Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing
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One of the major achievements of Maya culture was its system of hieroglyphic writing which was "the most highly developed script in pre-Columbian America." The Classic Period of Maya civilization extended roughly from A.D. 250 to A.D. 900. The writing system flourished in that era as one facet of a new, complex hierarchical order that was apparent from the civilization's remains but whose history was relatively inaccessible because the script could not be read. This writing was found on a variety of media. It was carved on freestanding stone monuments, on masonry architecture, on portable objects of bone or shell, and it was painted on pottery and in screenfold books, or codices, of bark paper. The content of the hieroglyphic codices was "primarily astronomical and divinatory" and for some time scholars believed that all Maya writing dealt only with the position of the stars and the art of prophesying from them. Gradually attention shifted to other media and it was slowly discovered that the inscriptions held "the names and deeds of kings and nobles, and accounts of how they and their people strove for prosperity and a place in history." Deciphering the Maya's script and discovering their history has been "one of the great stories of archaeology." The Maya language group originated over 4,000 years ago in highland Guatemala and subsequently divided into thirty-one separate tongues most of which can no longer be understood by each other. The important languages fo
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hical nature of the inscriptions in the 1950s. Proskouriakoff was an architect who studied formal aspects of Maya art in the attempt to establish relative dates for the monuments and artifacts. Her dating of the art was intended primarily as a means of charting changes in style but she also discovered patterns of dates at particular sites. These dates began with what seemed to be birth glyphs, followed twenty-five years later by glyphs celebrating accession to power and closing with signs for death. Thus the people represented in Mayan art alongside the inscribed glyphs were not just gods and spirits, as had often been assumed, but were historical personages. From this discovery, and as other scholars began to identify the glyphs for particular individuals and locations, the course of Mayan history has been revealed in some detail.
Progress on the specific character of the writing had been just as slow. De Landa's notes had been rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and the number system and names of the months had been deciphered. The calendar was gradually worked out as well but scholars were still not able to break the general code of the writing itself. By the mid-twentieth century many older scholars had decide
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Schele Freidel, Yuri Knorosov, De Landa's, Period Maya, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Chinese Egyptian, Honduras Belize, Spanish Italian, Thompson Maya, Deciphering Maya's, de landa's, phonetic sign, phonetic signs, maya script, particular word, maya scribes, maya civilization, mid-nineteenth century, day signs, maya calendar,
Approximate Word count = 1857
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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