Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Mayan Civilization
Now it is time to leave the Old World and sail across the Atlantic to the
New World, where a great people reigned from 2000 BC to 1500 AD, the Mayan
civilization. (
Mayan
means
Thrice built
.)
Perhaps some of the most diGcult of the languages that have yet to be deci-
phered, are the
Mayan hieroglyphs
, the only genuine writing system ever devised
in the pre-Columbian Americas. This writing system was used by the Mayan In-
dian peoples of Meso-America from roughly the third to the seventeenth century
AD. We use the term
hieroglyph
(see page 4) since the more than 800 symbols
are mostly representations of objects, namely, they are pictorial in nature,
pic-
tograms
, and typically we abbreviate this term and refer to them as
glyphs
.Up
to the middle of the twentieth century, only minute amounts of mostly numeric
data were decrypted. From the middle to the end of the twentieth century
progress was made in deciphering numerous Mayan inscriptions, so that by the
1990s a significant number of decipherings were achieved, but much remains to
be done. The complexity of the Mayan system is underscored by the fact that a
given symbol may represent a complete word. Such glyphs are called
logographs
.
A glyph that represents only a sound, syllable, or even just a part of a word
is called a
phoneme
. Yet, that is not all. A single logographic symbol might
have many meanings. Also, any given glyph could represent a sound, a concept,
or both. Hence, there are the interwoven problems of deciphering not only a
symbol's logographic meaning — what it represents — but also its phonetic
meaning.
Although the reader may find similarities in what we are describing here
to what we described in the tackling of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, there are
two major differences. First, unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphs, where there were
Greek versions, such as on the Rosetta stone, there is no known conversion of
Mayan glyphs into another language. Secondly, there are no people alive today
who can read or write the glyphs. The Mayan glyphs are unlike the Phaistos
disk in that there are a substantial number of sources that have been recov-
ered. Mayan hieroglyphs have been found carved in stone monuments (called
stelae
, meaning
stone trees
), on pottery, jewellery, and to a far lesser extent,
in topics. The topics of the Mayans are called
codices
, most of which were de-
stroyed by Spanish priests, who considered them to be pagan in nature. Four
codices are extant. The oldest is the
Paris Codex
dating, it is believed, to the
fourth century AD. In Figures 1.8 and 1.9 are representations of two pages of
the Mayan zodiac from the Paris Codex, where the constellations are repre-
sented by zodiacal animals such as a bird, scorpion, snake, and turtle (there are
a total of thirteen zodiacal animals in the Mayan zodiac corresponding to their
thirteen constellations). (These digital representations were downloaded from
http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/codex/download.html
, courtesy of North-
western University Library.)
The most recent codex, the
Grolier Codex
, dating to the thirteenth century,
contains exhaustive writings on the orbit of the planet Venus. However, it is
estimated that more than half its twenty pages are missing. The other two
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