Anthropology 1168: Maya Glyphs (original) (raw)
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Anthropology 450-002: Introduction to Maya Writing
This course covers the basics of ancient Maya writing and art. It explores myths, history, and tales of life at the courts of lords and nobles, who wrote and spoke in “divine glyphs”. The course begins with an overview of Maya glyphs and its historical and cultural contexts. After a section on the fundamentals of the script, each week will combine a discussion of the grammar of Hieroglyphic Mayan with lectures on a range of topics from tags and texts on drinking cups to parallels between Pre-Columbian, Colonial, and present-day Maya literatures. The lectures will be accompanied by practical exercises and quizzes. The course does not require any prior knowledge of Mayan languages or glyphs. No training in drawing or epigraphy is necessary.
Classic Mayan: An overview of language in ancient hieroglyphic script
In: Aissen, Judith, Nora C. England and Roberto Zavala Maldonado (eds.) The Mayan Languages. Routledge Language Family Series. New York: Routledge. , 2017
This essay provides an overview of the language attested in ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing, or what we choose to call Classic Mayan.1 The writing system was in use for nearly two thousand years, beginning in what archaeologists call the Late Preclassic period (ca. 300 B.C.) and lasting until the time of European conquest and domination. In this period the hieroglyphic script was used throughout the region we traditionally know as the “Lowland Maya area,” concentrated mostly in the lowlands of what is today Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico (Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Chiapas, and Tabasco) and parts of western Honduras. Thousands of ancient texts survive on stone monuments, various portable objects such as ceramics, and in three (possibly four) screen-fold books dating to the later stages of the script’s history. These mostly record religious and historical information, although the styles and genres of such texts varied considerably over time and space. Remarkably, virtually all of the extant hieroglyphic texts seem to represent a single “prestige” language that, even at the time of its use, may have been highly formalized and even archaic in some of its features (Macri and Ford 1997; Houston et al. 2000). With the decipherment of the script in the 1980s and ’90s, specialists soon realized that many of the basic phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of this language are represented in great detail by the ancient writing system. These are now the subject of considerable study, debate, and discussion. However, as the following sections attest, in spite of a variety of confounding factors and interpretive obstacles, there is a great deal that we can say about the linguistics of ancient Maya writing
This is the updated preliminary Classic Maya-English, English-Classic Maya vocabulary. During the period of June 2007-March 2009, the original vocabulary of 2002 was checked, revised, reduced, enlarged, and is now annotated in close to 300 cases. The updated version of this preliminary vocabulary of hieroglyphic readings (still a precursor to a fully illustrated vocabulary) contains some 1,275 main entries, each defined with a minimum of one transcribed glyph example (in total there are over 2,500 transcription examples). The updated English-Classic Maya vocabulary contains over 530 entries. The entries in the original and in this updated preliminary vocabulary have been elicited from hoeroglyphic texts (either carved, incised, or painted) on stone and wooden monuments (stelae, lintels, altars, etc.), on portable objects of stone, wood, bone, and shell, in murals, on cave walls, on ceramics, and in three of the four surviving screenfold books. Each main entry is followed by a reference to the hieroglyphic text in which the example can be found, while seven color figures illustrate a selection of these entries.
Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture (with Andrea Stone)
2011
Maya art is a rare combination of linear elegance and naturalism, blended with dazzling symbolic complexity. Decorated objects, ranging from painted vases and carved jade and shell ornaments to towering stone monuments and building façades, bear the traces of a symbol system that, while fascinating, can make an understanding of these images elusive to the uninitiated. Presented here for the first time is a compendium of one hundred Classic Mayan hieroglyphs that are also building blocks of much ancient Maya painting and sculpture. The symbols touch on many facets of the Maya world, from the natural environment—animals, plants, the heavens—to the mental landscape of gods, myths, and rituals. Using hundreds of line drawings and photographs, the authors show how to identify these signs, understand their meaning, and appreciate the novel ways they appear in art. As well as providing a basic introduction, the authors offer many new and exciting interpretations. Lavishly illustrated, and fully cross-referenced and indexed, this groundbreaking guide will prove an invaluable tool for those wishing to see Maya art, perhaps for the first time, through the eyes of ancient scribes and artists.