ANTHROPOLOGY 1168
SEVER HALL 102, TUESDAY AND THURSDAY 10 -11AM 1524-1560: Spanish secular and ecclesiastical authorities have some access to and are curious about Maya hieroglyphs and the content of the indigenous codices
1560-s – late 17th century: a change in perception to “books of the devil” and an increasingly aggressive campaign against Maya hieroglyphic codices and their keepers
Several attempts to understand Maya writing and translate some codices but none of such descriptions/translations has survived except for Landa’s Diego de Landa (1524-1579) Second Bishop of Yucatán, Mexico Great auto de fe in Mani in 1562 Second campaign in 1573-79
“…It was impossible to proceed strictly juridically with them… because if we had proceeded with all according to the order of the law, it would be impossible to finish with the province of Maní alone in twenty years…” 16th century
17th century
After Chuchiak 2004: Map 1 John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1872)
American lawyer, diplomat and travel writer
Author of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (1843), two lengthy & well-illustrated reports of his travels through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras in 1849- 1841, accompanied by the artist Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854)
Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814-1874)
Widely-traveled cleric who discovered many of the great manuscripts upon which current Mayanist research depends including Diego de Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (in an anonymous copy dating to 1661), the Quiché Maya Popol Vuh, and the famous 16th- century Motul Dictionary of Yucatec Maya.
Ernst Förstemann (1822-1906)
Published and studies the Dresden codex
Deciphered Maya numbers and calendar
Identified and explained the astronomical information in the Dresden codex (Venus and lunar tables) Combinations of 260- day cycle names and days of the 365-day solar year repeat approximately every 52 years
Most Maya dates are recorded in this system
The Long Count was used for larger periods of time Leon de Rosny (1837-1914)
Studied the Paris and Madrid codices
Suggested that Maya writing was a mix of phonetic signs and word signs
Identified glyphs for cardinal directions Could it be a spelling of cutz – a word for “turkey”?
Rosny suspected that it was, but he could not find a way to prove that the second sign was tz(V) Alfred Percival Maudslay (1850-1931)
Documented the monuments of Palenque, Copan and Quirigua in both casts and photographs, opening the way to the decipherment of Maya writing.
Sir J. Eric S. Thompson (1898- 1975)
Dean of Maya hieroglyphic research through much of the twentieth century, Thompson contributed greatly to our understanding of the complicated Maya calendar
First comprehensive catalog of Maya glyphs Yurii Knorozov (1922-1999)
Suggested that Maya writing was logo-syllabic and typologically similar to Old World scripts
Landa’s “alphabet” as a bi-script
Same signs in the surviving Maya codices used to decipher more syllables based on context
Landa’s Relacíon de las Cosas de Yucatán (ca. 1565) is an invaluable survey of Maya culture on the eve of the Conquest, containing detailed descriptions of the Maya calendar, the Yukatek Maya language and a bilingual key to ancient Maya writing. Only an abridged later copy of the original manuscript has survived
. Knorozov realized that the Maya script had too many signs for a heavily logographic system like Chinese but too few for a purely syllabic or alphabetic writing
.Multiple signs in Landa’s alphabet were assigned the same values (a, b, l, o, u). It would make sense in a mixed logosyllabic script, but not in an alphabet
.Several signs are assigned values including both a consonant and a vowel (e.g., ca, ka, cu, ku, ma and ti). So the script probably contained syllables
Cutz means “turkey” in many Mayan languages including Yucatec spoken in the region where the codices were likely from cu – tzu? Knorozov suggested that the value of the second sign could be tz(u), so that the spelling was cu-tz(u)
Madrid Codex 91a tz(u)-l(?)
Dresden 7a Dresden 13c Dresden 21b Dresden 40b Captions to the images of dogs in the Dresden codex always contained a word spelled with two characters – a potential tz(u) and one of “l” letters of Landa’s alphabet. One of the words for “dog” in Yucatec is tzul, so Knorozov suggested that captions spelled the word tzul as tzu-l(u) Dresden 19a 20a 21a
Knorosov showed that Landa’s l(u) and cu appeared together in the spelling *-lu-cu, where context requires the Mayan word buluk “eleven”.
allographs
mu- u-lu-mu u-mu-ti u-mu-ti muwan ulum u-mut u-mut
allographs
u-mu-ca u-mu-ca CHAK-CHE-e u-muc u-muc
ca-CAAN CHE-e
Initial and final phonetic complements or “clues” as Knorozov termed them
Problem with language identification (Knorozov tried to read in Yukatek instead of Ch’olan) Letter to M. Coe. 1957; DO archive
Some “corrections” where in fact a step in a wrong direction…
David H. Kelley (1924 - 2011)
first American scholar to both support and extend Knorosov’s phonetic approach. tu uucpiz tun uaxac ahau u katunil, laix u katunil cimci chakanputun tumen kakupacal yetel tec uilue
“In the seventh year of Katun 8 Ahau, this was the time when Chakanputun was destoyed by Kakupacal and Tec Uilu.” Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Roys 1967: 51, 141) Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985)
Her 1958 article on the historical nature of Maya inscriptions brought about a paradigm change in Maya research. Heinrich Berlin (1915-1987)
Berlin’s main interest in Maya writing was personal names, but in 1958 he found a series of glyphs that were particular to individual sites (or kingdoms). Berlin’s “Emblem Glyphs” are now knownto be the personal titles of Maya kings, identifying them as the “divine lords” of their own kingdoms.
His discovery was a major breakthrough in understanding Classic Maya political organization, which had previously been interpreted as everything from an Empire to a series of small chiefdoms. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (1968+) Tikal project reports Copan inscriptions by Barbara Fash Palenque inscriptions by Merle Greene Robertson and Linda Schele Maya vases by Michael Coe and particularly by Justin Kerr (Maya Vase Book volumes and later data base) Harvard Peabody and Dumbarton Oaks conferences (1971+) Palenque Round Table series (1973+) New generation of scholars: Floyd Lounsbury, Victoria Bricker, Linda Schele, Peter Mathews, John Justeson, Stephen Houston, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Alfonso Lacadena, Simon Martin David Stuart (1965-)
.Stuart vastly enlarged the number of contexts in which phonetic readings could be tested by turning his attention to logographs.
.His Ten Phonetic Syllables (1987) remains a foundational study for decipherment methodology. Three ways of writing tz’a-pa-ja, tz’ahpaj “it is driven into the ground” Words in the Maya script may be written with syllables (phonetic values only) or with logograms (pronunciation & meaning):
AJAW vs. a-ja-wa
PAKAL vs. pa-ka-la
WITZ vs. wi-tzi
Understanding spelling variation became key to all later decipherments
Many more Mayan languages have been documented in the last 50 years
Contributions by Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman, John Justeson, John Robertson, Soeren Wichmann and Victoria Bricker have led to a better understanding of modern Maya languages and their historical trajectories
It has become clear that most Maya inscriptions were written in some Ch’olan language
Present-day discussions center on the exact nature of the Classic Mayan / Hieroglyphic Mayan and its relation to the present-day and colonial Ch’olan languages and the spelling rules in the script Rediscovery of Maya glyphs Deciphering the calendar Phonetic decipherment The final breakthrough The language of the glyphs