Maya Writing, Mathematics, and the Calendar

Maya writing was a mixed logosyllabic system combining logograms and syllabic signs, organized into glyph blocks read in paired columns. Only four pre-Hispanic codices are known to survive colonial destruction — the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices, plus the contested Grolier Codex — because Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the burning of numerous Maya books at the auto-da-fé of Maní in 1562, an irreparable loss to the written record. Paradoxically, Landa himself recorded an "alphabet" of Maya signs that proved crucial to decipherment centuries later. In 1952, Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov proposed that the script was fundamentally phonetic rather than purely symbolic, a claim initially resisted for decades by the leading Mayanist of the time, J. Eric S. Thompson. Building on Knorozov's insight and on Tatiana Proskouriakoff's 1960 demonstration that stelae recorded real historical events, epigraphers such as David Stuart, Linda Schele, and Nikolai Grube drove decipherment forward from the 1970s onward; today an estimated 85 to 90 percent of known Maya texts can be read, a story popularized in Michael Coe's 1992 book "Breaking the Maya Code."