Maya Hieroglyphs Decoded

The Ancients

This episode explores the profound impact of deciphering Maya hieroglyphs on our understanding of ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Host Tristan

Key takeaways

• The decipherment of Maya script was not a single moment but an incremental process that peaked in the 1980s and 90s.
• Tikal (Mutul dynasty) and Calakmul (Kanul dynasty) functioned as competing superpowers in a centuries-long geopolitical rivalry.

Main topics

• Maya Hieroglyph Decipherment
• Tikal vs. Calakmul Rivalry

Notable quotes

It's opening up a whole world.

Conclusion

Deciphering the Maya script has turned a silent archaeological record

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 3 (1:02) And across the Atlantic in Central America, archaeologists have had another ancient code to crack. We know them as Maya hieroglyphs. Today, these beautiful symbols have started to reveal so much about the complex world of the ancient Maya. About their cities, their politics, their beliefs, their conflicts, their leaders. Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is your guide to Maya hieroglyphs and the world, the stories they are revealing. Our guest is Dr. David Stewart, Professor of Mesoamerican Art, Archaeology and Epigraphy at the University of Texas. Speaker 3 (1:49) David, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. It's Speaker 1 (1:53) great to be here. Speaker 3 (1:54) And to talk about Maya hieroglyphs. And I mean, reading up on your work just before this, to hear how the deciphering of this script, it's opening up this world of the ancient Maya, learning so much more about them and how they lived. Speaker 1 (2:08) It's opening up a whole world. I mean, imagine studying ancient Egypt. at a time when one couldn't read the hieroglyphic writing, and then you could read the hieroglyphic writing. I think we've gone through a transition. In our field, in Maya studies like that over the past 40, 50 years, something like that, and the decipherment really, really happened, I think, in the 80s and 90s. And we're still catching up to everything we can study, and there's still so much. Speaker 3 (2:37) And this is quite interesting because, yes, you mentioned the deciphering of hieroglyphs, and people would think Rosetta Stone and Champollion and like, I've got it, that kind of the eureka moment. But as we're going to find it in this chat. Is the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs, is it much more than just kind of one moment? Is it a much more prolonged process? Speaker 1 (2:55) It's absolutely more than one moment. It's been many people over, I would say, the past hundred years. Small, incremental breakthroughs, you might say. You know, a sign here, a sign there. You know, Maya hieroglyphs were words or phrases deciphered almost a hundred years ago. Actual signs were deciphered. back in the 19th century. Just a small, small, small percentage of what's out there. And then there was more progress, a better understanding of how the script actually worked. That was the real work that so many people were doing was just to try to figure out how the system worked. And even though a few signs could be read, the general system was really hard to fathom. until, I would say, the 1980s. That's when we really were able to first get it and see how it worked as a system. Speaker 3 (3:52) David, for you, reading about your story and your links to Maya archaeology, you mentioned the 1980s and the 1970s, because this is something that has fascinated you since you were a child. You've been visiting sites with Maya hieroglyphs since you were Speaker 1 (4:07) a young guy. That's right. I was very, very fortunate in the fact that my Mother and father were both archaeologists. They met on a dig, in fact, back in the 1950s. A great family story there. My father was running an archaeological project in Mexico when I was about 8, 9, 10 years old. But I was in the field with them. And I remember vividly the discovery of, well, first of all, it was at a site called Cobá in Yucatán. it has some of the most massive pyramids you know in the jungle this was a very remote place back then and i remember walking around looking at these pyramids and wondering about them very innocently very naively as a kid and the discovery of monuments with writing on them and my father becoming very excited and he would drop everything and go draw them and photograph them and i would look over his shoulder and ask him, what do these things say? What are these odd looking carvings, these squiggles on the rocks? I remember my dad saying, oh, we can't read these. No one can read these. Maybe a date. Back then, the only thing that anyone could read were the dates on the monuments, right? This created this kind of vision of the Maya being only interested in time, which is not true. The Maya calendar and stuff like that, I'm guessing. Right, right. That was understood a long time ago. I don't know, something stuck with me when my dad said, no one can read these. It's not like I had any ambitions, but I was just curious. And I was also bored in the middle of the jungle. As my dad was working, I had little to do. I would sit there and read some of the technical books he had on the Maya. And I would look at the drawings of the hieroglyphs and just wonder what in the world are these things. They're beautiful to look at. This is something that maybe some of the listeners have seen Maya hieroglyphs. visiting sites or in publications, but they're gorgeous and they're curious looking. They're odd looking things. Well, Speaker 3 (6:09) David, that's exactly what I was going to ask next. I mean, if someone mentions hieroglyphs, a lot of us will be thinking of the pictograms that you can see in ancient Egypt, or maybe even very early cuneiform as well, where they've got depictions of the vases and so on. When talking about Maya hieroglyphs, what do they look like? What types of images should we be imagining? Speaker 1 (6:29) Well, when one looks at a Maya text, whether it's painted on a ceramic vessel or whether it's carved in stone, what you're looking at is a bit like a grid. You're looking at a complicated array of roughly square or rectangular shaped things that are all clustered together. And within each one of those squares is an assemblage of what we call signs. You know, each sign is very complex visually. When you stand back and look at a Maya text, it's overwhelming in terms of its visual richness. It's not immediately clear that you're looking at images of things that are recognizable, although people usually can pick out, oh, you know, there's a human hand over there and there's a animal head over there. A lot of the signs look really abstract. And unlike Egyptian, let's say, you know, you look at an Egyptian text and, you know, it's fairly easy to recognize an owl, a kneeling person or something like that. I think in Egyptian writing, there was a conservatism about the system over such a long period of time. With the Maya, you see a lot of variation. You see scribes, individual scribes, deciding, oh, I'm going to be creative and I'm going to use this particular form of this sign here, writing a king's name, let's say. I know of inscriptions where a king's name will pop up several times. as you might expect. But each time it looks different because the scribe is being playful. And there's a certain amount of artistry and playfulness baked into the system that I don't think exists in a lot of other writing systems. Speaker 3 (8:09) Did this also become a lingua franca for the ancient Maya? Because when I think of the ancient Maya, David, I think of all these different cities. Calakmul, Karakol, Chichen Itza, Palenque, Tikal, Copan, and so on, spread over a huge area in Mesoamerica. Divided, as we'll probably explore, with their dynasties and their particular cultures. But did they all speak the same language? Did they all have this same hieroglyphic script? Speaker 1 (8:40) Well, this is a great question. You're absolutely right that Maya writing crops up in this vast region. One third of Mesoamerica is the Maya world. And throughout what's now Guatemala, part of Honduras, Mexico, Belize, you find sites where Maya writing existed and you find monuments. Now, until fairly recently, we weren't sure how to answer your question, which is, are the texts that we see at Chichen Itza, way up in the north of Yucatan, Is that the same writing system really in the same language that we're seeing in Copan or in Palenque, these sites further to the south? What we stumbled upon in a way in the, I would say in the early 90s is when this really came into focus, is that it is the same system. And if you can read the glyphs in one Maya site, you pretty much can read them at any Maya site. Now, there are two things about this that are interesting. One is we know that there are lots of Mayan languages. Even today, there are about 5 million speakers of Mayan languages, and there are lots of them, right? In the highlands of Guatemala, in the lowlands of Chiapas and Yucatan. The question was, which language are we looking at in the ancient texts? So with the precision of the writing system, the grammar, the phonology, I mean, this is really specific writing. We were able to pin down the language and how it relates to other historical or modern languages. It is a lingua franca. It seems to be that in ancient times, this was a courtly language, an elite kind of formal language for official texts that didn't always reflect what the general population was speaking. So we call the language classic Mayan. This is the language we see in the glyphs. We have grammars that we've written about it, linguistic studies of the language. It's close to some contemporary languages, not so close to others. But no matter where you were, if you were a Maya elite, if you were a nobleman or a priest throughout the Maya world, I think you would have been trained in this language and in this script. Speaker 3 (11:03) And that's interesting because I had this later, but I think I might as well ask it now. The everyday person from the classic Maya period, let's say, from the ancient Maya, the indication is that they would not have been able to read that script. I guess the next one is, would there have been a cursive script equivalent so that they still spoke the same language, but they wrote it down in a different form or interpreted it in a different form? Or would they have spoken a completely different language full stop? Speaker 1 (11:31) Yeah, this is a great question. From what we can see, and we have to acknowledge that we have a skewed sample of these texts, the ones that preserve on ceramics or in stone. We don't have the books. We don't have maybe some of the informal records that may have been kept here and there by, say, a middle class merchant or something like that. We just don't have those kinds of records if they existed. But I'm fairly comfortable in saying that, look, my writing was really reserved for the elites. It was a courtly art form and a courtly language. There well could have been simpler kinds of texts and written forms that, like I say, we just don't have. there must have been economic records and fairly dry tallies of tribute coming into maya courts and that sort of thing i wish we had those like linear b text or something it was don't have that stuff rather what we have are the you know records of rituals and historical narratives about wars and alliances and you know names of these great people I mean, it's a bit hard to answer that question. We have the more official, more formal texts instead of the larger body of things. Speaker 3 (12:48) David, I'm sorry, but from what you were just saying, it just sounds like the grass is always greener on the other side. Because I know many people who study the Mycenaeans and Linear B who are clamoring to find a name of an actual Mycenaean ruler, like an Agamemnon-like person, but all they have is the