The basic challenge in studying early writing is not identifying when or where it first appeared but deciding what writing actually is. Myriad definitions have been proposed to explain how writing, which is colloquially understood as the graphic representation of (spoken) language, differs from musical, dance, mathematical, or other graphic notations.Footnote 1 Scholars have never seriously challenged the status of alphabets, syllabaries, and other systems that transparently indicate speech sounds, divorced from any particular semantic value, as “writing.” Hieroglyphic, (semi-)logographic, and other visually intricate scripts, in contrast, were long considered less evolved, stuck behind the more phonetically transparent systems on a one-way evolutionary street between imagery and writing.Footnote 2
Recently, though, more nuanced discussion has accommodated a wider range of form and functionality in human-made scripts.Footnote 3 Today, scholars generally accept that conventionalized systems of graphic notation fall into two categories. The first, semasiographic, denotes systems that are “arranged primarily around nonphonetic principles of ordering” and are interpreted based on “the spatial and/or performative relationships among the constituent elements,” such that meaning is not tied to a particular linguistic system.Footnote 4 One such script was deployed in the Mixteca area of the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla, for example, where painters recorded mostly dates and personal, family, and place names that the orator-performer referenced when narrating the history for an audience.Footnote 5 Glottographic or lexigraphic systems such as alphabets and syllabaries, in contrast, are closely tied to language and require users to possess the relevant linguistic knowledge to communicate information accurately, even though these systems may contain some semasiographic components as well.Footnote 6
Narrow definitions of “writing” apply the label only to glottographic modes of graphic representation.Footnote 7 Broad definitions include both semasiographic and glottographic systems, emphasizing their shared communicative function and conventionalized form without discriminating based on relationship to speech.Footnote 8 This flexibility is especially advantageous in contexts such as Mesoamerica because it accounts for the high degree of iconicity and overlap with imagery that characterizes the region’s autochthonous writing systems.Footnote 9 Except in the overview of those traditions (see “Writing in Mesoamerica” below), however, the terms “writing (system)” or “script” as used in this book denote graphic systems that are primarily glottographic in nature. This approach is pragmatic, not ideological: Maya hieroglyphs are, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and Mesopotamian cuneiform, intimately tied to language. Cross-cultural comparison with other script traditions is thus most compelling in the case of similarly glottographic systems, even if semasiography has played a significant role in Mesoamerica’s long written tradition as well – including in the development of Maya hieroglyphs. A glottographic focus underscores the Maya script’s robust capacity to convey complex linguistic messages in graphic form, which made it the most sophisticated among all Mesoamerican systems of graphic notation.
Sociopolitical Complexity and Development of Ancient Scripts
For generations, scholars of early civilizations considered the big three of “agriculture, sedentary life, and writing” prerequisites for ancient humans to develop “complex architecture, organisation of labour on a significant scale and elaborated rituals.”Footnote 10 In recent decades, however, archaeologists have found evidence at Early Neolithic sites such as Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia, Choghā Mīsh in southern Mesopotamia, or Yuchanyan in southern China, of societies that did not cultivate domesticated crops or live in permanent settlements but nonetheless managed large-scale irrigation projects, crafted ceramics, or built monumental temples.Footnote 11 Early civilizations on the Peruvian coast also constructed monumental stone architecture, produced textiles, and carried out long-distance trade for centuries before adopting pottery, which also has long been considered one of the most basic artifacts of ancient life.Footnote 12 Clearly, sedentism and agriculture were not necessary for ancient peoples to achieve complex social organization. Nor was political unification – or even pottery, for that matter – a prerequisite for controlling collective labor. So, how justified is it to continue insisting that state-level administration or at least political centralization necessarily coincided with the emergence of early writing?
The idea that writing’s invention was tied to the rise of civilization can be traced back in the anthropological literature to figures such as Edward B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and V. Gordon Childe.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, the Eurocentric narratives of cultural evolution to which it belongs are rooted deeper in the early modern and colonial past.Footnote 14 Today, few serious academics would deny that the earliest examples of writing in Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica are spatiotemporally associated, at least in broad strokes, with archaeological evidence for social complexity, centralization, and urbanism.Footnote 15 What remains unresolved is the debate over the nature of the connection between these phenomena: Is it one of simple correlation or of causation? And if the latter – the preferred response among most who have taken an explicit stance on the issue – what is the causation’s directionality?
On one extreme is the assertion that political complexity and centralization preceded and fostered the invention of writing. In a widely cited article, Nicholas Postgate and colleagues argue for “a utilitarian, administrative origin” of writing in all four world regions where it was innovated.Footnote 16 In their view, writing arose in response to “the needs of administration” within a burgeoning political hierarchy.Footnote 17 This “technocratic” perspective casts writing as an effective administrative tool that supported centralization of power and the rise of the state.Footnote 18 Other scholars are more agnostic about causation, acknowledging that even if burgeoning political complexity did catalyze writing’s creation, early users of writing may not have been conscious of, motivated by, or interested in its potential for management or governance.Footnote 19 Yet even this view holds that early writing “depended for [its] existence and perpetuation on the high degree of uniformity and control that cities made available,” which was only possible with some sort of centralized administration.Footnote 20
On the other extreme are those who posit an inverse causal relationship, namely that early writing fostered the rise of political complexity and centralization. Some proposals are relatively measured, allowing that “the complex social form of the state – perhaps a regional state rather than a central one – was probably a precondition” for writing’s invention but that the latter may also have influenced the former’s development.Footnote 21 Others are more explicit in claiming that the practice of writing or “texts themselves facilitated state formation, rather than being a result of it” because “the production and storage of texts was an exercise in power.”Footnote 22
Assumptions of writing’s intimate association with political complexity and centralized authority often hover at the margins of debates about how and why the technology developed when and where it did. In their monumental treatise on the origins of civilization, David Graeber and David Wengrow push back against social historians’ long-held belief that writing “developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states.”Footnote 23 In their view, “the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities,” thousands of years before the advent of writing.Footnote 24 Yet their globally comparative discussion does not offer an alternative account of why or how the technology developed where and when it did. In characterizing Chavín culture on Peru’s northern coast from the first millennium BCE, they still cite a lack of writing or “pictorial” representation as “one reason why we can be fairly certain we are not dealing with an actual empire.”Footnote 25 The implication, of course, is that writing and figural iconography should chronically and socially precede imperial governance.
There is probably no universal resolution to the question of which came first – social complexity or writing? Inevitably, the answer depends on specific circumstances and on “compelling local need(s)” that writing initially fulfilled.Footnote 26 In their haste to resolve the debate over writing’s origins and the motivations underlying its invention, however, scholars have largely neglected another aspect of writing’s history that is at least equally important to understanding its place in early civilization. Unlike countless other technologies that humans have invented and quickly abandoned over our millennia-long history, writing arrived to stay. In ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, the newly created communicative tool was adopted and adapted by others who took up and propagated it through practice and exchange. What made writing a technology worth keeping? How did the earliest scripts develop from one-time inventions to shared traditions that remained in use through so many generations?
The answer may seem obvious to us now, living in a civilization that for millennia has depended on writing for essential social functions and, increasingly over the last 600-odd years, for daily life. But the value assigned to a technology after it has long become engrained in a way of life is not necessarily the same value that was ascribed to it upon its inception. Nor do the uses of writing today, thousands of years after our ancestors first created it, reliably explain what motivated others to adopt the novel technology in the distant past. Writing differs from many other technologies in that its very nature requires that it remain coherent as a system. In order to communicate successfully, writing’s users must agree on the forms and meanings of individual signs and on conventions for when and how to combine them.Footnote 27 They do not need to speak the same language. They must, however, share an understanding of how their script relates to speech. Additionally, they need to know how much they can deviate from those norms without jeopardizing a message’s intelligibility for its intended recipients.
By and large, discussions about early writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica take for granted the fact that, once invented, it coalesced into a coherent script with which writers could produce texts that readers in different moments and places could understand. From this perspective, the only phenomenon that needs explaining is writing’s initial creation. Yet this origins-focused model conflates stages of technological development that differ in consequence and nature. It also overlooks the sociological processes of ongoing practice and exchange that, even today, are necessary to maintain writing’s functionality over generations.
Unlike relatively recent episodes of script invention – the Cyrillic alphabet, for instance, or the Cherokee or hangul syllabaries – creation of writing in early civilizations was not a delineated event.Footnote 28 It tended to be “episodic,” piecemeal, occurring over a lifetime or two without a clear vision of an end goal or product.Footnote 29 At the same time, in contrast to the fragmented but comparatively rapid dynamic of its invention, a novel script’s early history, including its propagation and adaptation to spoken language, tended to be defined by “an ultimate homeostasis, where change is much less abrupt with a high degree of conventionalized stability.”Footnote 30 It was in this relatively stable social environment of widespread, consistent practice that writing developed into something coherent enough to become and remain a “system.”
A helpful framework for understanding the trajectory of writing and other human technologies distinguishes between the social phenomena of invention and innovation. Whereas invention describes initial introduction of a new technology, usually by a single individual or small group of collaborators, innovation accounts for the process by which others take up the novelty.Footnote 31 Innovation “allow[s] ventures in early writing to survive when their inventors die and their idiosyncratic experiments run the risk of passing away with them.”Footnote 32 Processes of innovation facilitated regularity in early writing systems by establishing a shared commitment among users to a common mode of graphic information transfer. Since writing is only communicatively useful in the case of mutual legibility, maintaining a script’s coherence requires ongoing exchange about its function and form.Footnote 33
This book focuses on writing’s coalescence and maintenance as a system, rather than its initial creation. Whereas most scholarship on early writing has profiled its invention or introduction, I consider what happens after a nascent repertoire of signs has been systematized into a script, particularly how users maintain it as a tool for reliably, consistently conveying linguistic messages across time and geographic distance. The collective of users who maintain and transmit a mutually legible writing system can be referred to as a “script community.”Footnote 34 A script community is by no means monolithic and may encompass groups that differ in how they produce or use writing, but its members maintain mutual comprehensibility by ensuring baseline regularity and transmission of their writing system through time and space.Footnote 35
Indeed, one could argue, as I do here, that innovation of a writing system is necessarily an ongoing process that continues in some form for as long as the system remains in use. This feature becomes most apparent when a “poorly coalesced script community” leaves its writing system vulnerable to abandonment or dissolution.Footnote 36 On the Indian subcontinent, for instance, variants of the once unitary Brāhmī script gradually developed in different directions starting in the first millennium CE, initially into regional styles and ultimately into several dozen distinct writing systems.Footnote 37 Scribal communities in Greece during the eighth century BCE drew on Phoenician writing to develop distinct local alphabets, some of which persisted alongside each other for centuries.Footnote 38 In ancient Egypt, the hieratic script written in the north (Demotic) diverged so far from its southern variant in the early first millennium BCE that the two “were no longer mutually legible” after just a few centuries.Footnote 39 Nothing inherent to writing as a technology guarantees a given script’s coherence or mutual intelligibility, since it is constantly subject to change through ongoing use.
Communicative Innovation in Early Civilizations
In the four regions of the world where writing arose independently, scribes located the origins of their respective scripts in the sacred realm of the gods and ancestors, not in worldly concerns of administration or trade.Footnote 40 Myths in these cultures about other-than-human creators or propagators accounted for an emic understanding of writing’s creation; they were also narratively convenient, in that they retroactively streamlined and ascribed intentionality to what was most likely an undirected process.Footnote 41 Importantly, too, they attest that early scribal traditions were keenly aware that the complex systems of graphic notation that scholars today call “writing” were bound up in the cultural phenomena now collectively known as “religion.” As a technology, writing crossed the divide between the human and other-than-human realms. Even after a script’s initial creation and coalescence as a system of graphic communication, ritual remained a key context for its use and transmission over many generations.
The cross-cultural comparisons made here and in subsequent chapters are not intended to contest the relevance of political centralization to coalescence of early writing systems. Processes related to the rise of the state were critical to development and transmission of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters, as many experts have argued. Smaller-scale, decentralized political and economic exchanges were important for the history of Maya hieroglyphs, too. Rather, I offer an alternative or corrective to assumptions about early writing with respect to the unparalleled centrality of politics and politics’ presumed distinction from religion. In all four ancient civilizations, religion and ritual were closely embedded in governance; they were also crucial to maintaining coherent writing systems over centuries, well after their initial invention.Footnote 42
Cuneiform in Mesopotamia
Writing in the sense of a systematic, graphic record of linguistic content did not appear in Mesopotamia until around 3300–3200 BCE, as attested by a trove of cuneiform documents recovered from middens and construction fill in the city of Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq.Footnote 43 Almost all of the oldest texts are either records about quantities or transfers of goods, or so-called lexical lists of names, occupations, or other nominal information.Footnote 44 Throughout its long history, cuneiform was an important tool for economic and administrative management. As such, it offers the best case study for the model that historically has exercised the greatest influence on cross-cultural theories of writing’s creation and transmission in conjunction with the state, beginning with Ignace Gelb’s seminal publication.Footnote 45
Yet politics and economics were not divorced from religion or ritual, and the latter contexts shaped cuneiform’s trajectory as well. Early Mesopotamian kingship depended on religion for divine justification of the ruler’s authority; that connection, in turn, obligated the royal family to manage cult infrastructure and perform key rituals for the community.Footnote 46 That religion influenced cuneiform’s development is apparent from many early examples of writing that concern temple provisioning and administration.Footnote 47 By the third millennium BCE, temple complexes were major foci of state-guided investment in architectural construction and craft production, activities which fueled demand for luxury goods such as lapis lazuli, ivory, and gold.Footnote 48 To feed the gods as well as their own personnel, temples required foodstuffs supplied by a combination of their own production and contributions from the state or nearby communities under its purview.Footnote 49 Thousands of terse “economic texts” recovered from Uruk cite gods, their temples, and the priests who administered them, a clear testament that institutions and practitioners that we today would classify as “religious” were implicated in the recorded transactions.Footnote 50 Scholars no longer believe that temples exercised supreme control over the ancient Mesopotamian economy, but there is no doubt that these institutions were critical to coordinating and motivating much of the material exchange that cuneiform texts record.Footnote 51
Cuneiform began to coalesce as a writing system in the late fifth millennium BCE, in tandem with major urbanization and development of complex exchange networks centered at Uruk.Footnote 52 The script’s rapid spread, which occurred alongside dissemination of “material culture of religious practice” such as Uruk-style cylinder seals and beveled-rim ceramic bowls, was fueled by that city’s status as a cultural, economic, and sociopolitical hub during the late fourth millennium BCE.Footnote 53 However, Mesopotamia did not experience large-scale political unification until the rise of the Akkadian empire in the twenty-fourth century BCE.Footnote 54 By then, scribes had adapted cuneiform to record the Akkadian language alongside Sumerian, which survived among elites and administrative officials but was no longer widely spoken among the general population.Footnote 55 Akkadian and cuneiform persisted as the region’s primary language and script, respectively, under the Babylonian empire, which gained control of southern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium BCE,Footnote 56 and under the Assyrian empire, which rose to prominence in northern Mesopotamia in the late second millennium.Footnote 57 Texts on ritual, mythology, divination, and other religious themes account for major portions of the cuneiform corpora produced under Assyrian as well as Babylonian rule. Their contents reflect a mix of cultural knowledge inherited from Sumerian tradition and more recent ideas, including some developed through interaction between the imperial contemporaries.Footnote 58
Cuneiform remained the predominant writing system through the Neo-Assyrian empire’s brief control of southern Mesopotamia in the eighth century BCE, the resurgence of the Neo-Babylonian empire in 626, and the invasion of the Achaemenid empire in 539.Footnote 59 Throughout this era, religious practitioners and spaces played key roles in maintaining the writing system long after it had disappeared from other spheres of social, political, and cultural life.Footnote 60 Through the late first century CE, however, use of the script continued to wither in favor of alphabetic writing.Footnote 61 In a strange twist of fate, the last known cuneiform text, an almanac from 79 or 80 CE, also originates from Uruk, which by that time had come under control of the Parthian Empire.Footnote 62 That cuneiform remained a vibrant, coherent writing system in Mesopotamia over the course of three millennia is a testament to the region’s robust networks of intellectual exchange, which facilitated scribal communication across linguistic communities and a half-dozen changes in imperial regime.Footnote 63
Hieroglyphs in Egypt
Hieroglyphic writing is attested in ancient Egypt no later than 3320–3200 BCE, almost contemporaneously with proto-cuneiform in Uruk.Footnote 64 From the script’s beginnings, hieroglyphs appear in both “cultic” and “administrative-economic” contexts, thwarting any attempt to isolate one sphere as their locus of origin.Footnote 65 Approximately 200 ivory, bone, or stone tags recovered in Tomb U-j at Abydos, which date to the thirty-third or thirty-second century BCE and are the oldest known Egyptian inscriptions, may have held “ceremonial” value in addition to an administrative purpose, given how labor-intensive their production would have been.Footnote 66 Generally, however, the early Egyptian corpus is biased toward funerary contexts, particularly the dry cemeteries of wealthy individuals buried at some remove from the Nile River Delta.Footnote 67 Other texts from this initial stage were likely inked on papyrus, wood, and other perishable artifacts that simply have not survived.Footnote 68
In fact, the Egyptian script’s graphic origins likely lie in the representational culture of early temples, where kings combined ritual performance with visual symbolism to reinforce their connection with the gods.Footnote 69 Chronology suggests that hieroglyphic writing and its cursive form, hieratic, developed during the late fourth and early third millennia BCE in tandem with the political institution of the king and, later, the “pharaonic state.”Footnote 70 Epigraphic and archaeological evidence indicates that the ascendant state and particularly its desire for monumental representation of pharaonic ideology provided “the ultimate stimulus to this surge of creativity” that birthed hieroglyphic writing in Egypt.Footnote 71 This proposal is supported by the funerary context of the earliest texts from Abydos, an early seat of dynastic power, and by the bureaucratic and economic orientation of other texts from the same period.Footnote 72
Writing in ancient Egypt thus crystallized in close articulation with the rise of the state, its administrative concerns, and the centralized governance that the pharaonic order both demanded and supported. At the same time, Egyptian dynastic rule was a religious institution from its beginnings. The king was considered a divine being and “the crucial lynchpin that held together not only Upper and Lower Egypt, but also the disparate worlds of gods and men.”Footnote 73 In conjunction with royal iconography, hieroglyphs offered a medium to graphically link dynasts’ administrative and religious roles; in the words of John Baines, “[r]ule was ritual and representation fused the two in recording them.”Footnote 74 Throughout its history, the script retained ritual connotations and uses that are not easily disentangled from political concerns.Footnote 75
The hieroglyphs were a key medium for recording and transmitting ritual practices and religious ideas through time and space between the living, the dead, and the gods. Religion also shaped written form in pharaonic Egypt, in addition to informing writing’s function. By the start of the Middle Kingdom in the mid-twentieth century BCE, scribes had developed a linear cursive hand that they deployed specifically for texts with religious or magical, including funerary, contents.Footnote 76 According to New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BCE) mythology, language was an important instrument in the creation of the world and its inhabitants, including the gods, who originated from “a speech act, an act of verbal articulation.”Footnote 77 The gods, in turn, created the hieroglyphs based on knowledge “formed in the heart” and “communicated by the tongue.”Footnote 78 Hieroglyphic writing was itself godly speech, not a mere visual representation thereof.Footnote 79
Similarly, hieroglyphic writing was central to managing the burgeoning Egyptian state and the dynasty as a social institution. Inscriptions on seal stamps and pottery indicate that, by the mid-third millennium BCE, the state had established a sophisticated network that administered settlements throughout Upper Egypt via local elites who were guided by, if not subject to, the king.Footnote 80 Writing facilitated not only documentation of economic, political, and religious concern but also more general communication across the social and geographic distances that such organization entailed.Footnote 81 The hieroglyphs additionally supported other forms of visual presentation. From writing’s initial stages, “royal commemorative art” was a principal context of use, where text complemented images with information about kings, the dynastic institution, and their legitimate authority.Footnote 82 Over time, (semi-)public display of hieroglyphs in ideological support of the state recursively strengthened the signs’ conceptual and formal entanglement with pictorial representation that they would retain throughout their history of use, in contrast to hieratic and the later demotic scripts.Footnote 83
Logographs in China
Of the four autochthonous inventions of writing in human history, the Chinese tradition is unique in maintaining an unbroken lineage of script use into the present. Characters directly derived from ancient Chinese writing remain in active use today among more than a billion people in East and Southeast Asia, including readers and writers of Japanese (kanji) and Korean (hanja). Unlike modern descendant scripts that often include purely phonetic elements – including contemporary Chinese characters, which are functionally morphographicFootnote 84 – the earliest writing in China was strictly logographic; that is, each character recorded a phonetic form and a corresponding semantic value, albeit in some cases with support from an accompanying phonetic determinative.Footnote 85
Writing in China was closely associated with ritual practice from its first appearance. Written signs are attested as early as the middle of the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE) on a jade pendant, as well as on a bone fragment dating to the Huanbei period (1350–1250).Footnote 86 The first substantial corpora originate from the Yinxu II period (1200–1050) and include divinatory texts recorded on (primarily bovine) scapulae and turtle plastrons, plus bronze inscriptions with brief accounts of the artifact’s maker or recipient.Footnote 87 The small scale and specialized, ritually oriented contents of early inscriptions indicate that they were intended for a limited, likely elite audience.Footnote 88 Yet the oldest extant oracle bone texts preserve a script that was already “fully developed and versatile,” indicating that writing’s origins were surely earlier and probably rooted in Late Neolithic (3000–2300 BCE) symbolic systems.Footnote 89
The dearth of early Chinese administrative or accounting texts is misleading and likely reflects more preservation bias than historical absence.Footnote 90 As in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, however, there was no clear distinction between religion and governance in ancient China. A viable ritual basis for sustaining political authority is already legible in texts from the Shang dynasty and was further elaborated over time.Footnote 91 Gradual changes in the cultural legitimation of political power are evident in some Shang oracle bone texts that almost invert the dynastic hierarchy by expressing “authorization from above,” in the form of permission from the king for subordinates to execute a particular task, as opposed to writing used to convey information “from the subordinate to the superior.”Footnote 92 Thus, the Shang king negotiated his own place in the hierarchy and justified his authority over the living by interacting with ancestors on behalf of the dynasty and his subjects. At the same time, the script’s role in mediating relations with the ancestors may have encouraged its functional expansion to the realm of “historical writing,” or record-keeping about people and events of the past.Footnote 93
Writing’s legitimating power under the Shang and Zhou (1046–256 BCE) dynasties derived primarily from divinatory engagement with ancestors and other spirits. Zhou kings continued their predecessors’ practice of ancestral worship while expanding the dynastic repertoire to “non-devotional ritual” that more explicitly invoked the state’s authority over the contemporary population.Footnote 94 Beginning in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), the Chinese state coopted writing for a burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus by channeling its communicative authority toward population administration.Footnote 95 As a result, during the late first millennium BCE, writing essentially “bureaucratized … communication between the living and the spirits” by integrating into dynastic administration the dual forms of “reporting in writing” to both superiors and subordinates.Footnote 96
Political hierarchy during the Shang and Zhou dynasties centered on kin-based relations that transcended the mortal and spiritual realms; from the Warring States period onward, however, political status was calibrated according to “claims of expertise” about the natural and political world.Footnote 97 In the new office- or rank-based hierarchy, a king’s authority derived from his capacity to order the natural world, rather than from the privilege of communing with the ancestors and maintaining the spiritual order – a conceptual shift fueled by “the power of writing to generate parallel realms that provided a model for human affairs.”Footnote 98 Over one thousand years after writing first appeared in ancient China, though, religious concerns remained crucial to governance and vice versa. Through the Warring States period into the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) and beyond, writing continued to flourish and evolve in its role as a medium for communication among people, gods, and ancestors.
Writing in Mesoamerica
Classic Maya hieroglyphs were the most complex and versatile system of graphic notation developed in the Americas. Yet the writing system was neither the first nor the only one innovated in Mesoamerica. All of the more than one dozen writing systems native to the region were closely tied to imagery and most likely developed from or at least in tandem with iconographic canons.Footnote 99 Unfortunately, all scripts that predated or were contemporaneous with Maya hieroglyphs remain undeciphered due to a combination of a paucity of known texts, limited sign inventories, and uncertainty about the local population’s linguistic identity.Footnote 100 Nonetheless, the diversity of systems of graphic notation that developed among multiple, linguistically diverse civilizations clearly attests to the cultural and technological value that Indigenous Mesoamericans ascribed to writing. Furthermore, the form, graphic contents, and archaeological context of Mesoamerican inscriptions suggest that many characteristics of Maya writing – including the prominence of calendrics, intimate ties to imagery, and integration into elite ritual practice and divine kinship – were inherited or adopted from other regional traditions.
Although the identity of some early scripts is unclear, scholars of ancient Mesoamerica generally recognize Cotzumalhuapan, Epiclassic, Gulf (El Tajín), Isthmian, Izapan, Maya, Mixtec, Mixteca-Puebla, Nahuatl (Aztec), Ñuiñe, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Zapotec as distinct writing systems that were autochthonous to the region.Footnote 101 First evidence of writing appears by the tenth century BCE in association with the Olmec civilization, which inhabited areas along the Gulf Coast in the present-day Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz.Footnote 102 Historical linguistic research indicates that the Olmec likely spoke an ancestral Mixe-Zoquean language, but their undeciphered inscriptions cannot offer any confirmation of this proposal.Footnote 103 The signs carved into an unprovenanced Preclassic artifact known as the Cascajal block, which was recovered during construction work in the Mexican state of Veracruz and made known to archaeologists in 1999, may represent either the Olmec script known from other artifacts or another, related writing system.Footnote 104
The so-called Isthmian or “Epi-Olmec” script developed out of the Olmec tradition and generated a small corpus of texts on artifacts that date between 36 BCE and the early to mid-first millennium CE.Footnote 105 Of all writing systems native to Mesoamerica, Isthmian is most clearly related to Classic Maya hieroglyphs. It was also used contemporaneously with early Maya writing, albeit for a much shorter time span and in a more restricted geographic region. Like other Mesoamerican writing systems, the Maya and Isthmian scripts use a combination of dots and rectangular bars to represent numerals, with each dot representing one and each bar equaling five.Footnote 106 They also share a practice of recording place notational Long Count dates and arranging texts in double-column format, features that distinguish both traditions from other Mesoamerican writing systems.Footnote 107 Still, many details of the Isthmian script’s history remain unknown, including the language that it encoded.Footnote 108
Izapa and Cotzumalhuapa on the Pacific piedmont of modern-day Chiapas and Guatemala, respectively, also hosted undeciphered scripts with clear ties to Classic Maya hieroglyphs, although their textual corpora and sign inventories are even more restricted than those of Isthmian.Footnote 109 Other writing systems that emerged from the Olmec tradition, in contrast, seem to have developed on a trajectory separate from Isthmian and Maya hieroglyphic writing.Footnote 110 Perhaps the most robustly attested is the Zapotec writing system, which originated in what is now the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Its history stretches from the fifth century BCE into the ninth century CE, although most extant inscriptions date no later than the sixth century.Footnote 111 The extant corpus is comparatively large, yet the texts are short and collectively feature only a few hundred signs.Footnote 112 However, the Zapotec script provided the basis for a semasiographic system later used in the nearby Mixteca lowlands and highlands.Footnote 113 The several hundred surviving texts from the Mixtec tradition are diverse in form and content and span over one-and-a-half millennia, from approximately the first century CE and through several generations of Spanish colonialism.Footnote 114
The Zapotec script also bears some resemblance to the writing system used in the great central Mexican urban center of Teotihuacan between roughly 100–600 CE, although it is unclear whether these similarities resulted from contact or descent from a common ancestral tradition.Footnote 115 The script at Teotihuacan is the latest addition to the Mesoamerican roster of native writing systems, as its glottographic nature has only been recently recognized.Footnote 116 There is no local evidence for precursor notational systems, and the local population’s linguistic affiliation remains uncertain.Footnote 117 Teotihuacan’s status as a major metropolis also meant that its residents were exposed to and may have even produced texts in other contemporaneous writing systems, including Maya hieroglyphs, example of which have been found in the apartment complex of Tetitla.Footnote 118
The Teotihuacan system is clearly a forebearer of the hieroglyphs used in central Mexico under the Aztec empire (1428–1521 CE), which persisted for several generations following European contact.Footnote 119 The Aztec hieroglyphs were also the most probable source for the writing system used among the Postclassic (925–1517) Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and other Maya groups in the western coast and highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, all of whom had close ties to central Mexico.Footnote 120 In contrast, the short, largely undeciphered texts of Preclassic Kaminaljuyu’, in what is now Guatemala City, and Tak’alik Ab’aj on Guatemala’s Pacific coast may represent early iterations of the same notational tradition to which later Classic Maya writing and iconography belonged, or one or more related but distinct script tradition(s).Footnote 121 In any case, the Maya highlands went epigraphically silent during the Classic period. When writing was reintroduced there during the Postclassic period, it seems to have taken the form of a central Mexican-derived system.Footnote 122 The limited examples of Classic Maya hieroglyphs in the region, in contrast, originate from the eastern and northern areas abutting the central and southern lowlands.Footnote 123
Classic Maya Hieroglyphs
The lowlands of what are now southern Mexico and northern Central America were the heartland of Maya hieroglyphic production throughout the script’s long history. The earliest known texts date to the Late Preclassic period (400 BCE–200 CE) and seem to have been concentrated in the central lowlands, although many examples are unprovenanced.Footnote 124 These early inscriptions are few and far between, and many are short or all but unreadable. But they clearly document an already well-developed writing system. As such, the hieroglyphs most likely developed even earlier and emerged from other Mesoamerican traditions with which Maya hieroglyphs demonstrate graphic and structural affinities, especially Isthmian writing.Footnote 125
Although a sizable corpus of texts survives from the Early Classic period (250–600 CE), the clear majority of surviving Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions date to the Late Classic (600–820) period and were produced in the central and southern lowlands.Footnote 126 The Terminal Classic era (820–925) saw a significant reduction in production of monumental hieroglyphs in both quantity and distribution, after which the script’s sphere of active use became largely restricted to the northern Yucatan Peninsula, which remained the epicenter of hieroglyphic production through the Postclassic period.Footnote 127 With the imposition of Spanish colonialism beginning in the sixteenth century, use of Maya writing declined rapidly before ceasing in most places. There are no surviving colonial-era hieroglyphic codices from the Yucatan, and persistence of scribal activity during that period is known mostly from secondary traces.Footnote 128 The last vestiges of hieroglyphic writing dissipated by the late seventeenth century.Footnote 129 Now, however, the previously defunct writing system is being revitalized among Indigenous stakeholders in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras as a marker of Pan-Maya ethnolinguistic and cultural identity.Footnote 130
Typologically, the Maya hieroglyphic script is distinct from other Mesoamerican writing systems by virtue of its robust capacity for phonetic representation. Excepting a few signs that may be considered semantic determinatives or classifiers,Footnote 131 all known hieroglyphs can be classified as either logographs, which denote associated phonetic and semantic values, or syllables representing a consonant-vowel sequence with no associated meaning. A minority of hieroglyphs are polyvalent and may fulfill either a logographic or a syllabic function, depending on context.Footnote 132 Although logographs convey much of the lexical meaning, syllabic signs are crucial to the writing system’s function because they represent personal pronouns, verbal endings, prepositions, and other morphosyntactic elements whose abstract, context-dependent meaning would be very difficult to communicate logographically. They also complement logographic readings to provide phonetic hints about the latter’s pronunciation.Footnote 133
The logo-syllabic writing system is fully equipped to express spoken language. The primary one associated with the script, which epigraphers today commonly refer to as Classic Mayan, likely represents a long-extinct member of the Ch’olti’an subgroup of Mayan languages.Footnote 134 Nonetheless, hieroglyphic texts from across the region and especially from outside the central lowlands bear traces of dialectal variation, hinting at the diglossic context in which many writers were operating.Footnote 135 Features from vernacular Mayan languages that appear in some hieroglyphic inscriptions include substitution of the prepositional forms ti and ta,Footnote 136 alternation between velar and glottal spirants,Footnote 137 verbal morphology typical of non-Ch’olti’an languages,Footnote 138 and inconsistent use of vowel disharmonic versus harmonic spellings.Footnote 139 Nonetheless, as an elite lingua franca, Classic Mayan predominated as the language written throughout the hieroglyphs’ attested history, even in areas where most of the population was almost surely speaking another, not necessarily mutually intelligible Mayan language.Footnote 140
Sourcing Classic Maya Hieroglyphs
Classic Maya elites lived in scores of distinct communities distributed across the lowlands, and they participated in a shared regional tradition of writing and ritual in different ways and for a variety of purposes. Understanding the co-practice and circulation of hieroglyphic writing and ritual offers insight into interactions between groups that participated in a shared culture even as they may have found themselves at odds in political contexts. At the same time, knowledge and physical behaviors entailed in practicing ritual or writing hieroglyphs disappear with their practitioners. Thus, archaeologists must rely on their material traces to draw conclusions about what happened and what it meant. In the case of writing, close analysis of graphic form presents a window into how scribes learned and practiced their craft. Likewise, to study ritual in the distant past, scholars rely on images and texts that record relevant concepts, figures, or events, as well as material evidence that ritual performance may have left behind.
The material evidence mustered over the following chapters to illustrate religion’s role in writing’s development is as diverse, perhaps even eclectic, as Classic Maya rituals themselves. This breadth is a necessary response to the challenges of studying the hieroglyphic script’s history. The Classic Maya corpus is exponentially smaller than the surviving bodies of writing for ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China. Current estimates posit approximately 12,000 known Classic Maya texts containing some 1,000 distinct graphs, of which 30 percent remain phonetically or semantically undeciphered.Footnote 141 For ancient Egypt, in contrast, more than 10,000 inscriptions have been documented just in the temples at Karnak.Footnote 142 Approximate cuneiform text counts solely from the Ur III period (2112–2004 BCE) exceed more than five- to sevenfold the total number of extant Classic Maya inscriptions.Footnote 143 By the mid-twentieth century, the Mesopotamian cuneiform corpus was estimated at over a half-million texts,Footnote 144 and oracle bones alone already account for well over 100,000 of the extant inscriptions from ancient China.Footnote 145
We will never know to what degree, if at all, the Maya corpus’ exponentially smaller size reflects a fundamentally lower volume of text production compared to the other three world regions. Ongoing archaeological excavations across the lowlands continue to uncover additional inscriptions that may contribute to future advances in hieroglyphic decipherment. Several factors have conspired to limit the quantity of extant texts available to us today, however. The first concerns population size and density. Compared to ancient China in particular, the Classic Maya pool of potential text producers and users was much smaller. Current estimates for the Maya lowlands, an area of some 95,000 km2, posit a population of 9.5–16 million during the Late Classic period, when settlement density peaked at up to 180–305 persons per km2.Footnote 146 The Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–221 BCE), in contrast, administered a territory about twice that size, where the early eighth-century population of 10–15 million is thought to have swelled by the late third century to 30–40 million.Footnote 147
Differences in geographic extent are less pronounced for the other two regions, where settlement concentrated along major rivers flowing through otherwise arid land. An area of 12,000 km2 in southern Mesopotamia is believed to have hosted 5.4–18 people per km2, and the northern region may have had a similar total population packed into a smaller area (29–60 persons/km2).Footnote 148 Nonetheless, the geographic distribution of cuneiform extends far beyond the Tigris-Euphrates river system, and major centers of text production outside that region included Ḫattuša and Kaneš (Kültepe) in central Anatolia and Pārsa (Persepolis) in southern Iran.Footnote 149 A total population of 1–3 million has been estimated over 18,000 km2 of arable land in Old Kingdom Egypt, in turn, with an average density of 93–165 people per km2.Footnote 150
More decisive than population counts are differences in material and environment. The drier conditions of China and especially Egypt have been more conducive to preservation of writing on fragile material surfaces such as bamboo, silk, or papyrus. The same may be said of Mesopotamia, although widespread use of clay as a writing surface was probably more critical for preservation there than the arid environment. In the subtropical Maya lowlands, in contrast, humidity and seasonal rains – not to mention periodic hurricanes and other violent storms – have destroyed almost all perishable text carriers.Footnote 151 Environmental and climatic conditions favor stone and other more durable media, which tend to record political histories and information about the artifacts’ owner and usage.Footnote 152 Other genres that may have been commonly recorded on barkpaper, palm leaves, and other perishable surfaces are essentially unrepresented in the extant corpus.Footnote 153 Unfortunately, the Classic Maya almost never composed hieroglyphs on pottery sherds or stone flakes, unlike ancient Egyptians, who produced thousands of inscribed ostraca.
The third factor underlying the relatively limited number of Classic Maya texts boils down to basic chronology. First human presence in Mesoamerica has been dated to at least 11,000 years ago,Footnote 154 roughly coeval with the earliest evidence for plant and animal domestication in the Near East.Footnote 155 Consequently, the timeline of early writing in Mesoamerica is delayed by several centuries compared to ancient China and more than two millennia relative to Mesopotamia and Egypt. The three latter traditions had, simply put, more time – at the beginning, but also at the end. The decline of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphic writing in Egypt, in each case following more than three millennia of use, was gradual and, although influenced by pressure from groups with other scripts, was not coerced.Footnote 156 Maya hieroglyphs, in contrast, were abandoned rapidly under colonial duress.Footnote 157 Untold scores of hieroglyphic documents were destroyed beginning in the early sixteenth century, and generations of Catholic missionaries systematically suppressed Maya writing as a vestige of precontact paganism.Footnote 158
Despite these challenges, however, Classic Maya writing offers a superlative case for studying the co-transmission of ritual and scribal practice in archaeological context. The hieroglyphic script is one of the best-documented forms of cultural knowledge from ancient Mesoamerica. Many inscriptions contain precise internal dates down to the year or even the day, permitting detailed analysis of chronological change. Most text-bearing objects can be associated with a specific site of origin based on archaeological or epigraphic data, which allows us to situate their hieroglyphic contents within local contexts of production and use.Footnote 159 Finally, considering the modest size of hieroglyphic corpus, surviving texts represent a relatively diverse range of media, from limestone and stucco to bone, jade, and wood. The material variation attests to a breadth of intended audiences and to the diverse settings in which the Classic Maya engaged with writing.
Model, Patron, Practice: Classic Maya Scribes
Before introducing the text artifacts that they used or produced, the practitioners of Classic Maya writing deserve closer examination. In general terms, scribes belonged to a vaguely defined elite that enjoyed social and material priority over most members of society.Footnote 160 The best evidence for historical scribes comes in the form of signatures that they left behind in a small minority of inscriptions.Footnote 161 Otherwise, the Classic Maya hieroglyphic corpus lacks explicit sources about scribal knowledge or practice, in contrast to the other three world regions where writing was invented. In ancient Mesopotamia, scholars have identified a relative wealth of surviving texts from or about school and scholarly contexts.Footnote 162 Pharaonic Egypt offers rich sources on education for scribes, including extensive samples of the knowledge that they acquired in subjects such as mathematics and medicine.Footnote 163 China in particular stands out cross-culturally for its robust body of scribal metadiscourse that stretches back to the early first century CE and includes generations of commentary on written form and content alike.Footnote 164
If there ever existed Classic Maya records of the kind available to scholars of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China about how and with whom writing was learned and practiced, they have not survived the ravages of environment, human activity, and time. We know relatively little about scribes’ social identities or roles, and what we do know has to be inferred from meticulous examination of the limited available data and judicious anthropological comparison.Footnote 165 Consequently, any study of scribes must focus on more indirect evidence, including that gleaned from the hieroglyphs that they produced. The following chapters do not reveal any new sources; instead, they explore known sources in novel ways. In other words, I address many of the same inscriptions that have supported previous epigraphic studies of Classic Maya civilization. Instead of key actors or events in politics and social history, though, I focus on what people are said to have done, with whom or what and where, and the hieroglyphic forms in which this information is recorded. The ritual events, practitioners, and paraphernalia documented in thousands of Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions are largely known to specialists, but there have been few prior attempts to connect these insights in any systematic way to the graphic forms that recorded them.Footnote 166
Classic Maya scribes, the subject of Chapter 3, embodied the connection between writing and ritual by virtue of their craft, which was an invention of the gods. A singular representative of this role was the divine patron of the hieroglyphs, a monkey scribe who embodied a model for hieroglyphic practice derived from the script’s primordial origins.Footnote 167 The supernatural simian offers a glimpse of the intrinsic connection between writing and religion, a link that was deeply embedded in practice and mythology alike. The monkey scribe and his other-than-human peers were creators whose rarified knowledge extended beyond graphic form and language to include divinatory, astronomical, and other information recorded with their script. Scribal practice entailed engaging not only with these divine role models but with the knowledge encoded in the hieroglyphs that they had created.
As human custodians of the script, Classic Maya scribes were set apart from those members of society who were unable to access or understand the sacred inscriptions. At the same time, their contingent social position required cultivating and maintaining relations with the gods and ancestors. Portraits of their other-than-human counterparts, as well as the ritualized components of writing practice, were a constant reminder to human scribes of the hieroglyphs’ ultimate source and the wisdom that their texts recorded.
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