The Ancient Maya authored thousands of texts on carved stone monuments, painted ceramic bowls, and modeled stucco panels. The Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD) compiles this ever-expanding corpus of ancient Maya script. Martha Macri initiated this project in the 1980s to record linguistic variation within hieroglyphic texts. Matthew Looper now manages the database and is responsible for its current online platform.
Ancient Maya scribes crafted text using a system of hieroglyphic blocks (Coe and Van Stone 2015, p. 10–11). While each block represents a single word, a block might consist of a single sign that stands for a complete word (logogram), a combination of syllable signs (syllobograms) that spell out a word, or a combination of the two (Coe and Van Stone 2015, p. 18–19). MHD records as many as 43 fields for each hieroglyphic text block. The fields provide information on the date, translation, provenience, material, and writing technique of a text. The expansiveness of the fields allow for the coverage of a writing system that adorns a variety of media, spans nearly two millennia, and covers an area now overlapping Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. It is understandable that none of the 85,565 entries contain data for all 43 fields.
The database allows users to query select fields to make targeted searches, although a search yields no more than 20,000 items. After scroll-loading in 50 row increments, users can download the resulting table as a .csv file. To help reduce the number of fields in my query, I selected only entries where the calendar date records a precise day. This afforded temporal control over any additional query. Figure 1 charts the distribution of all dated hieroglyphic text within the ninth bak’tun (9.0.0.0.0) – a period that spans 395 years from our own calendar system of 435 to 830 CE. This range falls within what Maya archaeologists refer to as the Classic period. I decided to use the Indigenous dating system and use units of roughly 20 years called a k’atun (e.g., 9.1.0.0.0, 9.2.0.0.0, or 9.3.0.0.0). Simon Martin (2020, fig. 50) used a similar convention for documenting instances of warfare on Maya monuments. The goal of Figure 1 is to present the intensity that ancient Maya scribes produced texts, which will offer a ground to compare further visualizations.
Figure 1 shows the rise and fall of Maya hieroglyphic script.
In “Peopling the Classic Maya Court,” Stephen Houston and David Stuart (2001, pp. 59-69) list several titles that royal family members held during the Classic period (300 and 800 CE). Of these titles, ajaw occurs most frequently and translates readily to ruler or lord (Houston and Stuart 2001, p. 59). Occasionally ajaw comes affixed with the prefix k’uhul or “holy,” signaling a lord held in greater esteem. The authors also note numerous prominent women holding ajaw titles, which is established by adding an ix prefix. The MHD allows for users to sort between different semantic categories like names, titles, relations, sites, among many others. I decided to chart the occurrence of ajaw glyphs over time in Figure 2, stacking within the graph the number of “holy rulers” or “queens” that appear within this more general category of rulership.
Figure 2 shows the fluctuation in ajaw titles in Maya hieroglyphic writing.
The above figure shows that instances of “lord” exponentially increases beginning in 9.10.0.0.0. While this trend mirrors the number an increased intensity of inscriptions as shown in Figure 1, the degree of intensity is greater in Figure 2. Furthermore, the ajaw figure reflects the lagged introduction of queens within Maya hieroglyphic writing – at least writing with calendrical dates – around 9.13.0.0.0. While the bar chart captures the waxing and waning of queens mentioned in hieroglyphic texts, it does not clearly convey whether women are represented with greater frequency within the ajaw title. For example, does the increase of queen titles in 9.14.0.0.0 reflect a greater representation of women within the script or does it result from an increase in the number of ajaw titles overall? Figure 3 uses a series of pie charts to demonstrate that the representation of women in fact fluctuates between 9.11.0.0.0 and 9.18.0.0.0, with 9.14.0.0.0 reflecting the greatest representation of women within the ajaw title at 15.2%.
Figure 3 shows percentage of women designations within ajaw titles.
The occurrence of ajaw titles plummets around 9.19.0.0.0, a timespan generally associated with the Maya “collapse” (Houston and Inomata 2009, p. 288-295). This “collapse” is most visible in the Central Maya Lowlands, an area overlapping with the jungled areas of Peten, Guatemala, and Campeche, Mexico. During this time, people abandoned their homes within once thriving cities like Tikal or Calakmul (Houston and Inomata 2009, p. 295–300). However, the “collapse” of the Central Lowland Maya parallels the meteorite rise of Chichén Itzá located in an area referred to as the Northern Maya Lowlands (Houston and Inomata 2009, p. 310–319). The MHD allows for users to filter queries based on these regions that archaeologists use to partition the Maya world. This filter helps explain the second – although smaller – wave of ajaw mentions starting around 10.1.0.0.0. Figure 4 shows a clear shift in northern titles following the “collapse” in the Central Lowlands.
Figure 4 shows increase in northern ajaw titles following the Maya “collapse.”
This trend is also reflected in the decisions Maya scribes made when writing the ajaw title. Artists could choose from a range of signs to write ajaw. MHD encodes these different signs using a system designed for Maya script (Macri and Looper 2003, pp. 17-21). Three frequent signs used for ajaw are PJ1, ZB1, and ZA6. The use of ZA6 begins in 9.18.0.0.0 but increases drastically starting in 10.0.0.0.0 when scribes from Chichén Itzá used the glyph in texts about their rulers. This trend is documented as a line graph in Figure 5. Another noticeable trend is the long-term use of ZB1 over several centuries from 8.16.0.0.0 to 10.2.0.0.0 and the preferred use of PJ1 beginning round 9.12.0.0.0. The MHD provides a base to visualize artist preferences over time. In this case study, I visualized the ajaw glyph, but the technique is applicable to other words and graphemes. In the future, I hope to apply this technique to additional hieroglyphic blocks to reveal differences in artistic practices across time and space.
Figure 5 shows fluctuations in the use of various ajaw hieroglyphs overtime.
References
Coe, Michael D., and Mark Van Stone. Reading the Maya Glyphs. Second Ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
Houston, Stephen, and Takeshi Inomata. The Classic Maya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Houston, Stephen D., and David Stuart. “Peopling the Classic Maya Court.” Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, Volume One: Theory, Comparison, and Synthesis. Eds. Inomata, Takeshi and Stephen D. Houston. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. 54-83.
Macri, Martha J., and Matthew G. Looper. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs: The Classic Period Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
Martin, Simon. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.