If many people have heard about ancient Egyptian writing today, then Mayan hieroglyphs are a much less known topic for the inhabitants of our time. Those who are versed in this area recognize that the writing of the ancient American tribes is in no way inferior in interest to the ancient Egyptian, and deserves no less attention. As is known from history, at first, scientists who studied the writing of ancient American people followed the same false path as 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 ancient Egyptian writing because they tried to interpret each character as a word or concept. The same mistake was made at first by researchers of the symbols used for Maya writing. Ancient Egyptian secrets were able to reveal Champollion at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The secrets of Maya writing are not all open today, and they learned to read the hieroglyphs used by this tribe only a few decades ago.
Scientists have noted a lot in common with writingAncient Egypt. It is surprising that people were close to understanding Mayan hieroglyphs as early as the sixteenth century, when de Landa compared the Spanish sounds and the symbols of the writing of the American tribes, corresponding to each other. Four centuries later, scientists, having come to grips with this issue, realized that the medieval monk was completely right in his observations.
Relatively recently, scientists have compared Egyptian writings and sources that have survived since the Maya. Similar principles have been identified. Hieroglyphs are logograms that are created to encrypt words. The Maya also used phonograms, which denoted sounds. The tribes of that time used determinatives that were written down and spoken out. Often, writing included phonetic compliments, and blocks in the shape of a rectangle were used to write words, which is fully consistent with the rules adopted in ancient Egypt. True, a distinctive feature of Maya writing was the presence of a relatively large gap between blocks, designed to separate words from each other.
General and more
Studying further Mayan hieroglyphs, scientists have identified the key differences between this writing and those adopted by the ancient Egyptians. For example, American tribes read from left to right. Texts were written from top to bottom. There were no other routes. In addition, a "semantic indicator" was used. Methods were invented to reflect the belonging of a word to logograms, phonograms were designated in a specific way. Separate designation methods have been developed fordeterminative. To formulate abstract ideas, the American Indians used metaphors. If we compare Maya and ancient Egyptian writing, we can see that the significance of the metaphor for the former is much more significant.
Nuances of linguistic practice
Mayan hieroglyphic scholars have identified the importance of careful handling of symbols. As practical exercises have shown, it is impossible to take all words, all associations literally. Sometimes the metaphors inherent in the language are completely abstract, sometimes they speak of real relationships between objects. Thus, the jaguar displayed power, while there was also a real correspondence: the king had the right to wear the skin of this animal, and his throne was made in the shape 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 they had the seeds of rebirth in 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 works of linguists and philologists, particular importance is given to the fact that the Maya is not a single culture, as is typical of 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 the languages spoken in that environment were unusual. The mental patterns inherent in those times and that area are very far from those characteristic of modern man. It is for this reason that the symbols of the Incas,Maya and Aztecs are so problematic to decipher. If a person grew up outside this culture, full understanding is almost unattainable.
About time
It is known that all the Mayan tribes thought a lot about time. Since then, many written sources, books created by representatives of the tribes, have come down to our days. They are written in different languages of this nationality. An impressive percentage of all materials tells about the calendar, is dedicated to genealogical features. The symbolism associated with the calendar, numbers, spread throughout primitive American society. Scientists have identified a rather narrow list of characters that tend to repeat frequently.
Historical context
To get a better idea of the symbols of the Mayan Indians, you need to know the history of this people. Today it is known that this style of writing is one of the most ancient, and also one of the most progressive for its time. Knorozov, a prominent researcher of the issue, called this system logographic-syllabic. The people who created this writing system were the inhabitants of a confederation of settlements. The state was formed approximately in the seventh century before the beginning 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 have chosen a new place of residence of the land to the north of the former - the Yucatan Peninsula. Here the state actively developed from the tenth tofifteenth century. Spanish citizens arrived in the Yucatan in 1527, seeing weak natives, whose statehood had suffered greatly from numerous internal conflicts. As a result, the locals were soon conquered.
The most ancient written monuments of this civilization are roughly dated to the fourth century before the beginning of the current era. There are also a number of sources, the dates of which cannot be determined. Scholars of Mayan symbols and their meaning suggest that such undated sources were created in the last centuries before the beginning of the current era. Most of the artifacts known to us are the inscriptions on the stone - on the temple walls, altars and stelae.
Before the coming of the Spaniards, the aborigines had a wide variety of manuscripts, folded with a harmonica, written in multi-colored paints on dressed deer skin or bark. Visually, some materials were similar to the paper we are used to. The Spanish conquerors burned them, considering them pagan. Especially many ancient sources were destroyed in 1561 at the auto-da-fé on the initiative of da Landa. Today, three ancient manuscripts are available to scientists. The names he gave indicate where the artifacts are stored: in Dresden, Madrid and Paris.
Secret and Overt
Modern scientists are trying to study Mayan hieroglyphs and their meaning, while ordinary people know very little about it - except perhaps the name of the tribe and the very fact that those people had a written language. The situation was similar in the past. The Maya themselves knew how to write and read priests, officials,who ruled the state. An ordinary person did not have such skills, the literacy of his own people was unknown to him, and the symbolism was more used for aesthetics and had a magical meaning.
When the statehood of the tribes collapsed, the priesthood disappeared, they lost the ability to read and understand the ancient script. A visual inspection of the monuments allows you to notice the abundance of calendar symbols and numbers. Mostly these are chronological records with dates. It is assumed that the basis of writing was a doctrine indicating the presence of certain time cycles. After passing one, a new cycle begins, in which events are repeated. As a consequence, knowing the past, the Maya believed that it was possible to predict the future. One of the researchers of the culture of ancient tribes - Thompson - says that the American natives were fascinated by the rhythm of time. He also described the writing of that time as a symphony of time.
By examining Mayan hieroglyphs and their meaning, scientists have found that the lines are almost always horizontal, formed by stylized characters. Such blocks are symmetrical to each other. In total, there are about three hundred hieroglyphs. Text often comes with pictographs. These images explain the meaning of the recorded words.
Comparisons and history
Scientists have repeatedly compared Mayan and Aztec symbols. 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 fixnumbers, names. It's more of an addition to the pictography. But Mayan writing is much more like the ancient Egyptian era of the Old Kingdom. The 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 (and also destroying) the cultural monuments of the American natives, in 1566 completed work on an essay dedicated to the Yucatan. In it, he pointed out the use of alpha-sound and syllabic signs by local residents. He also created the alphabet. He noted the bulkiness of the symbols, pointed out the existence of several ways of writing.
In his work, you can see the description of the word Le, translated as "loop". Listening to the local speech, the Spanish monk distinguished two sounds, which, when recorded, were indicated by three characters. In addition to "l" and "e", the Maya wrote an additional "e", which was attached to the consonant. As a medieval monk considered, the locals wrote chaotically, on a whim, only miraculously not getting confused in the text they depicted.
Public property
De Land's deciphering of the Mayan writings became known to the general public only in the nineteenth century, when they were officially published. From this moment begins the mass interest in ancient writing. A gigantic number of attempts have been made to identify the rules and readings. Arithmetic calculations, attempts at comparison, comparison of pictograms, hieroglyphs - all these manipulations gavethe ability to identify digital characters, as well as hieroglyphs, which denoted days, months.
Linguists and philologists, researchers, it became clear how the cycles of history, cardinal directions, planets, deities were displayed in the history of tribes. They determined the hieroglyphs with which the sacrificial animals were encrypted. Found some other pictorial hieroglyphs. It was possible to determine the meaning of about a hundred of the known 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 middle of the twentieth century, Yuri Knorozov made a new step in his work. The Maya writings, as this scholar formulated, were incorrectly and slowly deciphered due to the assessment of writing as logographic, without using the alphabet developed by de Landa. Knorozov suggested that writing be regarded as phonetic, ideographic logograms, combined with syllabic symbols. Accordingly, as Knorozov determined, you must first decipher the phonetic content of the signs.
Basic understanding
In many ways, it was Knorozov who deciphered the Mayan hieroglyphs. His works are based on ancient texts written in Latin, but in the Mayan language. For example, from the middle of the sixteenth century, the work "Chalam Balam" has been preserved. It was created during the period when the Spaniards conquered the American natives. Such texts made it possible to determine that the language was synharmonic, dictionary roots consisted of one syllable. Knorozov determined the correspondence of signs and their meaningsthrough comparison with pictograms and alphabetic symbols. At the same time, Knorozov not only used the works of de Land, but also checked his assumptions using the cross-reading technique. This complex method made it possible to determine the phonetic meaning of various symbols. As a result, it was determined that the writing of those times was predominantly syllabic.
Knorozov is the one who deciphered the Mayan writings, and also formulated the meanings, drawing parallels with the Assyro-Babylonian writing. He found that each syllabic character could mean a vowel, a combination of a vowel and a consonant, a combination of a consonant and a vowel, and a combination of three sounds: two consonants with a vowel between them. Moreover, most often the hieroglyph denoted a combination of a consonant and a vowel.
Such characters were used by the Maya to denote the last consonants of a particular word. The synharmonism inherent in the language allowed the use of a syllable symbol, the vowel of which was not pronounced aloud. So, to write the word "dog", they used two syllabic hieroglyphs. The word itself can be written in Latin as tzul. To write it, they took tzu as the first hieroglyph, l (and) as the second.
More about examples
Knorozov, that is, the one who deciphered the Mayan writings, determined that the symbols corresponding to the acrophonic principle became the basis of the syllabic system. At the same time, some logograms initially existed, which became the basis for the subsequent development of the language. The symbol "Wa", which visually resembles an ax, was formed on the basis of a logogrambaat, which means an ax made of stone. In order for the sign "ro" to appear, people first created the logogram pot, which was used to represent the head. The basis for the sign el was a logogram denoting fire - it was read as el. The transformation of a logogram into a syllabary, as Knorozov believed, was largely due to the fact that the roots in the language mainly consisted of one syllable.
Is everything known?
Knorozov's works devoted to the decoding of Mayan hieroglyphs were especially carefully studied and discussed at the international level in 1956. It was then that an international event was organized in the Danish capital, uniting Americanists from all over the world. This was already the 43rd such congress. All participants acknowledged that a great step forward had been made in the study of Mayan writing, but there was still much, much more to discover in order to fully decipher the language.
In the sixties, the Siberian bloc of the ANSSR took up this problem. The Mathematical Institute used the capabilities of computers to work on hieroglyphs. Almost immediately, the media reported that about 40% of the texts of the American Indians were deciphered quite accurately.
This is interesting
In the early thirties of the last century, Mayan writing 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 with the subsequent breakthrough of Knorozov, but stillimportant enough for its time. True, it so happened that after determining the lunar sequence for some time, the scientific sphere was in a lull, nothing new could be discovered. It was then that suggestions were first made that the texts of the American Indians contained only cult spells, calendar information and astronomical magical observations.
Some scholars of Maya writing have suggested that the hieroglyphic system is not related to the calendar. They determined that there is only a limited variety of options for writing and reading, understanding texts. At the same time, the presence of pictograms was taken into account. In the general case, the simplest writing is an image of the objects that the author refers to, but this approach is enough only for very primitive writing, because it is impossible to depict everything that needs to be written down with pictures. As a result, any more or less progressive writing system is not just a combination of pictograms, but a phenomenon that develops semantically, phonetically simultaneously.
On 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 Maya symbols and all other variants of writing texts are developing systems, using which people sought to eliminate the ambiguity of reading. Accordingly, ideography was replaced by the desire to bring phonetics and spelling closer together. Incidentally, a typicalan example from our time is rebuses, charades, where ideography is a method of transferring phonetics. In childhood, for a person, any such riddles are a real joy, but for ancient people, these principles of composing texts were the only ones available.
As studies of Mayan symbols and other ancient scripts have shown, the use of techniques similar to modern charades still did not completely eliminate ambiguity. The logogram is the maximum progress of the charade symbols. It is at the same time a carrier of semantics, phonetics - a complex symbol. Every language tends to simplify. As a result, the phonetic sound, written correctly, becomes more and more significant. The alphabet of syllables appears. The variety of phonemes inherent in the dialect is strictly limited, and therefore the number of alphabetic 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 the final one.
Symbolism and unscientific approach
For many of our contemporaries, Mayan scriptures are nothing more than a set of beautiful symbols that can be used for magical purposes. Some resort to them to call for good luck, others to turn to higher powers. In recent years, it has become quite popular to make tattoos, inscribing beautiful symbols into them. As a rule, the value for such purposes is practically unimportant, and the choice is based more on the beauty of writing than the real meaning of a particular character.
Quite an important place in the symbolism of the Maya is given"Imox". This is a symbol representing a dragon, a large crocodile. It means the lower world, in which reptiles appear, as well as desires, insecurities, emotions. This symbol is associated with the occult, mysteries. It also denotes abundance, the subconscious, the power of magic. "Imox" is associated with dreams, nightmares, obsession.
Khat is considered by some to be a symbol of good luck for the Maya. It means grain, a mature ear, a bag filled with grains. This is a sign of fertility, productivity. It is associated with fertility, the ability to abundantly produce offspring. This symbol is associated with the ability to create something. It denotes desires, and also reflects the inevitability of translating such into reality.
No less interesting is the "IK" symbol associated with the wind. It means something sinister, rage, anger. All these negative and dangerous forces are a symbol of the underdevelopment of energy, the inability to control potential. Accordingly, the sign is both negative and positive, talking about changes. They encrypt mystical breath, the ability to transform energy from one variety to another.
