How Maya Hieroglyphs Are Written: A Demonstration by Dr. Mark Van Stone

This section demonstrates the practical process of making epigraphic rubbings using essential equipment including a rubbing frame, paper mulberry paper, soft bristles, and a spray bottle. The demonstration shows how paper is pressed into stone grooves and ink is applied to create detailed copies preserving even fine details like cracks. The exhibition also features creative educational applications including a board game using characters from the Nanotthapana Sutra (recently declared a UNESCO Memory of the World document) and interactive workshops where visitors can stamp their names using ancient Sukhothai inscriptions from King Ramkhamhaeng's Inscription. These activities make learning ancient scripts engaging and accessible, connecting modern visitors with historical writing practices through hands-on experiences.

Epigraphy is the science of studying inscriptions on monuments as historical sources, encompassing various periods including medieval epigraphy. The practical applications extend beyond academia: students can apply their knowledge when visiting cities to read inscriptions on monuments, whether in Europe, America, or other regions. Roman Republican institutions like 'SPQR' (Senatus Populusque Romanus) appear on buildings worldwide, including in Belgium. Latin inscriptions appear across multiple historical periods, from medieval times to the 16th and 17th centuries, including tomb plaques in churches. The same grammatical rules apply to inscriptions from different eras, demonstrating the enduring influence of Latin as a written language.

Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions—writings engraved on durable materials like stone, copper plates, and terracotta—that serve as the most reliable sources for reconstructing ancient and medieval Indian history and culture; it encompasses the study of scripts (paleography), language evolution, and provides primary evidence for understanding political, social, economic, religious, and artistic developments from the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE) through the late medieval era, with systematic research beginning in India during the British colonial period (late 18th century) and continuing through the establishment of the Archaeological Survey of India's epigraphical branch in 1886, which has documented over 87,000 inscriptions across multiple languages including Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Arabic/Persian.

The term 'déchiffrer' evolved from explaining ciphered text to finding keys to dead languages, formalized in the 1878 Académie Française dictionary. Cuneiform decipherment was a collective effort spanning 1802-1857, less romantic than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Epigraphists divide labor from archaeologists who study material remains. Locating tablets is challenging because Mesopotamian architecture uses unbaked bricks; when walls collapse, interior spaces fill with brick fragments. Tablets are easier to identify when fired (like 3rd Dynasty Ur tablets, which are harder and orange-colored). Tablets were typically dried slowly in shade to prevent cracking. Clay tablets resist water damage, explaining why Mesopotamian civilization is known through hundreds of thousands of texts.

Among the Mexica, scribes were called 'tlacuilo' (Nahuatl), while Maya scribes were 'Achtiv.' Tlacuilos studied at the Calmecac elite school, learning to prepare materials, make brushes, and create pigments. Codices were created on amate paper, deer skin, cotton cloth, and maguey fibers. Brushes used animal hair or plant fibers. Pigments came from plants (indigo, achiote), insects (cochineal), and minerals (charcoal). Production was collaborative: some collected natural materials, others understood astronomy and time. Mesoamerican writing used images rather than alphabets, requiring specialists in both subject matter and visual representation.

Maya scribes held a privileged position as intermediaries between humans and the divine, responsible for recording, calculating, and transcribing knowledge revealed by the gods. They served as human representatives of supernatural voices, acting as channels for divine wisdom. The Maya believed the creator god existed before space and time, painting the world and writing the universe using a conch shell as palette and reed as brush. Writing was considered a sacred portal connecting the eternal and divine with the human and earthly. Maya codices were made from the bark of the fig tree (Ficus cotinifolia), considered sacred because it connected the three planes of the universe. The preparation involved soaking and boiling bark with lime, similar to nixtamalization of maize. Codices were covered with jaguar skin, considered sacred because the jaguar could penetrate caves and serve as portals to the underworld. Maya scribes held high social status and were considered attributes of power, able to access royal courts and receive great privileges. They were not merely human record-keepers but sacred beings who could be divine and luminous, indicated by marks of divine light on their bodies. The oldest surviving Maya manuscripts were created by Maya scribes before European arrival, now residing in European repositories named after their cities: Paris, Madrid, and Dresden Codices. The Dresden Codex is considered most elaborate with finest facture and complex content, including auguries, planetary tables, eclipse cycles, and Long Count calendar prophecies. Codices served as didactic manuals allowing scribes, priests, and astronomers to understand the ordered functioning of the universe, though much knowledge was lost after the 16th-century auto-da-fé.

Today only four Maya codices are officially known: Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Mexico. When Spanish conquistadors arrived, the Maya had been recording their world for centuries in books made of paper amatl, filled with glyphs, numbers, astronomical tables, rituals, and time cycles. In 1562 in Maní, Yucatán, Friar Diego Delanda ordered a massive burning of Maya objects, writing that many books were destroyed because they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the demon. Theories suggest some codices were confiscated and sent to Europe, others were altered before disappearing, and some may exist in secret archives in the Vatican or private collections. The Codex of Dresden contains Venus tables with precision believed impossible without modern instruments. Some codices may have contained knowledge of cyclical destruction events, which was dangerous for a colonizing culture needing to impose a single, eternal future.

The study of Maya codices employs a visual culture approach that examines how images are made, represented, and perceived. This interdisciplinary methodology, developed through the 'Culturas Visuales en México' project, involves historians, anthropologists, and artists working together. The approach recognizes that images cannot be reduced to a single academic discipline and requires understanding the social contexts of image production, including who made them, how they were made, and how they were used.

Maya calligraphy emphasized bold graphic production with flat color within elegantly executed parallel lines of equal width. This 'clear line' technique, also found in Aztec codices and modern comics, requires exceptional hand control and represents a learned bodily practice involving entire body disposition. Painters used torches made from resinous ocote pine to produce black ink (sibik/soot), with red mixed using ritual preparations possibly involving sacrificial blood. Conch shells served as ink vessels, with later examples showing color wheels arranged circularly based on daily observations of wet season colors. The 'dainty hand' gesture with extended pinky signaled delicacy and was refined through training, with young learners having their hands slapped for improper execution.

The language of classic Maya inscriptions is an ancestral form of a language spoken by about 50,000 people today on the border between Guatemala and Honduras, called Ch'orti'. This is not far from Copan. It was the literary language of the Maya for centuries, all through the classic period. All Maya inscriptions are in this ancestral form of Ch'orti', similar to how Latin was to the medieval church or classical Chinese to ancient China. Some Yucatec words show up in the inscriptions, but even at Chichén Itzá, the language remained ancestral Ch'orti'. Steve Houston thinks the Maya had their own grammarians who maintained this sacred language, and we're now getting a handle on its grammar.

The language used in Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions and codices was Classic Chol, a prestige language spoken by relatively few people but adopted across the Maya world for official and literary purposes. This functioned similarly to Latin in medieval Europe or Sanskrit in Hindu tradition—a written language used by educated elites rather than a vernacular spoken by commoners. Today, only about 50,000 people speak Chol, primarily in border villages between Guatemala and Honduras, representing one of the most endangered languages of the Americas. The study of this language and its relationship to modern Mayan dialects continues to yield insights into the linguistic evolution of Mesoamerican civilizations.

Approximately five million people today speak Mayan languages, with 20-30 distinct varieties. Epigraphers work closely with native speakers to identify which modern languages are closest to the ancient glyphic system. Chi'che', spoken by about 25,000 people in Guatemala, proved particularly valuable because it closely resembles the language used in Classic Period inscriptions. This linguistic connection allows researchers to test hypotheses about word meanings and grammatical structures in ancient texts. Unlike Greek, where ancient and modern pronunciations diverge significantly, many Maya words remain identical today, such as 'cacao' for chocolate. This continuity provides a unique bridge between ancient and modern Mayan cultures, enabling more accurate interpretation of historical texts.

Classical Mayan (often called Classic Ch'olti') was the prestigious written language of the Maya Classic period (250-900 CE), used by elite scribes, priests, and for monument inscriptions; it employed a sophisticated logosyllabic hieroglyphic script combining logograms (whole words/morphemes) with syllabic glyphs, enabling the recording of proper names, calendrical dates, verb morphology, and literary passages, and this writing system is considered one of the most advanced pre-Columbian writing systems in Mesoamerica.

The Maya civilization consisted of independent city-states rather than a unified empire, with Classical Maya serving as the lingua franca. Maya Yucatec is the third language most similar to Classical Maya, after Tzeltal and Chol, and is the most widely spoken Maya language. The Popol Vuh was written in Maya Yucatec, while the Annals of the Cakchiqueles was written in Kaqchikel Maya. Maya Yucatec can be referred to as Maya, Maya Yucatec, Yucatec, or Maya Peninsular, while other Maya languages should be referred to by their specific names.

Sinai 350 is part of the Harvard collection, which primarily contains casts. Benjamin Sass's comparative readings agree with Baron on some characters but differ on others. The inscription is more likely a Golden Horus name (a type of royal name) rather than a votive inscription. The outline shows what appears to be a horse (the 'golden horse' name) with the feet of the Horus bird. A match was found in Beckerath's handbook: Amenemhat II has a Golden Horse name (Ominumhot II), providing strong evidence for this identification. Sinai 345 is a votive inscription to Balot (female counterpart of Baal), a reading not controversial among epigraphers. Sinai 363 shows Baron proposing a 'strophodon' reading where the text swings up to the fourth register, then back down, then across to the fifth register, creating an acrostic pattern that is highly unusual and not supported by other epigraphers.

Linked open data enables complex historical analysis of what is going on where and how it is interacting with other places and how it compares to other places and other peoples over time. The Eagle project, directed by Silvia Landy, attempted to put together vocabularies specifically for epigraphy so that when one talks about a funerary inscription, all can point to the same identifier even if using different terms within projects. This enables cross-referencing data from multiple projects and beginning to do things like comparing epigraphic practices in different regions over time. The current dataset is somewhat limited because stone is only a very particular subset of textual, written epigraphic culture. The material of graffiti, ceramics, inscribed objects, and all other categories broadens this out hugely and would change our understandings considerably if it could be brought together.

A carved face stele dated to the 6th-7th century BC contains the name 'Yasim' (YSML), recognized by scholars as equivalent to the Hebrew name Ishmael. In South Arabian script, the letter SAT substitutes for the North Semitic Sheen, making these names cognates. This stele represents one of only four attestations of the Ishmael/Ishma name in South Arabian inscriptions dating to the early first millennium BC. Comparative analysis shows approximately 60 attestations of Ishmael in Hebrew epigraphy from the 8th-6th centuries BC, versus only 27 total in South Arabian inscriptions. This attestation confirms someone with this name was buried near the Neem region around 600 BC, consistent with Book of Mormon accounts. Critics suggesting Joseph Smith found Nahom on old maps face significant challenges: no known map from his time comes within 320 miles of the actual NHM altar location, and such maps lack the detailed geographic and cultural context now revealed archaeologically.

Epigraphy (एपीग्राफी) is the study of inscriptions. The oldest inscription is from Bogazkoy (1400 BCE), recording a treaty between Hittite and Mitanni kings with Vedic deities as witnesses. In India, Ashoka's inscriptions are oldest, found at Maski, Gurjara, Nittor, and Udayagiri. Most are in Brahmi script, with some in Kharosthi (written right-to-left). Greek and Aramaic scripts appear at Lagman and Sarakona. Pre-Gupta inscriptions use Prakrit with Brahmi/Kharosthi scripts, while Gupta and post-Gupta inscriptions use Sanskrit. James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837, enabling systematic study of ancient Indian history.

Epigraphy represents the most exciting frontier in pre-Islamic Arabia research. Recent discoveries include: a 2009 mosaic at Amman airport revealing new Roman titles for Al-Mundhir; Christian inscriptions in early Arabic script using Roman dating formulas in southern Saudi Arabia, suggesting pan-Arab identity through shared Christianity; and a Paleo-Arabic inscription referencing Al-Harith discovered in Jordan. Comparative anthropology from colonial American history provides useful frameworks for understanding ancient tribal leadership, recognizing that tribal leaders are creations of imperial states that are then repurposed locally. The Borderlands research model helps analyze how people react when introduced to new technologies and hierarchical structures.