Traditionally, archeologists thought the Mayan civilization lasted from about 500 BC to 1200 AD, although recent finds suggest it may have started even earlier (around 3,000 BC). It’s a culture known for its love of numbers. They used numbers to count and to measure like we do, but they also used numbers to represent their gods and to predict the future. The Mayan number system is based on 19 numbers.
The Maya also used a combination of glyphs, logograms and syllabograms in their writing. While we have 26 letters in our alphabet, the Mayans had around 500 logograms. These symbols represent entire words. Syllabograms represent syllables and the Mayan’s had about 150 of them. They also used 300 different glyphs (or pictures) and 100 or so of those represented the names of gods or the names of places.
Here are some more cool facts about the Mayan writing system:
• Depending on their mood and artistic whim, scribes would use different combinations of glyphs, syllabograms and logograms to represent something. They could use many symbols to represent the same thing.
• Diego de Landa was the first bishop of Yucatan. He thought the Mayan’s used an alphabet like ours in their writing. He was wrong.
• Bishop de Landa made what he thought was a key that would decipher the Mayan texts. It had 27 Mayan syllabograms that De Landa thought were the same as the Spanish letters that had similar sounds.
• Even though de Landa’s key represented a bad assumption and was incomplete, it did help decipher some of the Mayan writings. Because no one could completely figure out the writing, many people assumed it was not a real writing system.
• In the 1950s, Russian ethnologist Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov suggested that at least some of the script represented how words sound (phonetic). Most of the scientists at the time rejected his idea — but it turned out that he was right!
Reading a Mayan script is nothing like reading Kidsville News! Mayan script is written in paired columns and read in a zigzag pattern.
To learn more, check out this interesting video about Mayan writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9LRbLXMzy
You can find out more about Mayan scripts at
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm
http://www.ancientscripts.com/maya.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/maya/glyphs.html
