In the last century, it was finally proposed that in any Mayan writing, glyphs represented both kinds of alphabets. That’s because until the last century, researchers had no idea whether the glyphs represented phonetic sounds or complete symbols. Deciphering Mayan Glyphsĭeciphering Mayan glyphs can be a hard job. Apart from being a rich resource of Mayan glyphs, these books are also one of the most important insights into the Mayan civilisation. Chilam Balam is a collection of Mayan songs and religious prophecies and is also inscribed in glyphs. Notable among these is Popul Vuh, a book penned down in the 16th century and narrating mythological and political history of Quiche Maya. These epics are written in glyphs and narrate many fantastic stories of Mayan gods and heroes. Mayan epic stories have survived in the extant codices and are a rich resource of the Mayan creation mythologies and religious views. Among the extant Mayan codices are the Dresden codex, Madrid Codex and Paris codex. These books are called codices and they were originally written on a sort of cloth made from bark tree. Some Mayan books, however, have survived and they are a major source of Mayan glyphs. And since books and writing was the sole prerogative of the priests, most of the Mayan literature was destroyed in the burning down of these temples. When the Spaniards invaded the Mayan lands, most of the Mayan temples were pulled down.

Inscriptions comprising of glyphs have also been found on Mayan pottery and ceramics. These include extant Mayan inscriptions, usually found carved in stones of the Mayan monumental structures, or on wooden structures from Mayan times. A number of sources provide a rich collection of Mayan glyphs. It is for this reason that the researches have been able to decipher Mayan glyphs and understand Mayan texts.

The Mayan written language is one of the most extensively available languages from pre-Colombian Americas. Using two types of glyphs, namely syllabograms and logograms, gave the Mayan language a lot of flexibility. Mayan also had a number of other glyphs which served as proper nouns in the written language. In total, the Mayan language has 550 logogram glyphs and 150 syllabogram glyphs. Syllabogram was important because it helped the Mayans use different inflections in the written language. A syllabogram, on the other hand, was more thorough and brought together multiple syllables to string a single word or phrase. A logogram could be used, for instance, to provide a very precise and comprehensive form of a phrase, usually summed up in a single image or symbol. This helped the Mayans express their thoughts and history very lucidly. Syllabograms used syllables using a collection of images to depict a phrase and were more detailed. Logograms made use of an image to depict an entire phrase, for instance the depiction of a god to denote him. There were two types of glyphs in the Mayan language, namely logograms and syllabograms. Glyphs, a term used to denote the individual alphabets or symbols, formed the basic unit of the language.

The language comprised mainly of symbols in the shapes of glyphs, which is why Mayan language has been called hieroglyphics. Mayans had a detailed and well-developed written language which they used to inscribe on artistic works and to pen down books.

Mayan glyphs pictures