script. There was no parallel text in a known language, so scholars had to work from the calendar, from images, from the few colonial sources and from the structure of the texts themselves. Neighbouring writing traditions, such as the Isthmian script of the Gulf Coast, remain far less well understood.
Early attempts and Landa’s “alphabet”
Europeans first encountered Maya books in the sixteenth century. In Yucatan, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa wrote an account around 1566 in which he included a list of Maya signs matched to Spanish letters. He had asked Maya informants to write the letters of the Spanish alphabet and had them draw signs in response. Landa’s account was lost for centuries and rediscovered in the 1860s. Its “alphabet” at first seemed to offer a key, but efforts to read texts letter by letter failed, because the Maya script was not alphabetic. His informants had given signs that matched the sounds of the Spanish letter names, which was a different thing.
In the meantime, scholars made progress on the numbers and calendar. In the late nineteenth century, Ernst Forstemann, librarian in Dresden, worked out how the Dresden Codex recorded numbers, the Long Count and astronomical tables, a feat made possible by the numeric signs, which were more regular. This is why the calendar was understood decades before most other text.
The Thompson era
In the early and mid twentieth century, Eric Thompson became the leading authority. He catalogued signs, and clarified the calendrical and numerical material. He also argued that the glyphs mostly recorded astronomy, ritual and calendar matters, and that the Maya were a peaceful society of priest-astronomers, and he was sceptical of phonetic readings. His influence was great, and his cautious stance delayed the field. His cataloguing work, however, remains useful.
Two contributions in the 1950s and 1960s began to change that picture. In 1958, Heinrich Berlin identified “emblem glyphs,” signs that appeared to name particular cities or their ruling houses. In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, studying the monuments of Piedras Negras, showed that the dated texts followed a pattern of events in the lives of individuals: birth, accession, and other milestones. This suggested that the inscriptions recorded history about real rulers, not just ritual and astronomy.
Knorozov and the phonetic approach
Meanwhile, the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorozov argued in the early 1950s that the script included syllabic signs and that Landa’s list, treated as a guide to syllables rather than letters, offered a way in. His approach was based on methods used for other ancient scripts and on the comparison of the codices with Landa’s text. He was initially criticised, partly for political and scholarly reasons, and Thompson rejected his work. Over time, however, Knorozov’s insight that the script had a phonetic component proved fundamental. It allowed scholars to read words in the Maya languages instead of merely guessing at meanings from pictures.
The phonetic key worked in tandem with other approaches. Scholars used the context of images, calendrical frames and the known structure of dynastic texts to test readings. A sign that appeared before a name might be identified as a verb of accession, for example, and repeated patterns made it possible to confirm sound values.
The Palenque breakthroughs
From the 1970s, a series of workshops and conferences, beginning with the Palenque Round Table in 1973, brought together epigraphers, art historians and archaeologists. Using the new methods, scholars including Linda Schele, Peter Mathews, Floyd Lounsbury and others reconstructed the sequence of rulers of Palenque from its inscriptions. This work set a model: texts could be read, dated and cross-checked against the archaeological record. David Stuart, who began working on the glyphs as a teenager, went on to make major contributions, including identifying many sound values.
In later decades, further advances made it possible to read most inscriptions with reasonable confidence. These included recognising that scribes followed regular spelling conventions, that some signs were interchangeable, and that sign values could be tested across many texts. Comparative study of the Mayan languages, and later the analysis of new finds, extended the readable corpus. Today the majority of signs have known values, though some remain uncertain and a few texts remain only partly understood.
What the texts reveal
Reading the glyphs has shown that the Classic Maya world was a patchwork of competing kingdoms, ruled by dynasties who recorded their births, marriages, wars and rituals. The writing system also records:
- Lists of rulers and their accessions, which allow Maya city histories such as the Palenque dynasty history to be traced.
- Warfare and alliances between cities, from raids to captive taking and treaties.
- Ritual events, including period-ending ceremonies and bloodletting.
- Names of people, including scribes and artists, who sometimes signed their work, and the names of objects such as pots, with inscriptions that state what the vessel held.
- Mythological narratives and dates in the far past.
The texts do not tell us everything. They are heavily focused on elites and on events that rulers wished to be remembered, and they say much less about Maya commoner life and about ordinary economic activity. Archaeology and, increasingly, scientific methods supplement this record.
Surviving books and living communities
Only four ancient books survive, the Dresden, Madrid, Paris and Grolier codices, because many were destroyed in the colonial period, notably in the burning at Mani in 1562. Most surviving writing is on stone, ceramics, stucco and other durable media. The vast majority of readable text comes from the Classic period (about 250 to 900 CE).
Maya people today speak many Mayan languages and are active participants in the study of the script. Community workshops, language revitalisation and Maya scholars have made the decipherment a shared heritage project rather than a story only about outsiders. The decipherment also reminds us that the Maya script was a living tool for expressing a spoken language, and its signs record the voices of real people.