Going Mayan

Me trying out different inks with the sketches.

Will and I are in the same group for the Rosetta Project so he made a wonderful post about the process of creating our rosetta thing.  He pretty much summed up that whole process so I won't add much to what he said.  I instead wanted to blog a little about the process of coming up with the writing that we were going to use.

Because this project is pretty time consuming, our group mostly split up into smaller specialty groups to get it done and so that we wouldn't be spending way too much time to finish the project.  So I pretty much ended up as the Mayan language expert.  The mayan language can be pretty daunting.  Various dialects of Mayan are spoken today, but none quite like the ancient language.  Modern Mayan is also written in regular Roman lettering like English, so trying to crack the code of Mayan glyphs was a pretty daunting task.

Some restored carvings in the Captive's Court

The ancient mayan language has actually still not been completely deciphered, although much of it has.  So I decided I had to search the internet for good sources on how to write something in Mayan.  I first thought it would be easy to take some glyphs off of the photos I took when I visited Palenque in Mexico, but soon realized that it was hard to see the glyphs on camera and, like I said earlier, the language hasn't been 100% decoded so it was hard to find out what those stele were actually saying.  Finally I decided I would have to compose my own phrase from the known portion of the language and glyphs.  I found an AWESOME booklet on the internet about learning to write Mayan and mostly used it to compose a coherent and traditional type of phrase. (Awesome booklet Part 1,  Part 2 )

A picture of the palace from my trip to Palenque.

Using this book I learned all about the way mayan syllabograms (syllables) and logograms (words) are put together to form a word or phrase in each square.  We decided to use a simple phrase that introduced a person, just as many of the stone carvings did: introducing kings or queens and their genealogy, profession, birthplace or accomplishments.

This picture was probably taken within
seconds of the previous one, it just includes
my face.

I won't give away anything else about what it is that I wrote, but through the process of learning a little bit about the ancient Mayan language I realized how complex writing really is.  It isn't something that is learned in a day.  None of us learned that fast to write even our own language.  It as a complex process of crazy syntax, complicated combinations of symbols, an especially with the Mayan language, a difficult artistic process.  I learned that communicating is much more than just getting the point across, there are layers of connotation, denotation, and aesthetics that are also involved.


I was also participated in transferring my sketches from paper through to our final product.  Will talked a lot about that process, but I just want to say: kudos to the ancient Mayan scribes because it's hard enough just drawing their symbols with a pencil - I can hardly imagine carving them into stone.  Woh.