Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered.

In about 1566, the first bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, compiled a key to the Mayan syllabary consisting of 27 Spanish letters and the Mayan glyphs with similar sounds. This became known as the Landa Alphabet and helped with the decipherment of the script, even though it was based on the false premise that the script was alphabetic.

Mayan hieroglyphic writing, system of writing used by the Maya people of Mesoamerica until about the end of the 17th century, 200 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. (With the 21st-century discovery of the Mayan site of San Bartolo in Guatemala came evidence of Mayan writing that pushed back its date of origin to at least 300 or 200 bc .)

There are over a thousand Maya glyphs known from carved stones, painted murals and ceramics. Most of them are logograms; the rest are phonetic signs. This article will show you how to read Maya hieroglyphs.

2014年2月12日 · The Maya hieroglyphic writing system was a sophisticated combination of pictographs directly representing objects and ideograms (glyphs) expressing more abstract concepts such as actions, ideas and...

Words in the ancient Maya script are composed of several signs associated together. The pictorial nature of the Maya writing system though, makes it harder to grasp than our alphabetic system. A group of signs that form a word is called a “glyph block”.

2025年4月4日 · The four extant Maya codices—the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, the Dresden Codex, and the Grolier Codex—none dating earlier than 1100, contain a strong phonetic component, in fact a kind of syllabary, which can be successfully read as Yucatec Maya, but the Classic peoples of the Central Subregion more likely spoke an ancestor of the Cholan ...

The Maya time-keeping involved several interlocking cycles, some of which tracked astronomical events while others seemingly followed abstract time intervals. Similar to other Mesoamerican cultures, the Maya employed a 365-day solar calendar (jaab') and a 260-day ritual cycle (tzolk'in).

To those familiar with the deci­pherment of Egyptian hiero­glyphs and Babylonian or As­syrian cuneiform, the lack of progress in the reading of Maya hieroglyphs must seem strange. The language has not died out: it is still the native tongue of more than a million people in Mexico and Central America.

Modern scholars are in agreement that the Mayan glyphs are one of only three writing systems in the ancient world -- the other two being Sumerian cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia and Chinese -- to be invented separately. All others were most likely modeled after or …