The deadly race to decipher Maya hieroglyphs

Murder and Maya hieroglyphs make an unlikely combination, but the two came together one evening several years ago, deep in the rain forest of northern Guatemala. It happened at La Naya, soon after Scotsman Ian Graham and his party had arrived to draw and photograph inscriptions that had been reported at the remote ruin. They found much more than they bargained for. 

"I never thought Maya archeology would be that dangerous," Ian told me when I visited him at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, "but I sometimes feel fortunate to be alive. The looters are quite serious about their business." 

At La Naya, Ian and his group had unwittingly interrupted a gang of men engaged in cutting apart an ancient stone monument. Later, as the archeologists were setting up camp, shots rang out and Pedro Arturo Sierra, one of Ian's assistants, fell dying. 

The shooting was an isolated incident. But looting still occurs frequently enough to deprive us of priceless knowledge of the fascinating ancient Maya civilization. 

At Naranjo, a site near the Guatemala-Belize border, half the 40 known monuments have been attacked. Some of the finest examples of ancient American sculpture lie scattered in meaningless fragments over the forest floor. In their efforts to slice beautiful stone carvings into portable, marketable segments, looters have totally destroyed many precious hieroglyphic inscriptions. 

Such depredation—wreaked with tools as crude as sledgehammers—is doubly deplorable now. Researchers need every inscription that men like Ian Graham can record, for in the past two decades Mayanists have made significant progress in deciphering them. 

Until recently it was thought that these intricate glyphs dealt only with the calendar and the gods. Now, however, scholars have unraveled the names of rulers and fragments of history that indicate the ancient Maya sought an immortality of sorts in stone. 

The brilliant civilization that rose in the lowland jungle of the Yucatán Peninsula endured at places like Palenque, Tikal, and Copán until about A.D. 900, when a complicated series of circumstances wrecked the delicate equilibrium of what archeologists call the Classic Period. Not the least of Maya achievements was the most complex writing system ever devised in the Western Hemisphere.

Learning to read messages in stone 

Maya writing appears strange to us, for we see it across a wide gulf of time and culture. Its elements usually appear in what Maya epigraphers—specialists in the writing—call "glyph blocks." These are the square or rectangular elements that make up the separate units of an inscription. 

Glyph blocks may be arranged in a horizontal row to be read left to right, or in vertical columns to be read from top to bottom. In long inscriptions, such as the exquisite Tablet of the 96 Glyphs from Palenque, two columns are to be read at a time, top to bottom. 

Individual glyph blocks hold the actual elements of the writing. In all, 800 or more glyphic elements are known. Authorities do not agree on how many of these have been deciphered accurately; estimates range from 5 to 30 percent. 

Usually each glyph contains a dominant "main sign" that occupies most of the block. To this are attached any necessary affixes, or smaller elements. Main signs often have two forms. One is abstract and geometric; the other is the head of a human, animal, or bird that presumably represents a god or mythical being. Even the numbers, most often shown with combinations of bars (representing fives), dots (representing ones), and shells (zeroes), have different head forms. The numbers almost always refer to calendar matters. 

To the Maya priest, time and its endless passage of days inspired great awe. Anyone who has beheld the brilliant night sky from a dugout canoe on the Río Usumacinta, or from the pinnacle of a ruined pyramid on the plains of northwestern Yucatán, can perhaps approach some understanding of this Maya obsession—the effort to bring the moving universe into harmony with the seasons, and the regular passage of days into coherent unity with the errant moon. 

In order to perpetuate their unique affinity with the cadence of time—and to meet the year-to-year needs of the farmers who sustained them—the Maya employed the complicated calendar system developed by unknown Middle American forebears. 

Only the priests and rulers possessed complete knowledge of the calendar and hieroglyphic symbols. These were recorded by sculptors—with rarely an error—on stone, or painted by scribes in incredibly delicate rows of glyph blocks we find on pottery, walls, or the pages of surviving Maya books. 

Our increasing ability to decipher this writing has come about largely in the past century, and is an epic of both arduous exploration and meticulous scholarship.

Early bishop left keys to the puzzle 

We would have been much the poorer without the account of the Maya written in the 1560's by Diego de Landa, third bishop of Yucatán. Although the original was lost, an indefatigable French antiquary, the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, found an abstract of the famous Landa text in a Madrid library in 1863. It contained, in addition to an amazingly complete account of Maya ways at the beginning of the colonial period, a description of some of the workings of the calendar, accompanied by recognizable pictures of glyphs for kin, or day, and the names used for various days and months. 

Beginning in 1880, it took Ernst Förstemann, head librarian of the Royal Library at Dresden, 14 years of spare-time study to figure out the fundamental workings of the Maya calendar. He found a wealth of raw material in Landa's account, as well as in the excellent drawings of monuments that Frederick Catherwood had made during his journeys with John L. Stephens between 1839 and 1842, and the yet-unmatched photographs of Englishman Alfred P. Maudslay that were just beginning to appear in print. 

Förstemann possessed one item of prime importance that no one had yet utilized: the Postclassic Dresden Codex, which had reposed since 1740 in his library. The manuscript had been purchased in Vienna; most authorities think it may have been part of the shipment of New World curiosities that Cortés himself sent to his sovereign, Emperor Charles V, who resided in Vienna in 1519.

The Dresden Codex is painted on fig-bark paper sized with a thin layer of white plaster, folded screenlike into 78 pages. It is one of only four major Maya writings to survive, including works in Paris and Madrid, and a book in Mexico City whose authenticity is doubted by some authorities. 

Today, "to all intents and purposes, the contents of the Dresden Codex are known," noted the late Sir Eric Thompson, dean of all Maya scholars. His definitive study of the document shows it was a book of divination. Among its thousands of glyphs, delicately drafted figures, and rows of numerical notation lie sacred almanacs of good- and bad-luck days, tables charting the orbitings of Venus and predicting solar eclipses, and even warnings of divinely bestowed diseases.

Each day a god to the Maya

Förstemann started from scratch in trying to decipher the Dresden manuscript. It is a tribute to his genius that he not only managed to grasp the repeating sequences that paced Maya eternity, but was also able to calculate backward in time—and in Maya terms—the base date of the calendar used from the Early Classic Period onward. 

There were two main cycles; one of 260 days, the other 365. These sequences meshed like gear wheels. Each day was named in terms of both the 260- and 365 day cycles, and the full name of any single day could repeat only every 18,980 days—once every 52 years. 

To the Maya users of this calendar, the very days were gods, as were numbers. These moved in relentless procession through the eternity that priests of Quiriguá, Guatemala, must have glimpsed in A.D. 766, when they produced the calculation on Stela D that reaches a day 400 million years in the past! 

How did the priests handle such stupendous calculations? Simply by a method of positional notation such as we use when we write "1975." In our case, the four positions of numbers represent, from left to right, 1000's, 100's, 10's, and 1's. The Classic Period Maya customarily used five positions and a modified "base-20" arithmetical system to record dates.

Archeologists call such inscriptions "Long Count" dates, and can correlate them with our own calendar. Still there remains a tantalizing mystery: Long Count dates record the number of days that had elapsed since the beginning of the Maya calendar, a date that most Mayanists agree corresponds to our own August 11, 3114 B.C. What, one can only wonder, was the high significance of that day, long before Maya history began? 

We found just such a Long Count date last year while I was helping to map the site of Cobá in collaboration with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, and with support from the National Geographic Society. 

Domingo Falcón, the custodian of Cobá, and his brother, Leonardo, were clearing brush from a mound when they uncovered part of a carved stone, all but buried by rubble. We carefully scraped away the dirt and rocks and roots, forgetting the mosquitoes and stifling heat as row after row of glyph blocks came to light. I recognized the characteristic calendar glyphs, with their bar-and-dot numbers. The piece obviously had broken from an upright monument, across the headdress of a large figure.

Glyphs pinpoint a day long ago

The exposed stone quickly dried to a uniform whiteness that obscured the badly eroded glyphs in the brilliant sunlight. Draping a heavy tarpaulin over me to form a darkened tent, I set to work with graph paper, tape, pencil, and flashlight, playing the beam over different glyph blocks at varying angles to bring finer points into view. 

It took me several hours—emerging occasionally for a gasp of air—to complete a scale drawing of the inscription.

At last I began to count: First, the baktun, or 144,000-day periods—there were nine of these. Next, the katun, signifying 7,200 days; 17 of these. Then, ten 360-day periods called tun. The next two glyphs—the 20-day uinal and the bearded sun sign for kin, or one day—were accompanied by symbols for zero. 

Arithmetic brought the day count out of the dim reaches of the fourth millennium B.C.: The inscription signified 1,422,000 days after that mystical August 11, 3114 B.C. The sculptor had carved the date—in our terms—of November 30, A.D. 780. Whatever his intent, he had added nearly a century to the known Classic Period occupation of Cobá. 

Since dates or recordings of time spans pervaded Maya texts, scholars had long thought that the inscriptions dealt exclusively with the mechanism and mythology of time. But in the 1950's some Mayanists began to feel that this could not be so. 

For one thing, too many noncalendrical glyph blocks had come to light; some short inscriptions contained no calendar material. The whole concept of what the Maya had been recording began to change rapidly. 

Epigrapher Heinrich Berlin, who has devoted years to interpreting the panels that grace the serene temples of Palenque, noted an interesting repetition: Among the inscriptions of Palenque and those of other Classic centers across the southern lowlands—among them Tikal, Naranjo, Yaxchilán, and Copán—there occurred strikingly similar glyph blocks. They contained the same kinds of prefixes, but different main signs, and they appeared in similar context from site to site.

The change in the main sign appeared to be dictated by the site where the glyph occurred. Berlin cautiously dubbed them "emblem glyphs," for each was generally found only at a specific site. He reasoned that such glyphs probably functioned either as place names of the centers or, possibly, as names or symbols of their ruling lineages. 

Emblem glyphs give us a fascinating glimpse of relationships among the Maya centers. An intriguing link between Copán, Tikal, and Palenque, for example, is hinted at by the occurrence of both the Tikal and Palenque emblem glyphs in the inscription on Stela A at Copán. Were the places tied politically? Were their ruling families perhaps related? We should know someday.

New meanings begin to emerge 

The greatest breakthrough of all came in 1959, when Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff, then with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D. C., found patterns in dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, that suggested a record of milestones in the lives of individuals. 

On Stela 14 at Piedras Negras, a young man in Classic Maya regalia sits cross-legged in a large niche. A carved ladderlike band marked with footprints rises toward the niche, and a woman stands gazing upward at the seated figure. The monument, even by Maya standards, is unusual, but others bearing the same general motif occur at Piedras Negras—and each is the earliest in a group of monuments set up in front of a building. 

"My first thought," recalled Miss Proskouriakoff, "was that the 'niche' motif represented the dedication of a new temple, and that the footsteps symbolized the rise to the sky of the victim of sacrifice. I thought I might find the glyphic evidence for human sacrifice. What I found instead started an entirely new train of thought and led to surprising conclusions."

Delving into the complex series of dates, Miss Proskouriakoff began to see intriguing patterns. For instance, an important event appeared to be symbolized by what Sir Eric Thompson called the "toothache" glyph, a solemn bird head or other form bound by a knotted cloth. Another significant event was marked by the picture of an upended frog head. The time intervals associated with these events proved the most fascinating of all. 

The total time span recorded for each set of monuments ranged from 56 to 64 years. Human life spans? In these same groups, the upended-frog event preceded the toothache event by from 12 to 31 years. One might reasonably infer that the frog represented birth, or birthday; and the toothache, some milestone in a person's life—perhaps accession to power. The latter might be symbolized as well by the ascending footprints. 

Analysis of all the monuments, their date combinations, and the portraits of women, children, and young lords only reinforced Miss Proskouriakoff's startling contribution—our first glimpse of Maya political dynasties of the seventh and eighth centuries. 

Miss Proskouriakoff's interpretation of the Piedras Negras monuments opened a whole new world. David Kelley, now with the University of Calgary, found comparable data among the inscriptions of Quiriguá, one of the main centers of ancient Maya astronomy. Tatiana Proskouriakoff herself turned her attention to Yaxchilán, a major site upstream and across the Río Usumacinta from Piedras Negras. Again, the intellectual quest paid off. 

The ruins of Yaxchilán are arranged in a great crescent that parallels the biggest meander loop of the Usumacinta. The terrain rises from the river in vast jungle-covered heaps, and the rich, dark drapery of green perfectly complements the ancient buildings and moss-covered carvings that lie about. 

This was the setting for inscriptions that highlighted the lives and reigns of two of the most illustrious rulers of American antiquity—Shield Jaguar and Bird Jaguar, so-called simply from the pictures that make up their name glyphs.

A tale of rulers and a usurper

Among more than a hundred scenes and texts on the lintels, stelae, and stairways of Yaxchilán, Miss Proskouriakoff found that the earliest recognizable ruler in the inscriptions, Shield Jaguar, was probably born around A.D. 650. Since there is no apparent record of his accession, she speculates, Shield Jaguar may have been a usurper. Also, since some dates associated with him reflect a distinctive one-day "error," he may have been a "foreigner" from northern Yucatán, where such a calendar anomaly often occurs. 

Whatever his origins, Shield Jaguar appears to have lived to be more than 90 years old. Events of his military career are depicted in scenes of conquest. The lintels of one building suggest a combined obituary for the ruler and three other persons; their name glyphs are preceded by the distinctive prefix that signifies "female." 

Mexican archeologist Roberto García Moll, who is excavating at the site, may someday find—if Miss Proskouriakoff's reading of the inscriptions accurately reflects the events of 1,200 years ago—a tomb containing remains of an old man and three women. 

More is known of Shield Jaguar's successor, Bird Jaguar. Near the riverbank where it now rests, I saw Stela 11, the underside of which shows Bird Jaguar around A.D. 750, just before he ascended to rulership. Elegantly garbed and wearing a mask of the Sun God, he stands before three kneeling figures, surely captives. A panel above memorializes the dead Shield Jaguar and his wife.

Fun with puns compounds the problem

What did Bird Jaguar's subjects actually call him? The question underscores the most difficult task involved in glyphic research—to discover the true phonetic translation, as opposed to the meaning, of the various pictures and symbols in Maya inscriptions. 

With surviving colonial Maya-Spanish dictionaries, and grammars of modern Maya dialects, such translation would seem easy. After all, Michael Ventris cracked Minoan Linear B, an ancient script, by using code-breaking techniques—without even knowing what language it was in! 

But Maya texts are filled with obscure allusions and metaphors, and—worse, for the epigrapher—their authors loved plays on words, or puns. We constantly find homonyms, words of identical sound with different meaning. This devastates, in advance, any cryptographic analysis of the glyphs.

As one example, small pictures of fish sometimes flank the large glyphs that lead off Long Count dates. Thompson has shown that one Maya word for a certain large fish was xoc, and xoc is also the root of the words for "count" or "read." Thus, in the date-introductory glyph, the fish almost certainly signifies "count." Another element in that introductory glyph is the tun, or the 360-day period. Thus the ancients might have read the whole glyph as, ["What follows is] the count [of the] tuns."

Some experts disagree even on the basic principles of translating Maya glyphs. The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov believes that, in addition to the inventory of word signs, there are a number of glyphic elements that represent not ideas but single syllables. Linked together, these syllables can "sound out" meaningful words and phrases.

Pieces seem to fit together 

Thompson disagreed. "Maya writing is not syllabic or alphabetic in part or in whole," he wrote. Each glyphic element has an intrinsic meaning, he concluded. 

Nevertheless, some of Knorozov's readings work beautifully: His signs for chu, ca, and ha, for example—the very elements shown in the "capture" glyph in a scene with Bird Jaguar—yield, by Knorozov's system, the word chucah. One of its meanings, according to the old dictionaries: to seize. 

By employing similar phonetic principles, David Kelley and Yale University linguist Floyd Lounsbury have been able to read the name of the man found in the magnificent tomb beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque as "Pacal," or "Shield." Sometimes the name is shown simply as the picture of a shield. In other instances it is written as three glyph elements that by phonetic interpretation read pa-ca-la.

In their careful work with the inscriptions and accompanying motifs, Lounsbury and colleagues Linda Schele of the University of South Alabama and Peter Mathews of Calgary are reconstructing the list of Palenque's rulers through the Late Classic Period. So far they have identified at least 15. They have made other discoveries as well. Lounsbury, for example, has isolated what appears to be another event glyph—that for "burial." Thus he has completed, in a sense, the set that Miss Proskouriakoff began with the upended frog, or "birth." 

Obviously, the small dedicated group who seek the content of the Maya inscriptions, from John Graham of the University of California at Berkeley to Thomas Barthel of the University of Tübingen, West Germany, can't work in isolation. The task of decipherment comes only in bits and pieces that build slowly on the work of others. 

As one of my colleagues put it, "There can be no single key to this sort of thing because there's no single lock. I doubt that we'll ever have anything like the Rosetta stone. What we really need are good copies of all the inscriptions."

This task is underway. Undaunted by the shooting at La Naya, Ian Graham continues to comb the lowlands for new texts. He and his colleague, Eric von Euw, have together added 55 new monuments to the known inventory in six years. But the race between scholarship and thievery continues. 

Not long ago I visited an art museum in Texas. Mounted on one wall was a beautiful Maya stela bearing a huge figure in full regalia flanked by glyph panels. Its looters had "thinned" the monument to a sheet of stone only an inch and a half thick, then sawed the sheet into smaller squares, damaging parts of the sculpture. Where had it stood? Only its looters knew. 

Large carvings are not the only pawns in this illicit trade. The famed Maya polychrome cylinder vases of the Classic Period, things of indescribable beauty, show up in art shops from San Diego to Geneva, then vanish into private collections. 

This is a tragedy for mankind, really, for each is, in effect, a new codex, replete with scenes of action—ball games, royal courts, ceremonies, and processions—most often with texts that explain them. One such vessel that was exhibited in New York City bore the pictures of 31 small figures, beings of the Maya pantheon, or mythology, hitherto unknown to archeology. One can only wonder what else the looter found in the tomb that would have added to our knowledge of the Maya and the ways of the Maya mind.

Time works toward dispelling mystery 

I recently returned to Cobá with Sir Eric Thompson, only a few months before he died. The dated fragment we had helped uncover last year was now reunited—after more than a thousand years—with three other pieces of the same stela that Eric had found when he was last at the site, on his honeymoon, in 1930. 

As we stood in the brilliant sunlight before the whole magnificent carving, I reflected on such discoveries, and how they so often transcend the lifetimes of many scholars as they move toward complete knowledge of the Maya and their civilization. The old priests, with their fascination with time and its attendant good fortune, would have liked the idea.