The Mayan Alphabet

Mayan Alphabet

   On stone columns, on ceramic bowls, and in bark-paper books known as codices, the Classic Maya left written messages for posterity. But until the middle of the twentieth century, no one knew how to read them. The key to the Mayan hieroglyphic code appeared to have disappeared with the ancient cul¬ture. In fact, it waited in a long-neglected book by a sixteenth-century Spanish missionary.
   Assuming that the Mayan writing system was based on an alphabet similar to that used in Spain, Di¬ego de Landa, third bishop of Yu¬catán, questioned a literate Maya about the "letters" his people used. After what must have been a frustrating session for both men, the priest compiled a list he believed to be the Mayan alphabet and published it in 1566. Within a century of de Landa's interview, however, the surviving Maya had lost the art of writing their ancient language, rendering the inscriptions and codices meaningless.
   De Landa's manuscript came to light in the 1860s, but the latent key still went undetected. By that time, scholars thought that the Mayan glyphs were a form of picture writing and failed to take the friar's alphabet seriously.
   But in the 1950s, Soviet scholar Yuri Knorozov finally recognized the value of de Landa's work. The thirty-year-old epigrapher with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Leningrad realized that de Landa and his informant had been tangled in an intercultural misunderstanding. Each time the friar had asked for a letter of the alphabet, the Maya had responded with the symbol for a syllable. For example, when de Landa asked for the letter b (pronounced "beh" in Spanish), he was given the Mayan symbol for the syllable beh. Many Mayan words, Knorozov saw, were written by stringing together a series of symbols for syllables, not letters. Although his work went unrecognized for many years, Knorozov had made a crucial intuitive leap in breaking the Mayan glyph code. A succeeding generation of researchers has since largely deciphered the ancient language. But Diego de Landa might have done the same four centuries earlier, had he understood the real secret of the Mayan alphabet: There was none.