Maya Hieroglyphs Decoded
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What is Maya hieroglyphic writing and why does it matter?
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Kunevum. Linear B. Hieroglyphs. Mysterious ancient scripts that, when finally deciphered, revealed exciting new worlds. The cracking of hieroglyphs unlocked the world of ancient Egypt. Can air form the world of Mesopotamia? Linear B Bronze Age Greece. And across the Atlantic in Central America. Archaeologists have had another ancient code crack. We know them as Maya hieroglyphs. Today, these beautiful symbols have started to reveal so much about the complex world of the ancient Maya, about their cities, their politics, their beliefs, their conflicts, their leaders. Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is your guide to Maya hieroglyphs and the world, the stories they are revealing.
Our guest is Dr. David Stewart, Professor of Mesoamerican Art, Archaeology and Epigraphy at the University of Texas. David, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. It's great to be here. And uh to talk about Maya hieroglyphs. And I mean, reading up on your work just before this, to hear how the deciphering of this script it's opening up this world of the ancient Maya, learning so much more about them and how they lived.
It's opening up a whole world. I mean, imagine. studying ancient Egypt, uh, at a time when one couldn't read the hieroglyphic writing and then you could read the hieroglyphic writing. I think we've we've gone through a transition In our field, in Maya studies like that over the past forty, fifty years, something like that, and the decipherment really, really Happens. I think in the eighties and nineties and we're still catching up to everything we can study and th there's still some
And is this quite interesting because yes, you mentioned the deciphering of hieroglyphs and people will think Rosetta Stone and Champollion and like I've got it, like kind of the Eureka moment. But as we're gonna find it in this chat, is the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs is it much more than just kind of one moment? Is it a much more prolonged process?
It's absolutely more than one moment. It's been many people over, I would say, the past hundred years. Small incremental breakthroughs, you might say. You know, a sign here, a sign there. You know, Maya hieroglyphs were words, there were phrases deciphered almost a hundred years ago. Actual signs were deciphered back in the nineteenth century. small, small, small percentage of what's out there. And then there was more progress, a better understanding of how the script actually worked. That was the real work that so many people were doing was just to try to figure out how the system worked. And even though a few signs could be read, the general system was really hard to fathom until I would say the nineteen eighties.
And that's when we really were able to first get it and and see how it worked as a system.
And David, for you, uh reading about uh your story and your links to Maya archaeology, you mentioned like the nineteen eighties and the nineteen seventies, because this is something that has fascinated you since you were a child. You've been visiting sites with Maya hieroglyphs, you know, since you were Yehai.
That's right. I mean, I I was very, very fortunate in the fact that my mother and father were both archaeologists. They met on a dig, in fact, back in the 1950s. A great family story there. My father was running a archaeological project in Mexico, you know, when I was about eight, nine, ten years old. But I was in the field with them and I remember vividly the discovery of well, first of all, it was at a site called Koba in Yucatan and it has some of the most massive pyramids, you know, in the jungle.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Maya hieroglyphic writing and why does it matter?
0:00–5:38
2
How did scholars gradually crack the Maya script over the 20th century?
5:38–12:24
3
What does the glyphic evidence reveal about the rival super‑powers Tikal and Calakmul?
12:24–18:45
4
Who were the powerful female warlords and how are they recorded in the glyphs?
18:45–25:16
5
How did the Maya ball game function as a political and ritual tool?
25:16–32:24
6
What does the recently discovered “whiteboard” tell us about Maya astronomy and mathematics?
32:24–39:38
7
How did Maya elites use hieroglyphs for administration, tribute and trade?
39:38–44:55
8
What are the biggest unanswered questions and future directions for Maya epigraphy?
44:55–50:40