Time Line of Decipherment
When
the Spanish conquered the Maya empire in the 16th century, they forced their
new subjects to convert to Christianity and speak and write in Spanish. But
long before the Maya used the Roman alphabet, they had created their own rich
and elegant script, featuring more than 800 hieroglyphs. Sadly, the glyphs'
meanings were lost in the decades following the Conquest. Ever since, scholars
have struggled to decode these symbols, pronounce the words they form, and understand
the stories they tell. In this time line, follow the centuries-long
decipherment, which has only recently reached the point where scholars can read
more than 90 percent of the glyphs.—Rima Chaddha
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16th
century
Surviving
texts
The
quest to decipher Maya hieroglyphs began with the very Spanish invaders whose
hegemonic rule did so much to wipe out the ancient Maya script. Among them was
the conquistador Hernando Cortes, who led massacres in Mexico but who also,
some scholars believe, had the famous Dresden Codex—one of just four Maya
illustrated books surviving today—shipped back to Spain. Another was
Diego de Landa, a friar bent on replacing indigenous with Christian beliefs. In
what amounts to a crime against the cultural heritage of humanity, Landa
orchestrated the burning in 1562 of hundreds if not thousands of Maya
bark-paper books, which he deemed heretical. Yet four years later, Landa wrote
a manuscript about the Maya world called "Relation of the Things of
Yucatan" (left). Together, this manuscript and the Dresden Codex proved
essential in the later decoding of the Maya's calendar system and their
advanced understanding of astronomy and mathematics.
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1832
Counting
Actual
decipherment began with an eccentric European genius named Constantine
Rafinesque, who boasted of having dabbled in more than a dozen professions,
from archeology to zoology. His insatiable thirst for knowledge had led
Rafinesque to a reproduction of just five pages of the Dresden Codex, from
which he was able to crack the Maya's system of counting. In 1832,
Rafinesque declared in his newsletter, the Atlantic Journal and Friend of
Knowledge, that the dots and bars
seen in Maya glyphs (like these at left, from the Dresden Codex) represented
simple numbers—a dot equaled one and a bar five. Later findings proved
him right and also revealed that the Maya even had a symbol for zero, which
appeared on Mesoamerican carvings as early as 36 B.C. (Zero didn't appear
in Western Europe until the 12th century.)
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1880
Math
and astronomy
As
with many early glyph-related discoveries, serendipity may have played a role
in the next major step in decipherment. A librarian with a penchant for
mathematics named Ernst Förstemann just happened to work at the Royal Library
in Dresden, Germany, which owned the Dresden Codex and after which it was
named. He also had access to Landa's "Relation." Using his
unique skill set, Förstemann decoded the astronomy tables the Maya used to
determine when, for example, to wage war (at left are codex pages
depicting the planetary cycle of Venus). He also deciphered the Maya system for
measuring time, now called the Calendar Round. In this system, dates cycle once
every 52 years, much like dates cycle annually in our Gregorian calendar. Later
Mayanists used Förstemann's discoveries to convert Maya dates to
Gregorian dates—for instance, the Maya believed the world was created on
August 13, 3114 B.C.
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1881
Photo
documentation
Britain's
Alfred Maudslay was a respected diplomat, but he would be best remembered for
his work as an amateur Mayanist. Fascinated by scholars'
writings on the Maya and by new advancements in photography, Maudslay set out
to create as complete a record as possible of the civilization's
architecture and art. Using a large-format, glass-plate camera, he captured
highly detailed images of Maya sites, including clear close-ups of the glyphs
(left). He also prepared papier-mâché casts of several carvings from
which accurate drawings were later made. Maudslay had effectively given Maya studies its first systematic corpus, or body, of inscriptions. This
helped make further decipherments possible, in part by bringing glyphs to
scholars who had limited access to the few surviving Maya texts.
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1930s
Giant
steps—and missteps
By
the 1930s, British researcher Eric Thompson was the world's foremost
expert in glyph studies. His achievements included deciphering signs related to
the calendar and astronomy as well as identifying new words from the Maya
lexicon. Thompson also developed a numerical cataloguing technique, the
"T"-numbering system, for each glyph (left). This enabled experts
to easily discuss symbols that had yet to be fully understood or identified.
Nevertheless, glyph studies nearly came to a halt during this time, in large
part because Thompson had most scholars convinced that each of the symbols in
glyphs stood for entire words or ideas. For instance, the glyph for
"west" included a well-known symbol for the sun and an as-yet
unidentified symbol depicting a nearly closed hand. Thompson suggested that the
hand meant "completion." And so "west," where the sun
sets, was symbolized by "completion of the sun." It was a
reasonable guess, but one that, along with Thompson's more general take
on the glyphs, would be proven wrong.
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1952
The
sounds of the glyphs
While
glyph studies languished in the West, a Russian linguist in Moscow was making
his own groundbreaking discoveries. In 1952, Yuri Knorosov (left) postulated
that the individual symbols in Maya glyphs stood for phonetic sounds, much like
English letters do. Knorosov knew that Maya had too many glyphs to be a true
alphabet but too few for each glyph to symbolize an entire word. (Maya's
800-plus glyphs compare to the several thousand characters of Chinese, for
example.) He determined that written Maya, like Egyptian hieroglyphics,
contained a combination of these elements. Because "west," in
spoken Maya, is "chik'in," and "k'in" is
the word for sun, the hand represents the syllable "chi," as
Knorosov concluded. Fortunately, American scholars Michael and Sophie Coe began
publishing Knorosov's papers in the U.S. in the late 1950s. Otherwise,
his important (though incomplete) findings might have been inaccessible to
Western scholars until the end of the Cold War.
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1958
Uncovering
Maya history
Tatiana
Proskouriakoff was an architect by trade, but faced with a scarce job market
during the Great Depression, the Russian-born American took work drawing
reconstructions of the ruins at Piedras Negras, a Classic Maya site on the
border between Mexico and Guatemala (left). Later, while examining photographs
of the Piedras Negras stelae, or commemorative stone slabs, Proskouriakoff
noticed patterns in their dedication dates. The Maya would set up a series of
stelae in front of a single temple, one every five years. The first stela in
each series always showed a seated figure. Thompson had thought these were gods,
but Proskouriakoff convincingly proved that they were kings and that the
different markings on the stelae depicted their lives from birth until death.
When a ruler died, the Maya at Piedras Negras would begin erecting stelae at
another temple, detailing the life story of another ruler. For the first time,
as Thompson and others came to agree, the glyphs were found to tell the stories
of the Maya.
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1973
Unveiling
a dynasty
Concerned
that Maya research was limited to a few experts with special access to key
resources, Merle Greene Robertson, an American artist based at the Classic Maya
site of Palenque, built a center where anyone could go to study the
city's art and inscriptions. In December 1973, 30 people came to the center
at Robertson's invitation, forming the first major scholarly conference
held at a Maya site. Attendees included Robertson's assistant Linda
Schele, who had studied every Palenque inscription firsthand, and Peter
Mathews, an undergraduate who had spent the previous year assigning
Thompson's "T"-numbers to the city's inscriptions. The
duo (left, at the site) began piecing together Palenque's history using a
carving from the site called the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, which researchers
vaguely understood to depict a line of royal accession. Within hours, and with
a combination of luck and an intimate knowledge of the glyphs, Schele and
Mathews accomplished something extraordinary: They unveiled most of
Palenque's dynastic history, including the life stories of six rulers.
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1981
In
their own words
Before
all the glyphs could be read aloud in the original Maya, researchers needed to
complete Yuri Knorosov's phonetic decipherment. This began in 1981 when
15-year-old budding Mayanist David Stuart (left, with Linda Schele) discovered
that individual Maya words could be written in multiple ways, using different
symbols for the same sounds, as in "faze" and "phase."
Eric Thompson's theory had been that the Maya wrote in rebus, in which
symbols are used for whole words. A modern rebus of the phrase "I can
see" might include pictures of an eye, a tin can, and the sea. While some
glyphs can indeed be read this way, Stuart's finding—that any
symbol with the correct beginning sound can be used to identify that sound in a
word glyph—is also true. As a result, a single glyph could be drawn in
dozens of ways. With this revelation, scholars could now read many glyphs once
considered indecipherable.
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Present
Reviving
ancient Maya
Scholars
and the modern Maya can now read the majority of glyphs, like these from Copan.
They understand how the ancient language was spoken compared to modern Maya and
have begun to grasp the lost civilization's traditions by reading the
stories carved on walls and painted on pottery. From these images, they now
know, for example, that early Maya scribes held an exalted status, each living
like royalty and vying to develop his own glyphic style. Though many
traditional Maya scribes today write in the Roman script, there has been a push
since the 1980s among Maya to relearn their forebears' script and use it
themselves. Maya are now teaching the written language to one another in
workshops, while Maya schoolchildren are learning the glyphs along with the
history of their ancestors.
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