Mayan codices, royal monuments and Mayan calendars

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Maya is an independent language family that now has about 30 languages, divided into four branches. These branches emerged from the Protomaya language, which formed in the Guatemalan Highlands around the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. Now the history of the Mayan language family is about 4 thousand years old.

The first finds and de Landa's alphabet

Mayan writing entered scientific circulation at the beginning of the 19th century, when images of monuments with hieroglyphic texts appeared in a number of publications dedicated to the monuments of pre-Columbian America. In 1810, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt published pages of the Dresden Codex, a manuscript found in the Royal Library in Dresden that contained obscure characters and hieroglyphs. Initially, these signs were attributed to a kind of abstract writing of the ancient Mexicans without any clear territorial affiliation. In the middle of the 19th century, a huge number of enthusiasts rushed into the jungles of Central America in search of Mayan monuments. As a result of these studies, sketches of monuments and inscriptions on them were published. They were compared with the Dresden Code and saw that all these signs are part of the same hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Maya.

A new stage in the study of Maya writing was the discovery of Diego de Landa's manuscript "Report on the affairs in the Yucatan." In 1862, the French abbot Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, an amateur historian, found a copy of this manuscript, made in 1661, in the archives of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. The original was written by Diego de Landa in 1566. Fray Diego de Landa was the second bishop of Yucatan to be convicted of abuse of office and summoned to Spain to testify. And as a basis for his justification, he wrote a work containing a detailed description of the life of the Maya Indians who inhabited the Northern Yucatan. But, in addition to describing the life of the Indians, this manuscript included another very important thing - the so-called Landa alphabet.

This "alphabet" is a record called bilingual - a parallel text in two languages. Alongside the Latin alphabet, the letters of the Spanish language, the Mayan hieroglyphs were inscribed. The problem was to determine what is written in hieroglyphs: individual phonetic elements, whole words, some abstract concepts or something else. Researchers have been struggling with this question for several decades: someone thought that it was Diego de Landa's falsifications, someone thought that it was the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to the Mayan hieroglyphic writing. And some researchers said that the hieroglyphs have phonetic readings, which in this case they tried to convey using the letters of the Spanish alphabet.

At the end of the 19th century, a period of accumulation of the corpus of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions began, and photography began to be used to fix monuments. From the beginning of the 20th century, a series of publications with photographs and sketches of monuments began to appear. It was at this time that the corpus of Mayan hieroglyphic inscriptions was formed, according to which hieroglyphic writing was subsequently studied. In addition to them, two more hieroglyphic codes were found - the Paris and Madrid ones, named after the place of their discovery. Codes are a kind of handwritten Maya books in the form of long strips of paper, which contain records of hieroglyphic texts, iconographic images and calendar calculations. The strips of paper were folded like an accordion, and notes were made on both sides of the resulting code.

Decoding writing

In the late 30s - 40s of the XX century, the point of view of the British ethnographer, linguist and archaeologist Eric Thomson prevailed in the scientific world, who assumed that the Maya writing had a pictorial character, and individual characters of the letter must be understood depending on what they were. depict, without departing from context. That is, the entire complex of Maya images must be interpreted based on our knowledge of this culture. In response to the point of view of Eric Thomson, an article by the Soviet specialist Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov appeared in the magazine "Soviet Ethnography" in 1952. The young scientist, then still a graduate student of the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, offered his own view on the problem of deciphering the Maya writing. Knorozov was a broad-based specialist, even before the war, studying at the history faculty of Moscow State University. MV Lomonosov, he was interested in the history of Egypt. After the war, he decided to specialize in the ethnography of the peoples of Central Asia. And during his studies, he formed a fairly broad idea of the writing systems of the Ancient World. Therefore, when studying Maya hieroglyphic texts, he could compare them with Egyptian writing and a number of other cultural traditions.

In his 1952 article, he proposed a deciphering method, the main idea of which was to determine the reading of individual Mayan hieroglyphic signs, which, in his opinion, had a clear phonetic meaning. That is, he assumed that the "Landa's alphabet" contains the phonetic sound of hieroglyphic signs, which is written using the letters of the Spanish alphabet. Knorozov determined that the Mayan writing is verbal and syllabic: some signs are ideograms, that is, separate words, and others are syllabic signs (syllabograms) - abstract phonetic elements. It was the syllable signs that were written in the "Landa's alphabet", that is, syllogical signs that convey a combination of a consonant and a vowel. In turn, the combination of syllable signs gave a record of the required word from the Mayan language.

Knorozov's method, which he used to determine the reading of hieroglyphs, is called the cross-reading method: if we assume that some combination of signs (hieroglyphic block) is read in a certain way, then another combination containing a number of already read signs makes it possible to determine the reading of a new sign, and so Further. As a result, Knorozov came up with a kind of set of assumptions that ultimately confirmed the assumption about reading the first combinations. So the researcher received a set of several dozen hieroglyphic signs, each of which corresponds to a certain phonetic meaning.

Thus, the main achievements of Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov were the definition of the method for reading the Maya hieroglyphic signs, the selection of examples on the basis of which he proposes this method, the characteristic of the structure of the Mayan hieroglyphic writing in relation to the language. He also made a small, consolidated catalog of the characters he identified in the Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. There is a misconception that, having deciphered the Maya writing, Knorozov thus read all the texts in general. It was simply physically impossible. For example, he paid very little attention to monumental texts. In his research, he primarily focused on hieroglyphic manuscripts, the number of which is small. But, most importantly, he really suggested the correct method of reading hieroglyphic texts.

Of course, Eric Thomson was extremely unhappy with the fact that some upstart from Soviet Russia was able to decipher the hieroglyphic writing. At the same time, the scientific discourse coincided with the beginning of the Cold War, that is, the period when two ideological systems fought - the communist and the capitalist. Accordingly, Knorozov represented Marxist historiography in Thomson's eyes. And from the point of view of Thomson, using the methods of Marxism, nothing can be achieved, and until the end of his life he did not believe in the possibility of deciphering hieroglyphic writing by the method proposed by Knorozov.

At the end of the 70s of the XX century, most Western experts agreed with Knorozov's method, and further study of the Maya writing followed the path of studying its phonetic component. At this time, a syllabary was created - a table of syllabic signs, and the catalog of logographic signs was gradually replenished - these are signs that denote individual words. Practically up to the present moment, researchers are engaged not only in reading and analyzing the content of texts, but also in determining the readings of new signs that could not be read by Knorozov.

Writing structure

Maya writing belongs to the type of verbal-syllabic writing systems, they are also called logosyllabic. Some of the signs denote individual words or word stems - logograms. Another part of the signs are syllabograms, which were used to write a combination of consonant and vowel sounds, that is, syllables. There are about a hundred syllabic signs in Maya writing, now about 85% of them have been read. With logographic signs it is more difficult, more than a thousand of them are known, and the reading of the most common logograms is determined, but there are many signs, the phonetic meaning of which is unknown, since no confirmation by syllable signs has yet been found for them.

In the early classical period (III-VI centuries), the texts contained more logographic signs, but in the late classics, by the VIII century, the volumes of the texts increase, and more syllabic signs are used. That is, the writing went along the path of development from logographic to syllabic, from complex to simple, because it is much more convenient to use purely syllabic writing than verbal and syllabic. Since more than a thousand logographic signs are known, the entire volume of Maya hieroglyphic writing signs is estimated somewhere in the region of 1100-1200 signs. But at the same time, not all of them are used simultaneously, but in different periods and in different areas. Thus, about 800 characters could be used simultaneously in writing. This is a normal indicator for the verbal and syllabic writing system.

The origin of the Maya writing

Maya writing was borrowed, not exclusively Mayan development. Writing in Mesoamerica appears somewhere in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. It appears primarily in Oaxaca, within the framework of the Zapotec culture. Around 500 BC, the Zapotecs create the first state in Mesoamerica, centered at Monte Alban. It was the first city in Mesoamerica to become the capital of a large state that occupied the central valley of Oaxaca. And one of the elements of the complication of the socio-political structure is the appearance of writing, and not just the appearance of writing, but also the development of the calendar system, because one of the first signs that are recorded in Zapotec texts were signs of a calendar nature.

The first texts that were carved on stone monuments usually contained names, titles and, possibly, the place of origin of captives who were captured by local rulers, which is a normal tradition in early states. Then, in the last centuries of the 1st millennium BC, a more developed writing system appears in the culture of the so-called epiolmecs. The Epiolmecs are representatives of the Mihe-Soke language family, which inhabited the Tehuantepec Isthmus, the narrowest point between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and further south in the mountainous regions of Chiapas and southern Guatemala. The Epiolmecs create a writing system that is known from a few monuments from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD. It was there that the kings first began to erect monuments with lengthy texts. For example, such a monument as Stela 1 from La Mojarra is known - this is a settlement on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in which in the II century AD a monument was erected containing the so-called long count - a special type of calendar records and a text that includes over 500 hieroglyphic characters. Unfortunately, this writing has not yet been deciphered, but many characters in shape resemble those used by the Maya in hieroglyphic writing, especially in the early period.

Knowing that the Maya were very closely related to their neighbors, we assume that somewhere at the turn of the era, the Epiolmec script was borrowed by them through the region of mountainous Guatemala, that is, in the southern area of the Maya settlement. Around the 1st century AD, the first inscriptions appeared there, which were already made in Mayan hieroglyphs, although they very much resemble the hieroglyphic signs of Epiolmec writing. In the Mayan inscriptions, the first dates appear on a long count, which also testifies to the borrowing of the calendar system. After that, writing from the south penetrates to the north, into the lowlands. There, the Mayan writing appears in an already sufficiently developed form, with an established set of signs. It is believed that at the initial stage of development of the verbal-syllabic writing system, the writing should be more logographic, verbal in nature, that is, their logograms should be included in the inscription. But already the first monuments of Maya writing, dating back to the 1st century AD, demonstrate the presence of syllabic signs. This indicates that the Maya writing, apparently, was immediately created on the basis of the Epiolmec script.

Thus, the Maya, having borrowed the writing from Mihe-soke - and this is a completely different language family that spoke an absolutely different language - adopted, first of all, the form of signs and the principle of writing texts, but adapted the writing to suit their oral speech. There is an assumption that the language of Maya inscriptions, the so-called hieroglyphic Maya, was a language that was not quite similar to oral speech, but was used solely for the purpose of recording any information - descriptions of specific events from the history of kings, calendar calculations, religious and mythological representations, that is, for the needs of the Mayan elite. Consequently, hieroglyphic texts, as a rule, were created according to some definite canon, far from oral speech in its pure form. Although individual records, for example, on ceramic vessels, which contain texts different in canon from the royal monuments, demonstrate the transfer of forms of words or phrases that could only be contained in oral speech.

The first monuments and types of texts

The first written monuments of the ancient Maya date back to the 1st – 2nd centuries AD, the end of the pre-classical period - the earliest stage of the formation of statehood. Unfortunately, these monuments cannot be accurately dated, since they do not contain dates, only the owner's inscriptions. The first dated monuments appear at the beginning of the classical period at the end of the 3rd century AD. Classical hieroglyphic texts are divided into two types: monumental monuments with royal inscriptions and small plastic objects with proprietary inscriptions. The first ones record the history of the kings, and the second category of texts denotes the type of object on which the inscription is made, and the belonging of this object to someone - a king or a noble person.

The corpus of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions now comprises about 15 thousand texts, and among them monumental monuments prevail. These can be monuments of various types: steles, wall panels, lintels, round stone altars that were installed in front of the steles, parts of the decor of buildings - reliefs made on plaster, or polychrome wall paintings. And the items of small plastic include ceramic vessels used for drinking various drinks, such as cocoa, jewelry, status items that belonged to certain people. On such objects, a record was made that, for example, a vessel for drinking cocoa belongs to the king of a kingdom.

There are practically no other genres in hieroglyphic texts. But royal monuments very often contain information of a ritual and mythological nature, because the kings not only made political history, fought, entered into dynastic marriages, but their other important function was to perform rituals. A significant part of the monuments was erected in honor of the end of calendar cycles, especially twenty years, which, from the point of view of the mythological concept of the ancient Maya, were considered very important events. Very often the texts contain references to the gods, their functions, rituals that were sent in honor of these gods, a description of the picture of the universe. But we have practically no special mythological texts.

The exception was, again, the inscriptions on ceramic vessels, where we contain not only the owner's inscriptions. Very often, the main surface of the vessel was painted with images of some kind of subject - for example, it could be palace scenes, scenes of an audience or bringing a tax. And on the mural was placed a text that described or explained the depicted scene. Also, often on the vessels were depicted scenes of a mythological nature, some plot from the myth, to which a necessary, but brief explanation was made. It is from these references that we can form an idea of a sufficiently developed mythology among the ancient Maya, since these individual mythological plots were parts of a very complex mythological system.

The calendar system of the ancient Maya was studied earlier than others. At the end of the 19th century, the scheme of the functioning of the calendar was determined and a method of correlation between the modern calendar and the calendar of the ancient Mayans was developed. During the 1st half of the 20th century, the correlation coefficient was refined several times, as a result, now we can accurately calculate the dates of the Mayan calendar, recorded in hieroglyphic texts, relative to the modern calendar. Each royal inscription contains, as a rule, dates that tell about when this or that event took place. Thus, it is possible to build a single chronology of events that took place in the life of different Mayan kings. At the same time, in the classical period, from the 3rd to the 9th centuries, we know about the history of the reign of several dozen dynasties that ruled in the numerous Mayan kingdoms, but thanks to the developed calendar system and the tradition of dating events, we can build their clear chronology up to the day.

Mayan codices

Unfortunately, the tradition of using dates in hieroglyphic texts and the installation of monuments itself ends at the beginning of the 10th century. After the 10th century, in the postclassical period, the Mayan kings in Northern Yucatan, where at that time the center of political activity shifted from the lowlands, did not erect so many monuments. All history is recorded in paper codes. The nature of the Maya writing indicates that, apparently, it was originally designed to be written on paper. Mesoamerican paper, a special material that was made from the bast of ficus, was probably invented somewhere at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennia BC in Mesoamerica and then, possibly at the turn of the era, penetrated into the Maya region.

We know of four codes: Dresden, Madrid, Paris and Grolier. All belong to the post-classical or early colonial period, that is, they were created between the 11th and 16th centuries. The Dresden and Madrid codes are books of a ritual nature, where descriptions of certain events of a mythological nature are given, the mention of deities, rituals that must be performed on certain dates, as well as the calculation of the ritual calendar and chronology of astronomical phenomena. Unfortunately, even now we still have a very poor understanding of the content of these codes, although it is clear that much there is based on mathematical calculations of calendar and astronomical events. The third code, the Parisian, is not as extensive in content as the first two, but the entries in it most likely contain information of a historical nature, and not ritual and mythological. Unfortunately, the integrity of the pages of the code does not allow for an in-depth analysis. Apparently, this kind of texts were recorded everywhere in the classical period, and in the capitals of the Maya states there were special archives where such codes were kept. Perhaps there were even some literary works, for example, of a mythological nature, but, unfortunately, none of this has survived.

The last codex, relatively small in volume, the so-called Grolier manuscript, has long been considered a modern forgery, since it does not contain hieroglyphic texts, but contains iconographic images and combinations of calendar signs. However, a recent comprehensive analysis has shown that the timing of the paper sheet, the iconographic style, and the paleography of the calendar signs point to the ancient origins of the Grolier Codex. This is probably the oldest of the four surviving codices; the time of its creation may date back to the 10th – 11th centuries.

Current research

Maya writing is still being actively studied, a group of scientists of several dozen people from different countries is engaged in a scrupulous study of hieroglyphic texts. The point of view on understanding the structure of phrases, reading individual signs, the grammatical rules of the language of hieroglyphic texts is constantly changing, and this explains the fact that there is still no published grammar of the hieroglyphic Maya - simply because at the time of publication of such a grammar it is already outdated … Therefore, none of the major specialists still dares neither to write a full-fledged textbook on the Maya hieroglyphic, nor to compile a complete dictionary of the Mayan hieroglyphic language. Of course, there are separate working dictionaries in which the most well-established translations of words are selected, but it has not yet been possible to write a full-fledged dictionary of the hieroglyphic Maya and publish it.

Every year archaeological excavations bring new monuments that need to be studied. In addition, now the moment has come when it is necessary to revise the texts published in the first half and middle of the XX century. For example, the "Corpus of Mayan Hieroglyphic Inscriptions" project, which operates on the basis of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, has gradually published monuments from various Mayan sites since the 1970s. The Corpus publications include photographs and line drawings of monuments, and much of the research in recent decades has been based on these and similar drawings made in other projects. But now the level of our understanding of the context of hieroglyphic inscriptions as a whole and in the paleography of individual characters is much deeper than 30-40 years ago, when these sketches were created. Therefore, it became necessary to significantly rework the existing body of inscriptions, first of all, the creation of other types of images, new photographs using modern digital methods or the implementation of three-dimensional scanning, when using special devices a virtual 3D model of the monument is created, which, for example, can be printed on a 3D printer., thus getting a perfect copy of the monument. That is, new methods of fixing monuments are being introduced and actively used. Based on a better understanding of hieroglyphic writing, the new sketches of the inscriptions can be made much more accurate and understandable for subsequent analysis.

For example, I am currently studying the Washaktun Inscription Corpus - one of the most important archaeological sites in northern Guatemala - as part of an archaeological project of the Slovak Institute of History and Archeology. This site was discovered in 1916 by the American archaeologist Silvanus Morley, who was the first to publish monuments from this site, and a full-fledged archaeological study of the Mayan area began with the excavations at Vasactuna in the 1920s. The corpus of the Washaktun inscriptions includes 35 monuments that are not very well preserved, and the drawings that exist at the moment are far from ideal. When, in modern conditions, you begin to study the inscriptions - from getting to know the monuments themselves to analyzing new digital photographs, a completely different picture emerges. And on the basis of new data, the dynastic history in Vasaktuna is more fully reconstructed, and not only the already known details are clarified, but new information appears, for example, the names and dates of the reign of unknown kings. My main task is to completely redraw all the monuments of Vashaktun, and, believe me, this is a very painstaking work. At least, even before the completion of the project, it is clear that the results of this work are very different from the established picture that developed by the end of the 20th century. And similar work remains to be done with many Mayan archaeological sites.