What Was The Ancient Mayans Written Language System?
The ancient Mayans of Mesoamerica devised an elaborate system of hieroglyphics used by the royalty and religious higher-ups. Fifty years ago, the glyphs were virtually undeciphered, but in the last 25 years, great strides have been made in “cracking” the code. Mayan scribes wrote with quills and brushes from right to left on folding codices (books) made of bark coated with white gesso. Texts had both representational, semantic, and phonetic meanings. Logograms stood for whole words or word stems; syllabograms stood for syllables and vowels unaccompanied by consonants. The first bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, asked Indians to create an “alphabet” of signs, to which he assigned Spanish letter equivalents. Not until 1952 did a Russian epigrapher figure out that the “alphabet” was actually a list of syllabograms. This realization proved to be the “Rosetta Stone” of glyph decipherment. Mesoamerica was in a constant state of warfare between city states vying for dominance. Most Mayan tex
