If many have heard about ancient Egyptian writing, then Mayan hieroglyphs for the inhabitants of our time are a much less well-known topic. Those orientating in this field recognize that the writing of ancient American tribes is in no way inferior to the ancient Egyptian in interest, deserves no less attention. As is known from history, at first the scientists who studied the writing of American ancient people followed the same false path as the scientists who initially studied the writing of the ancient Egyptians. But more about everything.
general information
As many people know, at first people could not understand the ancient Egyptian script because they tried to interpret each symbol as a word or concept. At first, the same mistake was made by researchers of the characters used to write Maya. Champollion was able to reveal ancient Egyptian secrets at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The secrets of Mayan writing are still not open to everyone, and they learned to read the hieroglyphs used by this tribe only a few decades ago.
Scientists noted a lot in common with the writing of Ancient Egypt. It is surprising that people were close to understanding Mayan hieroglyphs as early as the sixteenth century, when de Landa compared Spanish sounds and written symbols of American tribes corresponding to each other. Four centuries later, scientists, closely tackling this issue, realized that the medieval monk was completely right in his observations.
More recently, scholars have compared Egyptian writings and sources from Mayan times. Identified similar principles. Hieroglyphs are logograms that are created to encrypt words. Mayans also used phonograms, which denoted sounds. Tribes of that time used determinants that were recorded and spoken. Often writing included phonetic compliments, and to write words used blocks in the form of a rectangle, which is fully consistent with the rules adopted in ancient Egypt. True, a distinctive feature of Mayan writing was the presence of a relatively large gap between the blocks, designed to separate words from each other.
General and not only
Studying further Mayan hieroglyphs, scientists identified the key differences between this writing and the accepted by the ancient Egyptians. For example, American tribes read from left to right. The texts were written from top to bottom. There were no other directions. In addition, a “semantic indicator” was used. Were invented methods for reflecting the word belonging to logograms, phonograms were designated in a specific way. Separate naming methods have been developed for the determinative. To formulate abstract ideas, Native Americans used metaphors. If we compare the Mayan and ancient Egyptian scripts, we can see that the significance of the metaphor for the former is much more significant.
The nuances of linguistic practice
Scientists involved in Mayan hieroglyphs have identified the importance of careful handling of symbols. As practical exercises showed, you cannot take all words, all associations literally. Sometimes the metaphors inherent in the language are completely abstract, sometimes they talk about real connections between objects. So, the jaguar displayed power, and there was a real correspondence: the king had the right to wear the skin of this animal, and his throne was made in the form of the body of a jaguar. This animal was sacrificial for sacred rites dedicated to the ruler. But to display a person there were flowers, corn. Like these plants, ordinary people existed in order to die, but at the same time had seeds of rebirth within themselves. The creation of the world was associated with a water lily, which appeared in the primitive era and appears in a reservoir, as if it were a miracle.
In the work of linguists and philologists, special attention is paid to the fact that Maya is not a single culture, as is typical for the Aztecs. Accordingly, there were several languages. Speaking in one of the dialects, a person might not understand another representative of the tribe who used a different type of dialect. All languages spoken in that environment were unusual. The mental patterns inherent in those times and locales are very far from those of modern man. It is for this reason that the symbols of the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs are so problematic to decipher. If a person grew up outside this culture, a complete understanding is practically unattainable.
About the time
It is known that all Mayan tribes thought a lot about time. Since then, many written sources and books created by representatives of tribes have survived to this day. They are written in different languages of this nationality. An impressive percentage of all materials tells about the calendar, devoted to genealogical features. Symbolism associated with the calendar, numbers, spread throughout the primitive American society. Scientists have identified a fairly narrow list of characters that tend to repeat frequently.
Historical context
In order to navigate in more detail in the Mayan symbols, you need to know the history of this nation. Today it is known that this writing style is one of the oldest, as well as one of the most progressive for its time. Knorozov, a prominent researcher of the issue, called this system logographically syllable. The people who created this writing system were inhabitants of the confederation of human settlements. The state formed around the seventh century before the start of the current era. It was located in Central America where today is Guatemala.
It is known that in the seventh or eighth century the Indians changed their habitat, and the reasons for this could not be established. The American natives chose the new residence of the land north of the former - the Yucatan Peninsula. Here the state actively developed from the tenth to the fifteenth century. In 1527, Spanish citizens arrived on Yucatan to see weak Aborigines, whose statehood was greatly affected by numerous internal conflicts. As a result, the locals were soon conquered.
The most ancient written monuments of this civilization are tentatively dated to the fourth century before the beginning of the current era. There are also a number of sources, dates whose creation cannot be determined. Scholars dealing with Mayan symbols and their meanings suggest that such undated sources were created in the last centuries before the beginning of the current era. Mostly known artifacts to us - these are inscriptions on stone - on temple walls, altars and steles.
Before the advent of the Spaniards, the natives had a wide variety of manuscripts folded in harmonica, written in multicolored colors on the dressed deer skin or bark. Visually, some materials looked like paper familiar to us. The Spanish conquerors burned them, considering them pagan. Especially a lot of ancient sources were destroyed in 1561 at the auto dauph on the initiative of da Landa. Today, three ancient manuscripts are available to scientists. The names given to them indicate where the artifacts are stored: in Dresden, Madrid and Paris.
Secret and Explicit
Modern scholars are trying to study the Mayan hieroglyphs and their meaning, while ordinary people know very little about this - except that the name of the tribe and the very fact that these people have written language. A similar situation was in the past. The Mayans themselves knew how to write and read priests, officials who controlled the state. An ordinary person did not possess such skills, a letter of his own nationality was unknown to him, and symbolism was more used for aesthetics and had magical meaning.
When the statehood of the tribes collapsed, the priesthood disappeared, they lost the ability to read and understand the ancient script. Visual inspection of the monuments allows you to notice the abundance of calendar symbols, numbers. Mostly these are chronological records with dates. It is believed that the basis of writing was a doctrine indicating the presence of certain time cycles. After passing one begins a new cycle in which events are repeated. As a result, knowing the past, the Mayans believed that the future could be predicted. One of the researchers of the culture of ancient tribes - Thompson - says that the American natives were fascinated by the rhythm of the time. He described the writing of that time as a symphony of time.
Parsing Mayan hieroglyphs and their meaning, scientists found that the lines are almost always horizontal, formed by stylized symbols. Such blocks are symmetrical to each other. In total, about three hundred hieroglyphs are counted. Text often comes with pictography. These images explain the meaning of recorded words.
Comparisons and History
Scientists have repeatedly compared the Mayans and Aztecs. Aztec writing is in many ways similar to pre-dynastic ancient Egyptian writing. This similarity is especially pronounced in the aspect of the ratio of pictograms and hieroglyphs. At the same time, hieroglyphs were mainly used to fix numbers, names. It is rather an addition to pictography. But the Mayan script is much more like the ancient Egyptian era of the Ancient Kingdom. Pictography here is an explanation of the hieroglyphs, while the text written by them is the center and essence of the document.
About de Landa's work
This man, who played an important role in the history of the Mayan tribes, and the possibility of preserving (as well as destroying) the cultural monuments of American Aborigines, in 1566 finished work on an essay dedicated to Yucatan. In it, he pointed out the use by locals of alphanumeric and syllabic characters. He created the alphabet. He noted the cumbersomeness of the characters, indicated the presence of several recording methods.
In his work, you can see a description of the recording of the word Le, translated as “loop”. Listening to local speech, the Spanish monk discerned two sounds that were indicated by three symbols when recording. In addition to "l" and "e", the Mayans wrote an additional "e", which was attached to the consonant. As the medieval monk considered, the locals wrote chaotically, on a hunch, only miraculously not getting confused in the text they depicted.
Public property
The works of de Land devoted to deciphering the Mayan writings became known to the general public only in the nineteenth century, when they were officially published. From this moment begins a massive interest in ancient writing. A huge number of attempts have been made to identify the rules and readings. Arithmetic calculations, comparison attempts, comparison of pictograms, hieroglyphs - all these manipulations made it possible to identify digital symbols, as well as hieroglyphs, which denoted days, months.
To linguists and philologists, researchers, it became clear how the cycles of history, the cardinal points, the planet, the deity were displayed in the history of tribes. Hieroglyphs that encrypted sacrificial animals were identified. Found some other fine hieroglyphs. It was possible to determine the meaning of about a hundred of the famous Mayan signs, that is, about a third of the total volume. At the same time, scientists determined the semantic load, but could not correctly assess the phonetics. As an exception, a few words worked out by Thomas, de Roni.
In the mid-twentieth century, a new step in the work was made by Yuri Knorozov. The Mayan letters, as this scientist formulated, were incorrectly and slowly deciphered due to the assessment of writing as a logographic, without the use of the alphabet developed by de Landa. Knorozov proposed to regard writing as phonetic, ideographic logograms, composable with syllabic symbols. Accordingly, as Knorozov defined, the phonetic filling of signs must first be deciphered.
Understanding base
In many ways, it’s Knorozov who deciphered Mayan hieroglyphs. His works are based on ancient texts written in Latin, but in Mayan. For example, from the middle of the sixteenth century the work “Chalam Balam” has been preserved. It was created at a time when the Spaniards conquered American Aborigines. Such texts made it possible to determine that the language was synharmonic, vocabulary roots consisted of one syllable. Knorozov determined the correspondence of signs and their meanings by means of comparison with pictograms and alphabetical symbols. At the same time, Knorozov not only used the works of de Land, but also checked his assumptions by the method of cross reading. This complex method allowed us to determine the phonetic meaning of various characters. As a result, it was determined that the letter of those times was mostly syllable.
Knorozov is the one who deciphered the Mayan letters, and also formulated the meanings, drawing parallels with the Assyrian-Babylonian script. He revealed that each syllable character could mean a vowel, a combination of a vowel and a consonant, a combination of a consonant and a vowel, as well as a combination of three sounds: two consonants, between which there is a vowel. Moreover, most often the hieroglyph denoted a combination of consonant and vowel.
Such Mayan symbols were used to indicate the last consonants for a particular word. The syngarmonism peculiar to language allowed the use of a syllable symbol, the vowel of which was not spoken aloud. So, to spell the word "dog", they used two syllable hieroglyphs. The word Latin itself can be written as tzul. To write it, the first character was taken tzu, the second - l (s).
More examples
Knorozov, that is, the one who deciphered the Mayan letters, determined that the symbols that corresponded to the acrophonic principle became the basis of the syllabic system. In this case, initially there were some logograms, which became the basis for the subsequent development of the language. The symbol "Ba", which visually looks like an ax, was formed on the basis of the baat logogram, which indicates an ax made of stone. In order for the “ro” sign to appear, first people created the logogram pot, which was used to designate the head. The base for the el sign was a logogram for fire - it was read as el. The transformation of the logogram into a syllable letter, as Knorozov believed, was largely explained by the fact that the roots in the language mainly consisted of one syllable.
Is everything known?
Knorozov's works on deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs were studied and discussed especially closely at the international level in 1956. It was then that an international event was organized in the Danish capital that brought together Americanists from all over the world. This was the 43rd such congress. All participants acknowledged that a big step forward was made in the study of Mayan writing, but there was still a lot to discover to decipher the language completely.
In the sixties, the Siberian bloc of the ANSSSR took up this problem. The Mathematical Institute used the capabilities of computers to work on hieroglyphs. Almost immediately, information appeared in the media that about 40% of the texts of the American Indians were able to decipher quite accurately.
It's curious
In the early thirties of the last century, the Mayan scholars established close contact with astronomers. This made it possible to determine the lunar sequence. To some extent, this was a triumph, in scale, although not comparable to the subsequent breakthrough of Knorozov, but still important enough for its time. True, it so happened that after determining the lunar sequence for a while, the scientific sphere was in silence, nothing new was discovered. It was then that the first assumption was made that the texts of the American Indians contained only cult spells, calendar information and astronomical magical observations.
Some Mayan scholars have suggested that the hieroglyphic system is not calendar related. They determined that there is only a limited variety of options for writing and reading, understanding texts. In this case, the presence of pictograms was taken into account. In the general case, the simplest written language is an image of objects to which the author refers, but this approach is enough only for very primitive writing, because with pictures it is impossible to depict everything that needs to be written. As a result, any more or less progressive writing system is not just a combination of pictograms, but a phenomenon that develops semantically, phonetically at the same time.
About linguistics and languages
Ideographic pure writing is practically not used in the history of mankind, since any symbol becomes too loaded with meaning, which means that an unambiguous reading is not possible.It is known from history that both Mayan symbols and all other types of writing texts are evolving systems, using which people sought to eliminate the ambiguity of reading. Accordingly, ideography was replaced by a desire to bring phonetics and spelling closer together. By the way, a typical example from our time is rebuses, charades, where ideography is a method of transmitting phonetics. In childhood, for a person, any such riddles are a real joy, but for ancient people the indicated principles of composing texts were the only ones available.
As shown by studies of Mayan symbols and other ancient scripts, the use of techniques similar to modern charades still did not completely eliminate ambiguity. A logogram is the maximum progress of the “charade” symbols. It is also a carrier of semantics, phonetics - a complex symbol. Any language strives for simplification. As a result, the phonetic sound recorded correctly becomes more and more significant. The alphabet of syllables appears. The variety of phonemes in the dialect is strictly limited, therefore the number of alphabet characters is also limited. The top of the development of writing is the appearance of the alphabet instead of the alphabet of syllables. This writing simplification step is final.
Symbolism and the Unscientific Approach
For many of our contemporaries, the Mayan scriptures are nothing more than a collection of beautiful characters that can be used for magical purposes. Some resort to them to call for good luck, others to appeal to higher powers. In recent years, it is quite popular to make tattoos, inscribing beautiful symbols in them. As a rule, the value for such purposes is practically not important, and the choice is more based on the beauty of writing than on the real meaning of a symbol.
Quite an important place in the Mayan symbolism is given to Imox. This is a symbol representing a dragon, a large crocodile. It means the lower world in which reptiles appear, as well as desires, insecurity, emotions. This symbol is associated with occult secrets. It means abundance, subconsciousness, the power of magic. "Imox" is associated with dreams, nightmares, obsession.
Some consider the Khat a symbol of Maya's good fortune. It stands for grain, a ripe spike, a bag full of grains. This is a sign of fertility, productivity. It is associated with fertility, the ability to produce offspring abundantly. This symbol is associated with the ability to create something. It denotes desires, and also reflects the inevitability of translating it into reality.
No less interesting is the symbol "Ik", associated with the wind. It means something sinister, rage, anger. All these negative and dangerous forces are a symbol of underdeveloped energy, the inability to control potential. Accordingly, the sign is both negative and positive, indicating changes. They are encrypted with mystical breathing, the ability to transform energy from one species to another.