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Later, seeking to use their native language to convert the Maya to Christianity, he derived what he believed to be a Maya "alphabet" (the so-called de Landa alphabet). Although the Maya did not actually write alphabetically, nevertheless he recorded a glossary of Maya sounds and related symbols, which was long dismissed as nonsense (for ...
The "alphabet", along with some passages of explanatory notes and examples of its use in Maya writing, was written as a small part of de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán ("Account of the matters of Yucatán"), which also documented many aspects of the culture and practices of the indigenous Maya peoples that he had seen and been told ...
The project Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan (abbr. TWKM) promotes research on the writing and language of pre-Hispanic Maya culture.It is housed in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn and was established with funding from the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. [1]
The Maya writing system (often called hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to Ancient Egyptian writing) [285] is a logosyllabic writing system, combining a syllabary of phonetic signs representing syllables with logogram representing entire words.
The Maya writing system consists of about 1000 distinct characters or hieroglyphs ('glyphs'), and like many ancient writing systems is a mixture of syllabic signs and logograms. This script was in use from the 3rd century BCE until shortly after the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.
Archaeologists discovered an ancient stone slab with 123 hieroglyphic symbols in Mexico, revealing the founding of a town in 569 AD and details about Maya rulers.
Classic Maya (or properly Classical Chʼoltiʼ) is the oldest historically attested member of the Mayan language family.It is the main language documented in the pre-Columbian inscriptions of the classical period of the Maya civilization. [1]
Since de Landa's "alphabet" seemed to be contradictory and unclear (e.g., multiple variations were given for some of the letters, and some of the symbols were not known in the surviving inscriptions), previous attempts to use this as a key for deciphering the Maya writing system had not been successful. [8]