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MAYA WRITING.
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Development, cultural significance, hieroglyphics, language, modern interpretations, phonetics, signs.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Development, cultural significance, hieroglyphics, language, modern interpretations, phonetics, signs.
Paper Introduction:
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
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"Deciphering Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: The State of the Art." Visible Language 24 (199 ): 62-72.Hammond, Norman. Eric Thompson, one of the greatestMaya scholars, in his belief that the Maya were a race of "peaceful priestsgiven to philosophical speculation about the nature of time and prophecy"and that this constituted the substance of all their writing.[13] It had frequently been suggested that the inscriptions referred tospecific historical events and, as he admitted, Thompson was proved wrongby the work of Tatiana Proskouriakoff who demonstrated the biographicalnature of the inscriptions in the 195 s. The word "jaguar" could be indicated simply by drawingthe head of a big cat. It was not until themid-nineteenth century that a popular book, with excellent drawings of Mayainscriptions, revived interest in the culture. [24]Ibid., 5 . Her dating of the art was intendedprimarily as a means of charting changes in style but she also discoveredpatterns of dates at particular sites. [23]Schele and Freidel, 49. The tablet celebrated the twentieth anniversary of theaccession of a lord named Bahlum Kuk. It was sometimes though that early scripts, such asChinese and Egyptian, were purely ideographic -- that is, bearing norelation to the spoken language. Schele and Freidel demonstrated the function of phonetic signs (bythemselves and as complements) and logographs using the sign for "jaguar"(balam in Mayan). D. One of the major achievements of Maya culture was its system ofhieroglyphic writing which was "the most highly developed script in pre-Columbian America."[1] The Classic Period of Maya civilization extendedroughly from A.D. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.Fields, Virginia. [3]Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Storyof the Ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow, 199 ), 45. 5th ed. Taken together these phonetic signs constitute the glyph. But linguists have come to understand, inpart because of the research on the Maya script, that all written languages"have a strong phonetic component (they denote sounds), no matter howpictorial some of the signs may look."[15] Even in scripts that areprimarily phonetic, such as ours, there are signs that are purely semantic(such as mathematical notation) and can be "'read' in any tongue onearth."[16] The phonetic nature of Maya script was revealed by a Russianlinguist, Yuri Knorosov, who explained that de Landa's list of signs andWestern letters was not an alphabet at all. [21]Houston, 34. They could also combine the two typesof signs. [25]Fields, 72. [18]Ibid., 33. Viewers would have known itcontained day signs even though, like the "prohibited" sign, it resembledno particular word. Thecalendar was gradually worked out as well but scholars were still not ableto break the general code of the writing itself. It is, however, possible that there was originally aspecific connection to a particular word. [1 ]Ibid., 34. [19]Ibid., 33. Maya Glyphs. (London: Thames and Hudson,1993), 166. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.Schele, Linda, and David Freidel. It was in thisregion that Mayan literacy flourished and "where the script achieved itsmost elaborate expression."[5] The specific origins of Maya script have not been determined but thegeneralized cultural unity of Mesoamerica makes it likely that there wasconstant contact among groups which "promot[ed] cross-fertilisation thatcut across differences of language and culture."[6] Within the lowlandregion Yucatecan and Cholan had approximately the same degree of similarityas Spanish and Italian have today. Coe, The Maya, 5th ed. In addition to phonetic signs Maya scribes also employed logographs,signs that represented whole words. This was done by adding a phonetic sign either before or afterthe logograph in order to make its pronunciation (and thus its specificmeaning) clear. Therefore readers needed to know thatthis particular logograph of a cat's head should be pronounced balam. Between 188 and 19 5scholars concentrating on the codices deciphered the basics of the Mayacalendar. By the mid-twentiethcentury many older scholars had decided that phoneticism was a mistakenapproach since no one had gotten anywhere by applying de Landa's alphabetto the hieroglyphs. The Maya. [27]Coe, 2 1. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1982.Houston, S. But ocelots and margays were also big spotted catsand were also found in the region. De Landa's treatise was hidden away in a library, as were the fourMaya codices that survived his Christian influence. [26]Ibid., 72. [13]Houston, 14. The scribe's skill is demonstratedin the beautiful calligraphy and in his "use of elegant metaphoricalexpressions for the passage of time" in his discussion of Bahlum Kuk'sancestry.[26] Thus the deciphering of Mayan glyphs has shown the way to"realms of Mayan thought and behavior that were undreamt of by earliergenerations of archaeologists" and as the work continues these realms willopen wider still.[27] BIBLIOGRAPHYCoe, Michael D. Like the Greek city-states they competed fiercely among themselves but they also presented a"unified ethnic identity to outsiders."[7] By the time the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century the culturehad declined to the point where a monk, Lorenzo de Bienvenida, saw the Mayaruins and described them as the finest of "all the discoveries in theIndies" but did not connect them with the far simpler Mayan society he sawaround him.[8] Another Spaniard, Bishop Diego de Landa, worked out thefact that ancestors of this same people had built the impressive structuresthat were now half-buried in the jungles.[9] Unfortunately Landa was also"a severe and narrow-minded man" who burned most of the Maya codicesbecause they contained, he said, the signs of the devil.[1 ] The Maya,Landa noted, "regretted [this] to an amazing degree."[11] But Landa,Bienvenida and others were also "accomplished scholars" who wrote "first-class anthropological accounts of native culture."[12] Landa eveninterviewed learned Mayas and left behind a description of the Mayacalendar and his so-called alphabet of Mayan writing. The important languagesfor deciphering Maya hieroglyphics are the Yucatecan and Cholan languagesthat occurred in the lowland area that takes in parts of present-dayMexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and all of Belize. De Landa's notes had been rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth centuryand the number system and names of the months had been deciphered. This led to extensive trade andcultural exchange and a shared Mayan identity evolved. This writing was foundon a variety of media. [14]Ibid., 15. [22]Ibid., 34. Proskouriakoff was an architectwho studied formal aspects of Maya art in the attempt to establish relativedates for the monuments and artifacts. [6]Ibid., 22. [15]Coe, 191. [11]Quoted by Fields, 66. [7]Schele and Freidel, 51. The basicunit of Mayan script, the glyph is "an irreducible sign with a distinctmeaning or sound."[18] The glyphs are block-like combinations of signsthat can have either very elaborate shapes or can be drawn with roughsketches that indicate only essential details. In this usage the syllabic signs are known as complements. Instead, it was a syllabary,"a collection of consonant/vowel combinations."[17] When they were puttogether these syllables formed words (glyphs) consisting of theprogression of consonant-vowel-consonant but dropping the last vowel sincefew Maya words ended in vowels. Glyphs were also combinedinto larger units, called compounds, in which a number of distinct glyphswere "wedged tightly against one another" in a larger block.[19] Scholarsare uncertain regarding the function of compounds. Ancient Maya Civilization. As aresult of this conjunction of three approaches -- the phonetic, thehistorical and the syntactic -- "the number of glyphs deciphered and theinterpretive fallout is growing exponentially."[24] As modern comprehension of Maya writing continues to grow scholarshave not only increased their knowledge of history but their "appreciationof the literary abilities of the Maya scribes" as well.[25] The PalenqueTablet of the 96 Glyphs is an example of the beauty of their work in visualand poetic terms. 9 . But, as Houston says, "in thissense ideographs form a default category about which we know verylittle."[22] In the 197 s a new group of scholars combined Knorosov's phoneticismwith Proskouriakoff's historical approach and developed a synthesizedapproach based on "the axiom that the writing reflected spoken language andthus had word order that could be used to determine the function of theglyphs" even when they could not be translated.[23] Inscriptions could,therefore, be paraphrased and treated as texts for the first time. [2 ]Schele and Freidel, 52. (Drawings wereespecially important because the inscriptions were unprotected from weatherand thieves.) At that point the emphasis on the study of the calendars inthe codices enabled scholars to work out chronologies for the various Mayasites. New York: William Morrow, 199 .----------------------- NOTES [1]Virginia Fields, "Deciphering Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: The Stateof the Art," Visible Language 24 (199 ): 63. Since balam was the only word forbig cat that began with ba (or ended with m(a)) readers knew they shouldpronounce balam here. [12]Michael D. But this emphasis also misled J. [16]Ibid., 192. [8]Quoted by Norman Hammond, Ancient Maya Civilization (New Brunswick,New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 33-34. Thus the peoplerepresented in Mayan art alongside the inscribed glyphs were not just godsand spirits, as had often been assumed, but were historical personages.From this discovery, and as other scholars began to identify the glyphs forparticular individuals and locations, the course of Mayan history has beenrevealed in some detail.[14] Progress on the specific character of the writing had been just asslow. [9]Hammond, 35-36. [5]S. The writing system flourished in thatera as one facet of a new, complex hierarchical order that was apparentfrom the civilization's remains but whose history was relativelyinaccessible because the script could not be read. It was carved on freestanding stone monuments, onmasonry architecture, on portable objects of bone or shell, and it waspainted on pottery and in screenfold books, or codices, of bark paper. In the early decades of this century archaeologists brought backdrawings of many more Classic inscriptions for study. [2]Ibid. A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. Todo this the scribe could add either the phonetic sign for the syllable bato the front of the logograph or the syllable m(a) at the end (where the"a" sound would, of course, be dropped). An ideograph is asign that communicates a particular idea while it "does not especiallyresemble anything."[21] (The cigarette, of course, could be replaced byanything else that was being prohibited.) The cartouche that encloses daysigns is an example of a Mayan ideograph. [17]Houston, 15. These dates began with what seemedto be birth glyphs, followed twenty-five years later by glyphs celebratingaccession to power and closing with signs for death. They appear to becomposed for the sake of order but may have some other function that hasnot been understood yet. Houston, Maya Glyphs (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1989), 2 . Thecontent of the hieroglyphic codices was "primarily astronomical anddivinatory" and for some time scholars believed that all Maya writing dealtonly with the position of the stars and the art of prophesying fromthem.[2] Gradually attention shifted to other media and it was slowlydiscovered that the inscriptions held "the names and deeds of kings andnobles, and accounts of how they and their people strove for prosperity anda place in history."[3] Deciphering the Maya's script and discoveringtheir history has been "one of the great stories of archaeology."[4] The Maya language group originated over 4, years ago in highlandGuatemala and subsequently divided into thirty-one separate tongues most ofwhich can no longer be understood by each other. 25 to A.D. D. [4]Ibid., 46. If the logograph was omitted altogether and thephonetic sign for la was added in its place, then a completely phoneticspelling of balam was possible.[2 ] A third type of sign was the ideograph which, as Houston mentions, isthe equivalent of a "no-smoking sign" in which a circle containing apicture of a cigarette is bisected by a diagonal line.
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