Mayan Writing

Mayan writing is one of the most beautiful but highly complex and difficult scripts in the world. It is a system that uses pictographs and phonetic or syllabic elements. The Maya used this sophisticated style to carve symbols into stone. The most common place for writing was the perishable books they made from bark paper, coated with lime to make a fresh white surface. These books were screen-folded and bound with wood and deer hide. They were referred to as codices, however only four remain today because of their perishable nature and Spanish book burning. The Maya writing system was one of the greatest achievements of their civilization. Maya writing also appears on an array of materials and in many places such as carved stone, door
Although some are recognizable as pictures of natural objects, others are very unrecognizable and unclear. For example, a glyph portraying a monkey head is actually a logograph meaning "sacred" or "divine." Throughout the course of the paper I will continue on with how to read the Maya code and hope to grasp a better knowledge of this artistically beautiful language. I first must learn the general layout the Maya used to organize an inscription. It employs a system of vertical double columns read in pairs, together with multiple horizontal rows. The designation of vertical columns by letters and horizontal rows offers a convenient way to preciously indicate an individual square of the overall grid. Glyph blocks form the main aggregate in Maya writing. Composed of two or more signs, they serve the fundamental building blocks. Secondly I had to learn to familiarize myself with the basic kinds of signs. I learned that glyphs vary depending on the type of material they were written on. For example glyphs carved on monuments look somewhat different
The most common of these is referred to as the symbolic variant. They tend to dominate other types of signs in an inscription. It has been concluded that symbolic variants can function as any grammatical form. Each glyph, again in theory, has a personified or head variant in addition to its symbolic form. Head variants represent humans or humanlike gods, animals, and supernatural creatures. These are generally depicted as the figure's portrait turned into the profile. The rarest of all, the full-figure variants portray the god or creature's entire body including the legs, head, arms, and torso. These generally represent the most ornate writing in the Maya system. It seems, symbolic and head variants represent the fragmented details of a larger image, whereas the full-figure glyphs provide the entire picture. Another category of signs includes the glyphs that have syllabic properties. Syllabic or phonetic signs generally take the form of consonant-vowel or of vowel by itself. Phonetic complements can hint to the value as a pronunciation guide. These complements seem to occur more frequently in the Late Classic texts than in the Early