Decipherment of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing

For its relative small size (many other sites in the Maya lowlands are physically larger), the amount of inscribed materials at Copán are truly astounding, suggesting that in some way the elite culture of this ancient kingdom was particularly interested in literate culture and whatever that entailed. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that Copán has long been a focus of intensive epigraphic investigation. The large number of texts at Copán, nearly all on large stone stelae or altars, have given scholars a large amount of texts to be compared and studied, and these texts have played a significant role in the overall effort to break the Maya code. Recently, this great progress in deciphering Copán's inscriptions has not only revealed surprising facts about the local royal history, featuring the rituals and reigns of individual kings over a four-hundred year period, but it has also opened several doors on Maya culture as a whole.

At present some 60 to 70 percent of the Maya inscriptions can be read with a reasonable degree of accuracy, this principally being the result of an ever-increasing refinement in our understanding of the workings of the ornate Maya script, as well as a better accuracy in reconstructing the Mayan language of the inscriptions from its modern descendants. Some texts are perfectly legible and can be read aloud in Mayan more or less as they were written centuries ago; others may be completely opaque to us, and may never be read in their entirety.

Between these extremes lies the majority of inscriptions at Copán and elsewhere, which are generally understood with regard to content, even if a number of words or names are unreadable. Certainly enough is known to allow us to step back from the details of deciphering to consider what the Maya had to say about their own society and history. What we must not fail to remember is that the results of these investigations has pushed back the historical record of the New World some fifteen hundred years.

A few words on the nature of Maya writing are appropriate as background for understanding the literate culture of Copán in ancient times. Anyone glancing at a Maya inscriptions would be immediately struck by the sheer complexity of the visual forms of the script itself—the "look" of the Maya script is in fact difficult to compare with any other. A text is typically arranged in a grid-like fashion, or by a linear arrangement of the same square blocks that are a basic formal unit of the system. Each block is composed of one or more signs, most of which possessed a strong pictorial quality throughout their history. Heads, body parts, objects of everyday life—all these things can be recognized in most inscriptions. However, it is a mistake to consider Maya writing as simple "picture writing," for nothing could be farther from the truth.

Maya hieroglyphs were a full writing system, meaning that it was above all phonetic. Every Maya sign corresponds to a word or a phonetic syllable, and thus was capable of accurately representing any spoken utterance. Word signs are the simplest type, where a character might represent a macaw head and be read Mo', "macaw." Hundreds of such signs are known. More complicated are the syllabic elements, which were combined in various ways to spell words. Syllabic signs may well be pictorial as well (bird heads, hands, etc.) but the image is not necessarily an indicator of meaning in such cases. Thus, the syllables k'u-k'u spell k'uk', "quetzal," and the sequence la-ka-ma spells lakam, "flag, banner."

Words such as these were commonly spelled with word signs as well, showing that there existed an inherent optionality to the script. Scribes constantly had to choose among the large repertoire of signs (some 800 in all) when composing their texts. To make matters even more complicated, a single syllable or word sign could have several substitutes or "allographs"—signs that graphically very different but functionally equivalent. For example, the syllable na could be rendered by five distinct signs. One can see why the decipherment has been a long and arduous process over the years.

Work over the past ten years has resulted in the decipherment of many inscriptions at Copán, although it must be said that several texts still elude even a cursory understanding. The recent epigraphic work has refined the ruler sequence and its chronology, nearly a quarter of a century after Heinrich Berlin's and Tatiana Proskouriakoff's celebrated breakthroughs in the historical interpretations of Maya texts in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A few rulers' names from the Late Classic period were fairly clear in the years subsequent to those initial findings ("18 Jog," "New-Sky-at-Horizon," etc.), yet the overall progress in identifying all the rulers was gradual, aided greatly by Berthold Reise's reading of the name glyphs on Altar Q, an important stone monument to be discussed momentarily. Why did clarifying the historical content of Copán's inscriptions require so much time?

There are several reasons, perhaps the most important being Copán's local scribal genre, where names and other glyphs are seldom presented the same way twice. Not only did writing styles vary over time, they also differed among contemporaneous monuments. This required epigraphers not only to understand specific substitution patterns, but also to painstakingly refine their models of the way Maya writing in general worked as a graphical system.

In essence, epigraphers had to solve many of the fundamental problems of Maya decipherment before addressing the specific readings in many Copán texts. Consequently, the progress in decipherment at Copán has developed hand-in-hand with, and in some ways as a result of, methodological advances on a much broader front.

We might even say that Copán's inscriptions help to define a certain "genre" of Maya textual practice. In studying the temporal and geographical diversity of Classic period inscriptions, it is perhaps useful to consider two fundamental types of text or genres. This may be best illustrated by comparing Copán to another site with a strong literary tradition, Yaxchilan. Both sites witnessed great political growth during the early years of the Late Classic period under the reigns of long-lived rulers. Both sites, moreover, display their texts in somewhat similar settings. Stelae are frequent at both centers, as are architectural inscriptions. However, the content of the inscriptions at Yaxchilan often differs drastically from those at Copán.

The major themes of the known Yaxchilan monuments are war, dance, and bloodletting rituals, with several records of architectural dedicatory rites. Most of the records of wars and dances accompany scenes of the rulers, who are featured prominently in all of the texts. Copán's texts have a far lesser emphasis on historical narrative. The stelae of the great plaza, for example, are inscribed with dedicatory formulae that name the ruler as "owner" of the monument, but they seldom if ever record any ritual or historical activity. Birth dates at Copán are virtually nonexistent, as also are records of war and capture.

The Copán rulers therefore lack some of the personalized history we read in the texts of newer centers in the western lowlands, such as Palenque, Yaxchilan, and Piedras Negras. It would seem that the great exception to this general pattern is Copán's Hieroglyphic Stairway, which provides what might be called the official history of the Copán polity. As will be seen, however, even here history takes on a special Copán flavor, providing background to what are essentially dedicatory statements.

The texts are for the most part very short, simply relating specific ritual and dedicatory information on the monuments. I have argued that this is a general feature of a great many Maya inscriptions, yet at Copán the emphasis on dedicatory matters is heightened by a surprising lack of background historical information.

The dynastic sequence of Copán has been difficult to reconstruct due to the texts' relative silence on both dates, accession dates, and statements of kin relationships among royalty. Essentially the Copán scribes presented a series of dated monuments with little more than highly elaborate name-tags, as in "the banner-stone of Waxaklahun Ubah K'awil ("18 Rabbit") was planted." A great many passages from Copán's inscriptions still defy translation, but these would seem to be specialized ritualistic texts, it is unlikely that once readable will fill-in any of the historical gaps. For this reason I have characterized Copán's texts as somewhat ahistorical, in that they are not concerned with historical narrative, or at least in not the same way we find at other sites to the north and west.

The obvious exception to this general description of Copán's literary tradition is the Hieroglyphic Stairway. In over two thousand hieroglyphs, the stairway text recounts, at least in part, much of the site's dynastic history, beginning with references to the "founder" K'inich Yax K'uk'Mo. The stairway includes numerous accession and death dates for subsequent.

Left: Glyph of founder K'inich Yax K'uk'Mo.
Right: Glyph of Waxaklahun Ubah K'awil.

Fash, myself and others have argued that the stairway was conceived as a powerful political statement of warfare and royal ancestry in the wake of Copán's apparent defeat by Quirigua in 737 A.D. In actuality, it is likely that the Hieroglyphic Stairway was built in two phases, the first by Ruler 13 (Waxaklahun Ubah K'awil) in 709, and the second by Ruler 15 ("Smoke Shell") at the traditional date of 755. Ruler 13 composed most of the dynastic narrative that is today visible on the stairway, proving that the Quirigua war was not a factor in this novel reworking of Copán's textual genre. Ruler 13 was an innovator in other respects as well, being responsible for most of the monuments of the Great Plaza and Temple 22 of the acropolis.

During his reign, the sculptural style of the city changed dramatically. Why his version of the hieroglyphic stairway departed so much from what came before it is difficult to know. However, even when relating historical narratives, the two stairway texts each culminate in final statements commemorating the building of the stairway sections, carefully conforming to the overall dedicatory tradition of Copán and other Maya sites. After Ruler 13, the Copán texts resort to short, terse, and self-referential statements of ownership and dedication.

The monuments at Quirigua were produced over the course of three reigns, making them somewhat less interesting for viewing changes through time, yet even within this relatively short span we see interesting and significant shifts in how inscriptions were conceived and presented. The well-known monuments of "Cauac Sky," the captor of Copán's Ruler 13, erected several imposing stelae in the small plaza of Qurigua, most of which celebrate the placement of the monuments themselves on period Ending dates. These monuments fall squarely in the Copán genre, and probably represent a conscious appropriation of Copán's rival art and scribal style after the latter's defeat. Cauac Sky's monuments also show a consistent effort to hearken back to calendrically-related events in the far distant past, much like what is found on Copán's Stelae C and N. The emphasis on "deep-time" may reflect the upstart kingdom's self-conscious effort to publicly present a historical pedigree where none before existed. Although accession dates and Copán's defeat are prominently featured at Quirigua, however, historical narratives of any length are non-existent.

Curiously, both Quirigua and Copán used stelae less frequently the end of the Late Classic period. Cauac Sky's successor, "Sky Xul" rejected stelae altogether, and Yax Pas of Copán likewise never erected a stela of his own. Both rulers instead invested their monuments efforts into architectural texts, free-standing altars, or so-called "zoomorphs" (a Quirigua elaboration on the altar concept). The significance of the change cannot be easily overstated, for in the case of Copán it occurred after centuries of stelae dedications by at least fifteen previous kings. Why a new mode of text presentation was so popular at the time cannot be explained, yet it surely must reveal a decreased importance in this region of the stela or "bannerstone" as a ritual and political monument.