Untangling Maya Glyphs

Reading this in English, you will be used to words formed from combinations of 26 letters.
By contrast, Maya words are formed from various combinations of around 1000 signs, made up of logograms and syllabograms. So while our system is phonetic, Maya writing is a mixed logosyllabic system.

Classic Maya texts can be found on a variety of mediums - like this example of a polychrome (painted in several colours) vase.

Maya artists not only created the large stone monuments, stelae and lintels, but also carved or incised texts and images into wood, bone, jade, and shell, for example.

There were also Maya books, called codices, made from bark-paper; but no codices have survived from Classic times, although we do have later examples that have survived.

These pages from the so-called Dresden Codex mostly contain calendrical and astronomical information connected to ceremonies. It is most probably from the 13th or 14th century, but depictions of similar books appear frequently in Classic Maya art as well.

At first glance Maya writing can look a bit overwhelming with the variety and detail of the inscriptions. But if you look closer, you can distinguish the (square-ish) glyph-blocks that make up a text.

From there we can go on to the reading order of the texts – basically, the main rule is that it is read from left to right, top to bottom (so far so good for English readers), in double-columns (and this is where it gets complicated). As with many other ‘rules’, there are quite a few exceptions, depending on the size and shape of the item the text is inscribed on.

On most of the stone monuments from the Classic period, nearly half of the text (and sometimes more) covers chronological content. Especially the beginning of most texts contain very detailed calendric information, after which you get the actual rest of the sentence (the narrative content).

So if we start with the calendric info, we first have to look at the basics = numbers.
The Maya use a dot for 1 and a bar for 5 (that’s the easy part).

We will be looking at each section in more detail now, taking this full date as an example. Many stone monuments start with a full date like this one, made up of a glyph called ISIG, followed by the Long Count and the Calendar Round (also often interspersed with information about lunations and moon phases, etc.). We will keep it simple and stick to the basics: A two-fold system comprising a linear count of days and a cyclical record of time with two different cycles.

This is the ISIG or Initial Series Introducing Glyph. It often occupies the space of 2 or even 4 glyph blocks and apart from the glyph in the centre always has the same outline. For a short intro to glyphs it just means that a date follows...

These 5 glyphs make up the Long Count - a linear count of time, counting the amount of days that have passed since a (mythical) start date that would be the 13 August 3114BC in our calendar.

The Long Count is followed by the Calendar Round, the cyclical recording of time made up of two interacting counts - the Tzolkin and the Haab. The glyphs from the Tzolkin calendar are some of the most recognisable Maya glyphs, as they always appear in a cartouche (the frame with 'legs' around the smiley face here)

The signs of the full Calendar Round with a Tzolkin and a Haab do not always appear next to each other, as in this example. As the Haab signs do not have the distinguishing characteristic of a cartouche like the Tzolkin, they are sometimes a bit harder to find.

The Tzolkin is a 260-day cycle - it consists of the numbers 1 to 13 in combination with 20 day-names (the same date therefore recurs every 260 days). It is the longest surviving part of the Maya calendars and is still used as a 'sacred almanach' in Maya communities.

The Haab is a 365-day cycle and therefore corresponds to the vague solar year. It consists of 18 named 'months' with 20 days each and 5 extra days at the end of a cycle.

The articulation of both Tzolkin and Haab produce the Calendar Round, the most commonly used calendar in Mesoamerica (not just among the Maya). It is a 'round' as approximately every 52 years a specific date repeats itself.

In Maya writing you can sometimes recognise faces, animal heads or hands, for example, while other parts just look like squiggles to us.

Instead of 26 letters, each representing a sound, you have logograms = a sign representing a word. In this case, the head of a jaguar represents the word 'jaguar' (or balam in Maya).

And then you also have syllabograms = a sign representing a syllable (consonant-vowel, e.g., ki, ba, mo). This is the same word as the jaguar head - balam - just 'spelled' with the syllables ba, la, and ma (forming the word balam).

A slightly more elaborate version, stretching over 3 glyph blocks, but reading the same: K'AK' - TILIW -li -wi (upper left block); CHAN -na (upper right block); YOPAT (lower left block)

The most elaborate way of writing is the so-called 'full figure' variant. Each sign is represented as a fully formed figure, human, animal, a bit of both; and sometimes on top of each other. The glyph block on this cast also represents the same name.

Transcription: K'ak' (red) Til[iw] (yellow) Chan (blue) Yopat (green) make up the name of K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Yopaat

And although some words seem pretty obvious - for example this verb (Chok), meaning 'to scatter'...

But it has led to interesting histories being revealed - this glyph is another verb in the texts of Quiriguá recounting an important victory of ruler K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Yopaat - can you see the axe separating the first glyph part diagonally?

It tells the story of how the Quiriguá ruler captured and decapitated Waxaklajun Ubaaj K'awiil (here is one of his stelae), the great ruler of the much bigger city of Copán (now in Honduras). No wonder it appears quite a few times on the monuments in Quiriguá!