The enigma of Mayan writing
The first European who found himself in the presence of the vestiges of the Mayan civilization was the Andalusian Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, on an expedition in 1517. The aim of the exploration of the Central American mainland was to imprison indigenous people and then use them as slaves in agricultural lands and mines of Cuba.
The adventurers set sail from Cuba on February 8, 1517 with two caravels and a brig. After about twenty days of sailing, they sighted land on the coast of Yucatan.
The invaders, amazed, saw stone houses and realized that they were in the presence of an advanced culture. The village was called Great Cairo, following a medieval tradition that saw every non-Christian civilization as Muslim. However, that land was called Catoch by the tribal groups, which meant our homes. A misunderstanding instead gave rise to the word Yucatan, as it seems that, when foreigners attempted to communicate, the natives responded with the phoneme Yu-ca-tan, which meant I don't understand. Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba had no idea that those tribal groups were distant descendants of the Mayan people, one of the greatest civilizations of pre-Columbian America.
In the following days, as the Europeans entered the interior, there was a violent battle. The cacique of Great Cairo had prepared an ambush and was convinced he would destroy the invaders. But the foreigners were not taken by surprise and, armed with arquebuses and crossbows, managed to get the upper hand. During the battle, two natives, Julianillo and Melchorejo, were taken prisoner, later baptized and used as interpreters on other expeditions.
While the battle raged, the company's chaplain went inland and was the first to see some Mayan religious centers. He found pieces of gold and copper, then managed to adventurously return to the ships. The explorers then skirted the Yucatan peninsula, and came into contact with other peoples in a village called Campeche. They were received peacefully and were shown temples and priests wearing white robes, whose hair was soaked in blood. From this detail we learned that those tribes were dedicated to human sacrifices.
During subsequent expeditions, the conquistadors found various ancient books in some temples, precious testimonies of a distant past. Unfortunately, since according to them, the Mayan books were steeped in superstitions and represented an obstacle to the conquest and evangelization of those lands, they decided to burn them all. As an example, a sentence from Bishop Diego de Landa is reported:
We found many ancient books and since everything they contained was full of superstitions and the deceptions of the devil, we burned them all, while the natives tried to stop us.
Luckily, before setting the manuscripts on fire, the bishop had some of them analyzed and then reported his theory in his notes to decipher those strange signs that were contained therein (which later proved to be almost correct).
Members of the Mayan nobility were re-educated in monasteries and prohibited from using the old script. In the more isolated areas of the interior, however, the Mayan writing continued to be used until 1697, when the Franciscan Andres Avedano de Loyola reached the citadel of Noj Peten.
Only four Mayan books escaped the grim and devastating fire of the ferocious and obtuse conquistadors, and were sent to the Habsburg court as exotic gifts. One of them arrived in Dresden and was then studied towards the end of the 18th century by the Prussian naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt who partially reproduced it, calling it the Dresden Code, in his book Journey to the Cordilleras. In the last years of the 19th century, the librarian Ernst Forstemann thoroughly studied the Dresden Codex and managed to decipher the arithmetic system and the Mayan calendar. Forstemann managed to demonstrate that the Maya used a vigesimal numbering system, gave great importance to zero and counted time starting from a remote day in the 4th millennium BC. He also proved that the strange hieroglyphic signs that appeared in the monuments and pyramids submerged by vegetation in the Mesoamerican jungle coincided with those found in the Dresden Codex, and that to read them one had to proceed from left to right and from top to bottom in groups of two columns.
With the aim of broadening the object of study, towards the end of the 19th century the two frontier researchers AP Maudslay and T. Maler entered the jungle of southern Mexico and photographed various Mayan stelae in which various ancient hieroglyphs were carved in bas-relief. Their results were surprising, as many previously unknown archaeological sites were cataloged. The following studies, however, did not lead to great results although the Mayan calculation systems that led to the calendar and the calculation of time could be explored in depth.
A significant step forward in the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs was made by the art historian Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985). In her studies, she realized that some carved steles alternated with an interval of one generation. She was able to recognize some symbols and give them the meaning of birth, coronation, death. She also recognized some signs used to name some kings and princes of the past. The German archaeologist Heinrich Berlin also demonstrated that, in the majority of cases, these signs signified historical facts that described the political and military situation of the time. Furthermore, some signs called emblems were discovered, which referred to cities or villages.
At this point it had not yet been understood whether the signs carved into the Maya stelae or written in the four preserved manuscripts corresponded to concrete guttural sounds. Some scholars, mistakenly, put forward the hypothesis that the Mayan glyphs were simply pictograms, which recalled an idea, but not hieroglyphs that were part of a real language.
The archaeologist and linguist Yuri Knorozov (1922-1999) radically changed the approach to the study of the Mayan language. Knorozov, who was a Red Army soldier in 1945, entered Berlin during the Soviet advance. Near the Reich library, he found some boxes full of dusty books. Among them was Diego de Landa's original description and reproductions of three of the four books that had been shipped to Europe way back in the 16th century. When Knorozov resumed his studies after the war, he graduated with a thesis on the Landa manuscript, an important source of knowledge about the life of the descendants of the ancient Maya before the arrival of the conquistadors. In Landa's writing it was argued that the Mayan signs corresponded to phonemes. Probably Landa, before burning the majority of the books found, asked the priests to read the signs, incomprehensible to him, drawn in the books. These symbols were therefore related to sounds. Knorozov, however, knowing that the Mayan signs were around 800, realized that they could not have any relevance to the sounds of the Latin alphabet (a, b, c, d etc.). On the other hand, the Mayan glyphs could not even be ideographic characters like the Chinese alphabet, as no language has only 800 words.
The number 800 was eerily similar to that of other scripts of the past: the Sumerians used 600 characters for their cuneiform script, while the Hittites used 497. The latter two scripts alternated the syllabic system with the logogrammar. While for some scholars it was unthinkable that the Maya used a writing system similar to that used by ancient Middle Eastern civilizations, Knozorov managed to demonstrate the existence of syllabic characters. He based it on the fact that in some manuscripts there were hieroglyphs corresponding to the pictorial representations. For example, next to the drawing of a turkey there were two symbols. One was the q of Landa's alphabet. Since the turkey was called kutz in ancient Maya, Knozorov deduced that the second sign corresponded to tz.
Likewise the word “dog” was translated tzul in Ancient Maya. Two signs were found near the pictogram of a dog: one corresponds to tz and the other identified as ul.
Based on this system Knozorov managed to discover many syllabic signs. Starting from 1960 his studies were recognized worldwide and the Mayan writing was called logosyllabic or mixed. Currently, approximately 300 of the 800 Mayan signs have been deciphered.
According to some scholars, this language did not originate to facilitate commercial transactions, but simply to legitimize the power of the kings, who were equal to the Gods. The literati, priests and scribes, generally lived at court, and had the task of recounting the events of the kingdom in written form. Since the manuscripts and stucco stelae mainly described the facts of the nobility and kings, and not of the daily life of the people, it is almost certain that Mayan writing was intended only for the upper classes.
According to some scholars, the Mayan language originated from pre-existing languages in the Central American area, such as the Epi-Olmec, or Isthmian (of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec) writing. This conclusion was reached following the comparison of dozens of symbols which turned out to be very similar.
It must be remembered that the study of the enigmatic Mayan writing is not only interesting for specialists. The Mayan ethnic groups still existing today in Mexico and Guatemala consider it the writing of their ancestors, and its study and decipherment has contributed to restoring their identity and pride.
YURI LEVERATTO
