These aren’t words as much as a sort of suffix. If you look at the various snake heads above, you’ll see that some of them put dots below the snake while others don’t. You see, the Maya also had a sort of punctuation. Just what that snake means isn’t clear and this is where glyph-reading gets tricky. That’s the crazy-looking snake, though as you can see above, any image can work to represent your city. Lastly we have the city name, in my case Kaan, Kaanal or Kaanul, depending on how you want to read it. And if you get use to seeing them, you can start to spot them all over the place. Nevertheless, every great city used the same phrase and the same words to designate a great dynasty. But it also references a bloodline, which may explain why it looks a little like drops of blood but not why those drops seem to be falling onto a shell. The next part of our phrase is k’uh, which means “holy” in this case. If you don’t have room, as with this spine used for – there’s no nice way to say this – penis blood sacrifices, then write each word out. If you want to be fancy, cram a bunch of words into one glyph. Thus a single square on a Maya tablet can be either a word, a phrase or a whole sentence. Think of it like a Maya contraction, I suppose. The confusion comes in because almost any glyph can be written by itself (the latter one) or smushed in with several others. Start with the word ajaw or “lords,” which looks like this: Unless it looks like this: For instance, the Snake emblem glyph above reads “ajaw k’uh kaanul” or “the holy lords of the snake.” Ish. All of these say the same thing as the glyph above.Įmblem glyphs were a sort of coat of arms or a flag that identified where your allegiances lay. Or maybe I should say glyphs, because every writer among the ancient Maya often had their own style. But the real central character isn’t a person at all but an emblem glyph for the Snake kings. In the story, I profile many incredible characters – both historical figures and the scientists who study them. And just like the Maya, ancient peoples in the fertile crescent started adding rules and sounds to their collection until we ended up with the modern alphabet you are reading now. As I have written before on this blog, our own form of writing began in a similar way – a series of pictures of swords and oxen and other images. So what is this form of writing? Isn’t it just a bunch of squiggly lines and wacky pictures? Well yes. ![]() But it wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that experts realized that these bizarre pictures were neither, rather they were a complex form of writing that I could theoretically use to write this post. The reason we do is because the Maya were the only culture in the Americas to devise a complex form of writing. Originally, archeologists thought the bizarre scribbles on the sides of pots or walls was either pictograms – more of a stick figure cartoon – like the Mexica (Aztecs) used or else maybe a series of spiritual astronomical images – more of a drug-addled vision quest. It’s actually kind of incredible that we have the story at all. It’s a twisting tale of political maneuvering and ambition unlike any other in the Pre-Columbian world. ![]() In this month’s issue of National Geographic, I tell a story of an ancient dynasty of Maya kings who made perhaps the region’s best attempt at creating what we might call an empire.
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