Despite Knorosov’s progress, some Western scholars continued to deny that there was any phonological component to Maya writing at all, and to claim that the glyphs were not true writing but merely ideograms, representing concepts but not actually recording language. Things began to change in the 1970s, however, as more American Mayanists became convinced that Knorosov had been on the right track. Mayanists began to get together to collaborate on decipherment and exchange ideas in brainstorming sessions, often at the instigation of art historian Linda Schele.
The linguist Floyd Lounsbury gave the decipherment efforts some much-needed rigor with his study of substitutable glyphs. Glyphs that could be substituted for each other in the same context must either (a) represent the same sound, (b) represent the same meaning, or (c) be contrasting members of the same category (in the sense that, for example, the English suffixes -ed and -ing are both in the category of verbal inflections – they can both be used as suffixes to a verb like walk, but they cannot be used simultaneously).
The decipherment crept forward, slowly gaining momentum, until the 1980s, which saw the opening of the floodgates. This was in part thanks to the young David Stuart, who was raised on Maya archaeology and presented his first paper on Maya decipherment in 1978 at the age of 12. Since then Stuart has remained at the forefront of Maya decipherment, rigorously applying the principle of phonetic complements and substitution patterns, and carefully testing his proposed decipherments both in the context of associated illustrations and in the context of other texts. Does a proposed reading of a glyph, he asks, produce a meaning that squares with what the associated illustrations suggest is being discussed in the text? And does the reading combine with glyphs in other texts to produce a meaningful reading?
Other Mayanists, many of them art historians, have contributed to the effort. Just as Champollion’s recognition of the ibis as a symbol for the god Thoth was important to his breakthrough in Egyptian hieroglyphs, so a growing understanding of Maya iconography has been important to the Maya decipherment.
The decipherment is now significantly advanced. Many logograms can be read, and reconstruction of the syllabary is nearly complete (figure 5.1). In recent years the phonological decipherment has advanced to the point where texts can be read well enough to give linguistic detail on the language, rather than just bare outlines. This means that a particular question can now be considered with some hope of an answer: which Mayan language, exactly, do the inscriptions record? Earlier work suggested either a language of the Ch’olan subfamily or the Yucatecan subfamily, or a mixture of both; but recently David Stuart and collaborators Stephen Houston and John Robertson have made a strong case that the language of the glyphs was a prestige language they have dubbed Classic Ch’olti’an, which belonged to the Ch’olan subfamily. In other words, the Maya followed the same pattern as other literate cultures: a particular version of the language, once written down, became fossilized and spread beyond its original sphere to others who wished to acquire writing. The written language ignored many of the differences of language and dialect that occurred over time and space in the spoken language.
Even without an individual Champollion, the Maya glyphs have finally been persuaded to divulge the majority of their secrets. While early Mayanists may be faulted for their lack of cross-cultural training (of the sort that allowed Knorosov to make his breakthrough) or for their lack of interest in actually learning Mayan languages, it is nevertheless true that the Maya decipherment has been an objectively difficult task. For one thing, there simply has not been available the extensive corpus that exists for Egyptian hieroglyphs or for Mesopotamian cuneiform (most of whose hundreds of thousands of excavated tablets have yet to be read, due to their overwhelming quantity). The longest Maya inscription ascends along the hieroglyphic stairway of Copán. It describes Copán’s dynastic history in the space of about 2,500 glyphs. Most surviving Maya texts are much shorter. Many of the longer texts are painted or carved on ceramics; these may number up to 84 glyphs. This is very short indeed compared to the Egyptian funerary papyri of the Book of the Dead, or the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh. The range of topics dealt with is also limited: dates take up much of the inscriptions, and virtually all texts are in the third person singular. First- and second-person forms are so rare that they have only recently been identified.
Figure 5.1 The Maya syllabary (incomplete). Additional variant signs exist, and continued decipherment is identifying further signs.
A final and not insubstantial reason for the slow decipherment of Maya glyphs is the system’s complexity. It was difficult to decipher because the system just plain is very difficult. Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, where each sign stands alone as a discrete picture of something that is often recognizable even to modern eyes, Maya glyphs are hard to take in visually. Complex patterns and grotesque faces are jammed together into ornate, dice-shaped blocks. While the principles of Maya writing may be familiar to those acquainted with cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, visually Maya glyphs are like nothing found outside Mesoamerica.
Here, roughly, is how the system works. A Maya text is composed of visually discrete glyph blocks. These are nearly square, but with rounded corners, like dice. The glyph blocks are laid out in one of several possible arrangements: a line, column, L- or T-shape, or grid. The reading order is face-on, which is almost always left-to-right, and top-to-bottom. A grid of glyph blocks is read in double columns, so that the leftmost two glyphs of the top row are read first, followed by the leftmost two of the second row, until the bottom is reached and the reading picks up at the third and fourth glyphs of the top row, etc.
A glyph block is usually composed of two or more pieces – the individual signs of the Mayan logosyllabary. (This is like the Egyptian practice of putting hieroglyphs into square or rectangular arrangements, or the Chinese practice of squeezing together compound characters, but there is no open space left between individual parts of a glyph block.) Within a glyph block, one sign – the main sign– will be shown larger than the others, and squarer (though still with rounded edges). The main sign will often be a logogram and represent the root of a word, but syllabograms may also occur as main signs. Surrounding the main sign will be one or more affixes (meaning here graphical signs added to the main sign, not linguistic affixes added to the root of a word). The affixes are longer and narrower than the main sign. They may be appended on the left, top, right, or bottom of the main sign and are hence known as prefixes, superfixes, postfixes, and subfixes respectively. Affixes tend to be numbers, phonetic complements, pronouns, or verbal suffixes. Yet there is no formal distinction between what may be a main sign and what may be an affix: the affix of one glyph block may appear, plumped out, as a main sign in another. The orientation of an affix will change according to whether it is being used horizontally (as a superfix or subfix) or vertically (as a prefix or postfix). Thus an affix that stands tall and narrow as a prefix to the left of one main sign will appear rotated 90 degrees as a short and wide superfix on another main sign. A glyph block is generally, but not always, read in the order prefix, superfix, main sign, subfix, postfix (in other words, left, top, center, bottom, right). Figure 5.2 shows examples of glyph blocks.
A glyph block can be further complicated by including two slightly overlapping main signs, or by conflating signs – that is, adding distinctive aspects of one sign to the general shape of another.
One bewildering aspect of the Maya script is its rich variety. As in other early scripts, spellings could alternate between phonological and logographic forms, and vary in the number of phonetic complements used. Sometimes the variations were due to the requirements of space, but the Maya scribes appear to have taken special delight in using as many different spellings as possible. Even logograms could occur in more than one form. Humans, animals, gods, and other supernatural creatures (which included units of time in this calendrically obsessed culture) often had both a symbolic (abstract) form and a head variant, showing the individual in profile with i
ts identifying features. Even numbers, normally the easiest part of the Maya system, had head variants, the numbers 1 through 12 represented by their patron deities, and 13 through 19 represented by a conflation of the deity for 10 and those for the numbers 3 through 9. As if two versions of the logograms were not enough, sometimes a being rated a full-figure glyph, a miniature-scale portrait, complete with associated objects and attributes, embedded in the text.
To further complicate matters, the Maya system, like cuneiform, contains a fair amount of polyvalence, by which a single sign may be read in more than one way. This on top of the various ways to spell a single word, or to spell two words that are homonyms! This apparently inefficient variety is typical of early writing systems, and Knorosov’s education prepared him for this aspect of Maya. Other Mayanists, however, found the complication unintuitive and were the less inspired to believe that Knorosov’s approach to decipherment was going in the right direction.
Figure 5.2 Examples of Maya glyphs. Top two rows: variant spellings of balam (“jaguar”) and pakal (“shield”), using logograms, phonetic complements, and syllabic spellings. Third row, a date in the Sacred Round, 13 Ajaw, showing the bar-and-dot system of numerals and the tripod cartouche for day signs. Also shown are the head variant form of 13 and a version of the Initial Series Introductory Glyph. Bottom row: the “upended frog” and “toothache” glyphs identified by Proskouriakoff, signifying birth and accession to kingship.
In one way, however, Maya does not behave like other early scripts. Given a logosyllabic system with heavy use of phonetic complements, where are the semantic determinatives? If the Maya did use determinatives, it was on nowhere near the scale of the Akkadians, the Egyptians, or even the Chinese with their system of radicals. The cartouche on three legs that surrounds the day signs of the Sacred Round may be a determinative; as far as anyone knows there was no pronunciation associated with it. But it is still not settled which signs or parts of signs, if any, may have functioned as determinatives. The less conspicuous presence – or even absence – of determinatives in the Maya system serves as a reminder that each of the ancient traditions of writing was an intellectual accomplishment in its own right, created with its own quirks and idiosyncrasies.
Despite the restricted content of surviving Maya material, it is clear – from the extent of the syllabary, if nothing else – that the Maya could have written down anything in their language that they cared to. In this respect they outstripped their neighbors, and even their cultural successors. The Aztecs, whose empire rose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only to be destroyed by the Spanish in 1521, used their proto-writing as a labeling or captioning system in their illustrated books, but not to write out texts.
Though knowledge of the Maya script was lost in the eighteenth century, the Maya themselves are still there, still living and speaking Mayan languages in their traditional homeland. Since the days of Bishop Landa, those languages have been written in the Roman alphabet. But with the advances in modern decipherment and a new spirit of cooperation between Mayanist scholars and the modern Maya, the script is now being returned to its original people. Maya glyphs can finally be removed from the long and tragic casualty list of the Old World’s collision with the New.
6
Linear B: The Clerks of Agamemnon
Although we revere the Greeks of the classical period (480 to 323 BC) as the founders of Western civilization and its literary tradition, their forebears were another matter. The Greeks of the late Bronze Age (roughly 1600 to 1100 BC) were not democrats, playwrights, and philosophers. They were more like Greek-speaking, Bronze-Age Vikings, living in small fortified city-states and engaging in trade, piracy, and sacking and pillaging in the waters of the Aegean; and though they experimented with literacy, it didn’t stick.
Nevertheless, the Greeks of this era – known as the Mycenaean period, the age memorialized in the epics of Homer – developed a complex enough society that for a while keeping written records seemed like an awfully good idea. Accounts were kept in Greek for about two and a half centuries, between 1450 and 1200 BC, before the Mycenaean cities suffered destruction and collapse. The population declined dramatically, and the technology of writing was lost as Greece sank into its Dark Age. Even the memory of Greek writing was lost, so that when the alphabet was introduced in the ninth century BC, it was hailed as a new technology, and when modern archaeologists rediscovered Bronze-Age Greek documents, it was hardly conceivable that the writing could be Greek.
The story of the rediscovery of the first Greek script, Linear B, starts with Heinrich Schliemann, a nineteenth-century German businessman turned archaeologist. Schliemann was possessed by an idea that most experts in the field of Greek history at the time considered to be ludicrous: that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, telling of the Bronze-Age Trojan War and its aftermath, were based on actual historical events. Armed with Homer’s descriptions, he went looking for the city of Troy. In 1871 he found its remains on the coast of Asia Minor (see appendix, figure A.6), and although later generations of excavators have shown that he misidentified which archaeological layer would have coincided with the Trojan War, he proved that there was at least a germ of truth to the old legends that described an advanced Aegean civilization during the Bronze Age.
Schliemann then turned to mainland Greece, home of the attackers of Troy, called Achaeans by Homer. According to Homer, the foremost Greek city at the time of the Trojan War was Mycenae, ruled by the great king Agamemnon. The wife of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, was Helen, whose abduction by Paris of Troy started the war. Schliemann located Mycenae in 1876, complete with gold-filled burials, one of which he was sure was that of Agamemnon. Once again, he had gotten the date wrong (the burials would have been centuries before Agamemnon), but he succeeded in attracting world attention to Greek archaeology as he conjured history out of legend with his rediscovery of Mycenae and its riches.
Schliemann’s discoveries were of particular interest to the Englishman Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Evans. The son of an amateur archaeologist and paleontologist, Evans was more aware than most that Europe must have had historical roots much earlier than the classical Greeks and Romans, with whom nineteenth-century history classes began. People had lived in Europe during the Stone Age and Bronze Age – why weren’t more people interested in finding out about them?
Evans visited Schliemann in Athens, where his imagination was captured by the Mycenaean civilization. Where had it arisen? How had it developed? And on what did it keep its records? A civilization that advanced, he reasoned, must have had writing – why had it not been found? Evans had a keen appreciation of the cultural importance of writing: his father was a paper-mill owner at a time of rising literacy rates in Victorian England. Evans had also inherited from his father an interest in ancient coins and their inscriptions. He was particularly struck by some small gemstones and rings that Schliemann showed him. Engraved with tiny designs, they had obviously been used as seals, to create a distinctive impression on soft clay or wax.
One of the designs was an octopus, a symbol typically associated with the Aegean islands, not mainland Greece. Could the source of Mycenaean civilization lie out in the Aegean? On a later trip to Greece Evans found more engraved sealstones in an antique shop. The small symbols engraved on them had a vaguely hieroglyphic look. Could they be writing? The stones came from Crete, he was told. So Evans headed to Crete.
According to Greek legend, Crete had once been ruled from the city of Knossos by a powerful king, Minos. Minos had employed the brilliant inventor and architect Daedalus, who had built for him the famous maze-like Labyrinth beneath his palace. The Labyrinth imprisoned the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull son of Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë, and a bull.
Not far outside the city of Candia (today’s Heraklion) was a hill still known by tradition as Knossos, though its official name was Kephála. Evans was not the first to eye the site with an excavator’s interest, but the island was under Turkish control at the tim
e, and excavation permits were difficult to obtain. Evans managed to buy a quarter-share of the site in 1894, ensuring that no one else could beat him to the digging, and went on to explore the rest of the island. He found many more sealstones; their ancient purpose long forgotten, they were worn by nursing peasant women as charms to aid their milk production. Crete was clearly the home of the sealstones; surely it was here that he would find the Bronze-Age source of Aegean writing and civilization.
Excavation was delayed by revolution and civil war on Crete, and Evans’s first concern on returning to the island in 1898 was relief work on behalf of its citizens. With the spring of 1900, however, he began digging at Knossos. A week later he had found his first written clay tablet. The finds piled up: soon he had hundreds of tablets, and by the end of the first year’s digging he had over a thousand.
Meanwhile more glamorous discoveries were also being made at Knossos. The ruins of the Palace of Minos, as Evans called it, began to be unearthed. A truly impressive structure larger than Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Minos served as an AD ministrative and religious center, as a storage facility, and quite possibly as the domicile of a royal family, whether or not any of the kings were actually called Minos. Long, complicated passageways AD orned with brightly painted murals led to a large central court. The size and intricacy of the floor plan would quite naturally have suggested a confusing Labyrinth to those who viewed its ruins in the centuries after its fall. Excavating the grand Palace of Minos was to occupy most of the rest of Evans’s life.
Crete had been home to other palaces as well, though the one at Knossos was the largest. Good-sized palaces at Phaistos and Mallia came to light under the spades of other archaeologists in the early twentieth century, and a few smaller palaces have been found since. The flowering of the Cretan civilization that produced these complexes preceded that of Mycenaean Greece, and Evans was able to show that much of Mycenaean art could trace its inspiration to Crete, to the civilization he dubbed Minoan. The sensitivity and elegance of Minoan ceramics and wrought gold pieces remain exceptional today, three and a half millennia later.
The Writing Revolution Page 12
