MAYAN glyphs and their meaning

Mayan glyphs were the writing system which had the Mayan culture and which are divided into three different types. In a Teacher we tell you.

In the mesoamerican cultures the use of glyphs to represent various elements of the world was common, being something that for the Europeans it may seem strange to us, but in cultures like the Maya or the Aztec it was something usual. For this reason, and to better understand these symbols, in this lesson by a Teacher we must talk about the symbols of one of the main Mesoamerican peoples, talking about the mayan glyphs and their meaning.

Index

1. What is a Mayan glyph and what is it for?
2. The emblem glyphs, one of the types of Mayan glyphs
3. What do the Mayan glyphs mean?

The Mayan script was a writing system used by the Mayan people. from the Mesoamerica region. Mayan writing was made up of a series of elements known as glyphs, which the European conquerors called hieroglyphics for its resemblance to the writing system of the Egyptians.

The importance of the Maya glyphs lies especially in the fact that it is the Mesoamerican writing system that has been best and most deciphered. In part, it is because we have a greater number of sources that tell us about this type of writing, serving to be able to analyze and decipher a large part of the symbols.

the glyphs They were painted on ceramics, codices or walls, carved in stone or wood. It is thought that the glyphs were painted, although most of them no longer have these remains due to the passage of time. The Mayan glyphs need a lot of space, since they were very large and several had to go together to form a word or even a complete sentence.

As for how they were used, the glyphs could represent words or syllables, and they could even have more than one use. The glyphs were placed in columns and rows, and their position could cause their meaning to change, with where the griffon being placed being important in understanding its meaning.

In this other lesson we discover the mayan numbering system.

Within the Mayan glyphs, those known as emblem glyphs stand out, which were a kind of title or symbol to designate the nobility. These glyphs were formed by the word ahaw(Sir in the Mayan language) and a place name used to refer to which area the nobleman was from. The idea was to relate the rulers of an area to this one, since during that time families ruled a region for generations.

These glyphs seem to be used to mark nobility and their titles, being for this reason that they appear in places such as tombs or palaces, where they were placed to pay tribute to the great rulers of the regions. The problem with this class of glyphs is that we do not have the names of many of the nobles of the time. Maya, so it is difficult to relate the glyphs to the nobility that existed in Mayan territory during the epoch.

The use of emblem glyphs is an exceptional case, since while the rest of the glyphs only represent words, syllables, or in some cases specific elements of nature, these were used to represent persons or titles, giving a new dimension to the Mayan glyphs.

Some experts consider that these Mayan glyphs They are also used to represent places, since the place name could serve to represent the place where the glyph is located, and many the glyph appears on numerous buildings in the same place.

Even so, the emblem glyphs are always accompanied by the word ahaw, seems to show that they refer to lords and not to places.

In this other lesson we will discover the Main contributions of the Maya as, for example, the Mayan calendar.

To continue this lesson from a Teacher we must talk about the Mayan glyphs and their meaning, in order to differentiate some types of Mayan glyphs, and the meaning they had to represent certain elements or words. For this we must talk about the classes of glyphs, and after that explain how each of them works to form words.

The first thing we must understand to understand the meaning of the Mayan glyphs is that they can be differentiated in 3 classes mostly:

• the glyphs phonetics. The phonetics They are that represent sounds, that is to say, that they are something similar to the phonemes that we currently use, being close to the letters or syllables. Phonetic glyphs were used primarily to transcribe proper names or foreign words, and could even currently be used to translate words from other languages ​​into the Mayan language. We can say that this class of glyphs are the most important of the two classes, since they are the ones that allow us to understand the pronunciation of the Mayan language.
• the glyphs logographic. On the other hand are the glyphs logographic, which we can see comes from the word logo, since they are similar to these. The logographic glyphs are abstract symbols that represent general concepts such as nature or rivers, people or complete words. These glyphs were sometimes accompanied by other visual elements, as they helped to compare the glyphs with what they represented. This class of glyphs are the most commonly represented, since they serve to refer to certain elements, without the need to use the complex word formulation of the glyphs phonetics.
• the glyphs emblem. As for the emblem glyphs Commented before, we could say that this class of glyphs is from the logographic class, since a single glyph is capable of representing a place or a person. The main difference is that the emblem glyphs would represent just one specific person while the logográficos can refer to a place or a class of person.

If you want to read more articles similar to Mayan glyphs and their meaning, we recommend that you enter our category of History.

• Berlin, H. (1958). The "emblem" glyph in Maya inscriptions. Journal of the Society of Americanists, 47, 111-119.
• Barrois, R., & Garcia, H. (2011). The Glyph-Emblem, a Mayan dynastic glyph. In Paper presented at the 24th Symposium of Archaeological Research in Guatemala (pp. 939-956).
• Kelly, D. h. (1962). Phonetics in Mayan writing. Mayan culture studies, 2.