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The phonetic decipherment of Mayan glyphs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Stephen D. Houston
Stephen D. Houston*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA
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Abstract

The complete decipherment of Mayan glyphs is an event that neither we, nor perhaps our children, shall ever see: the script is tortuously complicated, as many hieroglyphic writing systems are, and hardly susceptible to rapid and unequivocal ‘codebreaking’. Nevertheless, good progress has been made towards reading the glyphs, with many solid achievements in reconstructing the genealogies and political interaction of royal dynasties of the Classic period (e.g. Berlin 1959; Proskouriakoff 1960). The focus of the present paper is another, more controversial feature of Mayan glyphs: a set of ‘phonetic’ or syllabic units used in spelling Mayan words. Virtually all glyph specialists now accept the validity of these units, but the path to consensus has been difficult and acrimonious. We shall examine here why many good scholars resisted ‘phoneticism’ in Mayan script, and why additional evidence so impressively confirms its existence.

Type
Special section: the archaeology of Maya decipherment
Information
Antiquity , Volume 62 , Issue 234 , March 1988 , pp. 126 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1988

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