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4 results

  • 10 - Writing and record-keeping in early cities

  • from Part II - Early cities and information technologies
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 207-226

  • Summary

    Classic Maya cities were dynamic places constructed throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent zones during much of the first millennium CE. This chapter examines how Maya cities were understood, used, and altered. Other named features of urban landscapes include pyramids and altars, neither, unfortunately, with fully accepted readings of their glyphic references. Other buildings in the Maya texts correspond to stairways, known as ehb, and ballcourts recorded by glyphs that are not yet deciphered. A notable attribute of later Maya ideas about appropriate or correct behavior is that it conforms to movement and handed-ness. Right and straight correspond closely to concepts of truth, virtue, cleansing, even prophecy. A final, remaining theme is that Maya cities accord with general concepts of landscape features yet also remain a malleable work-in-progress. The view of any such city today would contain a certain arrangement of buildings and spaces in urban armatures.

  • 8 - Reading early Maya cities: interpreting the role of writing in urbanization

  • from Part II - Early cities and information technologies
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 158-180

  • Summary

    Ancient Maya cities have attracted the scholarly gaze of Westerners since at least the latter part of the eighteenth century. Maya hieroglyphic writing, a complex system that combines logographic and phonetic signs to encode the complexity of language, has only recently been deciphered to the degree that it can be read with confidence. This chapter presents a report about ancient Maya writing, that discusses questions about the nature of ancient cities and writing in general. It also discusses the nature of texts in their social contexts, survey the earliest texts in the Maya Lowlands, and consider what these texts suggest about the relationship between the development of writing. The chapter focuses on the rapid rise of densely populated urban centers in the Lowland Maya Preclassic. Early Maya cities provide an interesting case study in the relationship of writing to processes of urbanization.

  • AREAL SHIFTS IN CLASSIC MAYAN PHONOLOGY

  • Danny Law, John Robertson, Stephen Houston, Marc Zender, David Stuart
  • Journal:
    Ancient Mesoamerica / Volume 25 / Issue 2 / Fall 2014
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 January 2015, pp. 357-366
    Print publication:
    Fall 2014

  • Advances in hieroglyphic decipherment and in language contact typology provide new data and theories with which to investigate and reassess prior interpretations of Mayan linguistic history. The present study considers the shift from proto-Mayan *k and *k' to /ch/ and /ch'/, a sound change that affected several Mayan languages in different phonological contexts. This sound change, with a very particular set of conditions, has been highlighted as a defining feature of the Cholan-Tseltalan branch of the Mayan language family. New evidence suggests that this sound change was shared as a result of contact around the time of the Classic period, rather than reflecting an inherited sound change that would have taken place at a much earlier stage of the language family. Hieroglyphic data provide further evidence that this sound change was adopted in the hieroglyphic language in a word-by-word fashion, rather than applying to all similar phonological contexts at the same time.