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Maya Epigraphy Methods


In the 70's I had the good fortune to attend Linda Schele's first class at the University of Texas at Austin. She had wonderful ideas about reading the Maya glyphs. These included spelling the glyphs out, she also included "sense readings of the pictoral elements within those glyphs. [But other views tooka toll and soon the "phallus" glyphs reigned supreme, even though none of the Maya codices emphasized such glyphs.]

It has been almost thirty years since that momentous class and in that time, only the rulers' names, dates of birth, accession and death together with a battle or two have been defined and clarified. Very few, if any, of the "events" other than those stated here have been identified. The discipline seem to have forgotten that language in any land ebbs and flows with such governments. Even in places like Europe and Asia, rulers married only princesses, daughters of other rulers. And these princesses brought with them some of their own customs. They also brought with them an entourage of servants who mixed with the servants of the new households and, in turn, married other servants or city folk.

Shipwrecked sailors appeared once in a while. Hernan de Cortés found two such men in Veracruz, one of which became important enough that he, too, married into the royal households and became a ruler in his own right. Probably, this was due to a higher form of technology he may have been trained in at home. La Malinche became Cortés's translator very quickly, but it is not until one reads about the Jesuits in Venezuela that one encounters the mamaluccos who had married the natives and became the unwilling translators for the Jesuits.

When one reads the Popul Vuh, written in Spanish and even in various Maya dialects, the story is just a tale that is not true. And when they begin to "read" the glyphs, those texts are immediately forgotten. They appear to put the written texts back on the book shelves and tend to ignore them. They pour over the glyphs, drawing them out, defining some elements as grammar components while tiny elements that actually contain more information are lost.

When Bishop Landa asked a Maya glyph artist to "spell" out a sentence using the glyphs, he did. The Maya scribe apparently was already accustomed to writing out what he may not have understood as a language. His "writing" skills included sounds. In his land alone there were many visitors from foreign areas with different speech patterns. It was necessary that the scribe be familiar with sound, just as a modern stenographer. Seeing that "spelled out" words are possible, now the glyphs emphasizing those "spelling" attributes are used and although referred to sometimes, the visual aspects of the glyphs are ignored. On "spelling" out the glyphs, the big push now, is to create a "proto-language" base, instead of identifying the language that is the source of the "spelled out" or the visually inferred concepts.

A case in point is the Initial Series Glyph at the top of the first two columns (or more) of most monument texts. Even in the beginning, it has always been taught only as: "the Initial Series Glyph that identifies the dating sequence of the text." It has been merely a form of decoration, nothing more. See the ISG in The Temple of the Sun. It is apparent, that its iconography is very different from other monuments. So when compared with other ISG's, each monument appears to contain information about the texts found below that Initial Series Glyph.

Another situation is the The Serpent-Dragon or the Square Nosed Beastie in the same glyphic text. It is found in a Mixtec codice. Nevertheless, the Mixtec visual is never considered as a possible translation of a Maya glyph. These are only a few examples of missing data. Several more can be found in the Presentation.

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