Maya Hieroglyphs Decoded

Forget everything you thought you knew about the ancient Maya. Cracking their mysterious hieroglyphs didn't just reveal boring calendars, it exposed a cutthroat, Game of Thrones-style world of rival superpowers, Tikal and Calakmul. Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor David Stuart to uncover tales of powerful female warlords, dark pilgrimages to the underworld, and the secret jungle "whiteboard" of an ancient mathematician. MORE The Maya Collapse Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-maya-collapse/id1520403988?i=1000663446064 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/56rb6VA4Ey9bMX9CrhCfRR The Olmec: Mother of Mesoamerican Civilisations Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-olmec-mother-of-mesoamerican-civilisations/id1520403988?i=1000719796223 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6TX2CjZw3sq6Xcdal9gr2l Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with a whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 1:44Tristan Hughes?

  Cunyiform, Linear B, hieroglyphs. Mysterious ancient scripts that, when finally deciphered, revealed exciting new worlds. The cracking of hieroglyphs unlocked the world of ancient Egypt. Cunyiform, the world of Mesopotamia. Linear B, Bronze Age Greece. And across the Atlantic in Central America, archaeologists have had another ancient code to crack. We know them as Maya hieroglyphs. Today, these beautiful symbols have started to reveal so much about the complex world of the ancient Maya, about their cities, their politics, their beliefs, their conflicts, their leaders.

• 2:29Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is your guide to Maya hieroglyphs and the world, the stories they are revealing. Our guest is Dr. David Stewart, Professor of Mesoamerican Art, Archaeology and Apigraphy at the University of Texas.

• 2:52Tristan Hughes?

  David, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

• 2:55Speaker 06

  It's great to be here.

• 2:56Tristan Hughes?

  And to talk about Maya hieroglyphs. And I mean, reading up on your work just before this, to hear how the deciphering of this script, it's opening up this world of the ancient Maya, learning so much more about them and how they lived.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  It's opening up a whole world. I mean, imagine studying ancient Egypt at a time when one couldn't read the hieroglyphic writing, and then you could read the hieroglyphic writing. I think we've, we've gone through a transition in our field, in Maya studies like that, over the past 40, 50 years, something like that. And the decipherment really, really happened, I think, in the eighties and nineties. And we're still catching up to everything we can study, and there's still so much.

• 3:40Tristan Hughes?

  And is this quite interesting? Because yes, you mentioned the deciphering of hieroglyphs, and people will think Rosetta Stone and Champollion, and like, I've got it, like kind of the eureka moment. But as we're going to find in this chat, is the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs, is it much more than just kind of one moment? Is it a much more prolonged process?

• 3:58Speaker 06

  It's absolutely more than one moment. It's been many people over, I would say, the past 100 years. Small incremental breakthroughs, you might say, you know, a sign here, a sign there. You know, Maya hieroglyphs were words or phrases deciphered almost 100 years ago. Actual signs were deciphered back in the 19th century. Just a small, small, small percentage of what's out there. And then there was more progress, a better understanding of how the script actually worked. That was the real work that so many people were doing was just to try to figure out how the system worked.

• 4:38Speaker 06

  And even though a few signs could be read, the general system was really hard to fathom until I would say the 1980s. And that's when we really were able to first get it and see how it worked as a system.

• 4:54Tristan Hughes?

  And David, for you, reading about your story and your links to Maya archaeology, you mentioned at the 1980s and the 1970s, because this is something that has fascinated you since you were a child. You've been visiting sites with Maya hieroglyphs, you know, since you were yay high.

• 5:10Speaker 06

  That's right. I mean, I was very, very fortunate in the fact that my mother and father were both archaeologists. They met on a dig, in fact, back in the 1950s. A great family story there. My father was running a archaeological project in Mexico, you know, when I was about eight, nine, 10 years old. But I was in the field with them. And I remember vividly the discovery of, well, first of all, it was at a site called Colbah in Yucatan, and it has some of the most massive pyramids, you know, in the jungle. This was a very remote place back then. And I remember walking around, looking at these pyramids and wondering about them very innocently, very naively as a kid.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  And the discovery of monuments with writing on them. And my father becoming very excited, and he would drop everything and go draw them and photograph them. And I would look over his shoulder and ask him, what do these things say? What are these odd looking carvings, these squiggles on the rocks? And I remember my dad saying, oh, you know, we can't read these. No one can read these. Maybe a date, you know, back then, the only thing that anyone could read were the dates on the monuments, right? And then this created this kind of vision of the Maya being only interested in time, which is not true.

• 6:32Tristan Hughes?

  The Maya calendar and stuff like that, I'm guessing.

• 6:34Speaker 06

  Right, right. Exactly. That was understood a long time ago. I don't know, something stuck with me when my dad said, no one can read these. It's not like I had any ambitions, but I was just curious. And so, and I was also bored. In the middle of the jungle, as my dad was working, I had little to do. I would sit there and read some of the technical books he had on the Maya. And I would look at the drawings of the hieroglyphs and just wonder, what in the world are these things? They're beautiful to look at. This is something that maybe some of the listeners have seen Maya hieroglyphs visiting sites or in publications, but they're gorgeous and they're curious looking. They're odd looking things.

• 7:11Tristan Hughes?

  Well, David, that's exactly what I was going to ask next. I mean, if someone mentions hieroglyphs, a lot of us will be thinking of the pictograms that you can see in ancient Egypt, or maybe even very early Cunyiform as well, where they got like depictions of the vases and so on. When talking about Maya hieroglyphs, what do they look like? What types of images should we be imagining?

• 7:31Speaker 06

  Well, when one looks at a Maya text, whether it's painted on a ceramic vessel or whether it's carved in stone, what you're looking at is a bit like a grid. You're looking at a complicated array of roughly square or rectangular shaped things that are all clustered together. And within each one of those squares is an assemblage of what we call signs. You know, each sign is very complex visually. And so, when you stand back and look at a Maya text, it's overwhelming in terms of its visual richness. It's not immediately clear that you're looking at images of things that are recognizable, although people usually can pick out, oh, you know, there's a human hand over there and there's a animal head over there.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  A lot of the signs look really abstract. And unlike Egyptian, let's say, you know, you look at an Egyptian text and, you know, it's fairly easy to recognize an owl, a kneeling person or something like that. I think in Egyptian writing, there was a conservatism about the system over such a long period of time. With the Maya, you see a lot of variation. You see scribes, individual scribes deciding, oh, I'm going to be creative and I'm going to use this particular form of this sign here, writing a king's name, let's say. I know of inscriptions where a king's name will pop up several times, as you might expect.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  But each time it looks different because the scribe is being playful. And there's a certain amount of artistry and playfulness baked into the system that I don't think exists in a lot of other writing systems.

• 9:11Tristan Hughes?

  Did this also become a lingua franca for the ancient Maya? Because when I think of the ancient Maya, David, I think of all these different cities, Kalakmal or Karakol or Chichen Itza, Palenque, Tikal, Copan and so on, you know, spread over a huge area in Mesoamerica, divided, as we probably will explore with their dynasties and their particular cultures. But did they all speak the same language? Did they all have this same hieroglyphic script?

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Well, this is a great question. You're absolutely right that Maya writing crops up in this vast region. You know, one third of Mesoamerica is the Maya world. And throughout what's now Guatemala, part of Honduras, Mexico, Belize, you find sites where Maya writing existed and you find monuments. Now, until fairly recently, we weren't sure how to answer your question, which is, are the texts that we see at Chichen Itza, way up in the north of Yucatan, is that the same writing system really, in the same language that we're seeing in Copan or in Palenque,

• 10:26Speaker 06

  these sites further to the south? What we stumbled upon in a way, in the, I would say, in the early 90s is when this really came into focus, is that it is the same system. And if you can read the glyphs in one Maya site, you pretty much can read them at any Maya site. Now, there are two things about this that are interesting. One is, we know that there are lots of Mayan languages. Even today, there are about 5 million speakers of Mayan languages, and there are lots of them, right? In the highlands of Guatemala, in the lowlands of Chiapas and Yucatan. The question was, which language are we looking at in the ancient texts?

• 11:09Speaker 06

  So with the precision of the writing system, the grammar, the phonology, I mean, this is really specific writing, we were able to pin down the language and how it relates to other historical or modern languages. It is a lingua franca. It seems to be that in ancient times, this was a courtly language, an elite kind of formal language for official texts that didn't always reflect what the general population was speaking. So we call the language Classic Maya. This is the language we see in the glyphs. We have grammars that we've written about it, linguistic studies of the language. It's close to some contemporary languages, not

• 11:52Speaker 06

  so close to others. But no matter where you were, if you were a Maya elite, if you were a nobleman or a priest, throughout the Maya world, I think you would have been trained in this language and in this script.

• 12:05Tristan Hughes?

  And that's interesting, because I had this later, but I think I might as well ask it now. The everyday person from the Classic Maya period, let's say, from the ancient Maya, the indication is that they would not have been able to read that script. And I guess the next one is, would there have been a cursive script equivalent, so that they still spoke the same language, but they wrote it down in a different form, or interpreted it in a different form, or would they have spoken a completely different language, full stop?

• 12:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is a great question. From what we can see, and we have to acknowledge that we have a skewed sample of these texts, you know, the ones that preserve on ceramics or in stone. We don't have the books. We don't have maybe some of the informal records that may have been kept here and there by, say, a middle-class merchant or something like. We just don't have those kinds of records if they existed. But I'm fairly comfortable in saying that, look, Maya writing was really reserved for the elites. It was a courtly art form and a courtly language. There well could have been simpler kinds of texts and

• 13:15Speaker 06

  written forms that, like I say, we just don't have. There must have been economic records and fairly dry tallies of tribute coming into Maya courts and that sort of thing. I wish we had those, like Linear B texts or something. We just don't have that stuff. Rather, what we have are the, you know, records of rituals and historical narratives about wars and alliances and, you know, names of these great people. I mean, it's a bit hard to answer that question. We have the more official, more formal texts instead of the larger body of things.

• 13:50Tristan Hughes?

  David, I'm sorry, but from what you were just saying, it just sounds like the grass is always greener on the other side, because I know many people who study the Mycenaeans and Linear B, who are clamoring to find like a name of an actual Mycenaean ruler, like an Agamemnon-like person, but all they have is the bureaucratic texts that survive in Linear B, like. And you want that. You want that boring bureaucracy stuff to get more of that insight, and they want the epic tales, and you've got the epic tales. But regardless, that gives us an insight of the type of material that you have surviving from these hieroglyphs that we're going to explore. My last question on the background, first of all, is then, when looking at these hieroglyphs, we should be thinking of them all shapes and sizes, some very big on the size of

• 14:33Tristan Hughes?

  a great stone temple was very clearly public and for everyone to see, but others deep in caves and painted onto walls. So the context in which this script, the hieroglyphs have been discovered across the Maya world, they vary significantly, do they?

• 14:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. I mean, we have, like you say, public texts, or let's say, out in the open texts. I don't know how accessible they were to the general public, if they were on a facade or something like that. But very visible, you know, if you were walking around a plaza in Palenque, you know, or something around 700 AD, you would have seen Maya texts and decorations all integrated on the stucco decor of the temples, beautiful things, all colored brightly. And then if you walked into some of the palace hallways or into the temple shrines, you would have seen also tablets, stone tablets with long

• 15:26Speaker 06

  inscriptions on them. If you had walked around a throne room of a Maya ruler or nobleman, you would see vases and portable objects with writing on them too. This was, again, something they wanted to present as part of their their visual culture. If you were a high-ranking person, was to use hieroglyphs. And, you know, they wrote little name tags on jewelry, for example, this is so-and-so's jade necklace, or this is so-and-so's drinking cup. That's pretty mundane, but then you have the much more public-facing formal narratives about mythology and about history.

• 16:02Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, okay, we've got to delve into that. What were the big things on figuring out how this script worked? Is it very much based on sounds? Is it phonetic? I mean, what do we know about that?

• 16:11Speaker 06

  I think the biggest insights that we had in the 1980s was understanding the visuals, the visual system. That is, cutting through all the noise, you might say, the visual noise of a Maya text, like I was describing earlier. It can be overwhelming to look at one, the artistry of a Maya inscription or Maya text. One of the things I remember working on, and this would have been around 1983, 84 especially, was realizing that underneath a lot of that complexity was a rather simple system, where, again, scribes had a lot of options in front of them, where they could choose five or six or seven variants, forms

• 16:55Speaker 06

  of, let's say, writing the syllable, just the sound "ba", okay, something like that, or "ku", right? You could use that to spell lots of different words. But each time they would bring in a sound like that, they could choose one of several different variants. And one of the things I was working on was identifying those variants. So I was working on, you know, oh, okay, over here, this word is spelled this way, but over here, it looks a little bit different, and they're substituting this sign for that sign, but it looks like it's the same word. Maybe those two are equivalent, you know? And so it was making these, what we called substitution patterns, realizing that underneath all of that was a legible

• 17:38Speaker 06

  system. And then things really started to snowball in the decipherment.

• 17:42Tristan Hughes?

  And then adding more and more pieces, like when you get near to the completing of a puzzle, the final pieces of the puzzle are much easier to add because most of that image is already there. Is that idea?

• 17:52Speaker 06

  That's right. I mean, through the process of elimination, once we started to really churn out these patterns, I mean, it was crazy. I remember in the late 80s, early 90s, it was almost every day, there was a new word, a new phrase that we would realize, you know, we were sending letters to each other, and then a little bit later it was emails, you know, hey, I've got this one, you know, hey, we've got this. So maybe it's this, maybe this is the syllable here. So there was about a, I don't know, a five or six-year window in there in the late 80s, early 90s, when it was just happening at lightning speed, and none of us could kind of catch up to what was going on.

• 18:32Tristan Hughes?

  David, when I think about this, going back to another script, let's say when cuneiform was deciphered, but still today, there are so many kind of clay tablets that people haven't yet studied, because there are so many cuneiform texts that have survived. So more is being found out every year. The fact that Maya hieroglyphs have only been, you know, completely deciphered, as you say, in the last few decades, and given the quantity of them and all of these different sites, there must still be so many texts, so many inscriptions out there, that scholars have yet to study, that may reveal even more insights, and new stories, new kings, new rulers, and new politics and so on, that we don't know yet, because we haven't had the time to get to them yet.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  Well, I think that's true. I mean, every few weeks, there's some new email that comes in my inbox from a colleague where, hey, there's a new king of this dynasty, you know, I don't think we ever saw him before, you know, double-checking, that kind of thing. And it's amazing to be in the mix there of reconstructing history. I'll be honest with you, as someone in the mix here, in the center of the study of Maya glyphs, it is a bit overwhelming, because, yeah, we have so much data that we're processing. I'm still writing up research I was doing 30 years ago, because, you know, things get pushed to the back burner, and then there's a new discovery, and I have to work on this. And then, you know, it just becomes, I don't know, it's like a whack-a-mole of scholarship,

• 20:00Speaker 06

  but what a great problem to have, right? I mean, we have so much rich material. And yeah, I mean, it's going to be generations of work, to be honest. People will be writing dissertations on texts that, you know, maybe I glance at and say, oh, okay, that's what that says, right? And a few emails are exchanged. But, you know, this will be the stuff of future work, and that's exciting.

• 20:21Tristan Hughes?

  Well, given how much there is in this chat, we can focus in on a few examples of glyphs that have been deciphered and what they're revealing about particular cities of the ancient Maya. And two particular cities that I noticed in your work, David, are those of Tikal and Calacmool. So before kind of delving into what survives from these cities and what the glyphs tell us about them, can you give us an introduction to where these two cities are in the ancient Maya world and how prominent they were?

• 20:56Speaker 06

  So Tikal and Calacmool are two of the largest Maya cities of the Classic period. So they're roughly contemporaneous with each other. The Classic period spans about, say, 200 AD up to about 900 AD. And within that period, you see the rise of lots of Maya city-states. Tikal and Calacmool by the 600s, 700s emerge as really two of the most powerful, and sometimes we even call them the superpowers of Maya politics. Tikal has been known archaeologically a lot longer. It was excavated quite a bit, especially

• 21:37Speaker 06

  back in the 1950s and 60s. Calacmool in Mexico, much more recently. So one thing to understand is that these are in two different countries. Tikal is in northern Guatemala. Calacmool is in southern Mexico, but they're actually not that far apart from each other. And what we've come to understand in looking at their histories and their records is that they were great rivals. They were really the two kingdoms who were driving a lot of alliance networks, for example, over centuries. Two separate dynasties really at each other's throats for centuries. And going into the details of the politics of all of that has been pretty extraordinary and realizing what they were all up to to

• 22:22Speaker 06

  form these alliances. And then the wars between them. We have many records of different wars between the two sites themselves and also their allies.

• 22:31Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, come on then. Let's do it. Let's do that now. So what are the dynasties that we have for these two, well, the mega cities, the centers of their own areas of influence, the dynasties of Tikal and Calacmool? Do we know their names? Do we know much about their stories?

• 22:46Speaker 06

  We do know their names. And so one thing that we've teased out of the inscriptions are the names of these royal houses, you might say. The Tikal dynasty was called Mutul, and the Calacmool dynasty, which also was based at a even earlier site called Cibanché, was called the Canool dynasty. And so the Mutuls and the Canools are, in the way I frame it in the book, are kind of the two great enemies that define much of what we see in Maya history in terms of geopolitics.

• 23:19Tristan Hughes?

  And do they say, my mind is thinking, for instance, of the city-states of ancient Greece, where, yes, you have those kind of key figures at the top. But another thing that is mentioned in the surviving texts is how they always had their origin story, their mythological origins, whether it's linked to certain gods or rulers and so on. Do we see that, for instance, with Tikal and Calacmool? Do they have stories about how these cities were founded and whether, you know, it was a member of this dynasty that was there and founded the city on their behalf and so on?

• 23:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, that's a little hard to access. But I think the parallel is roughly the same as what you described. I do sense, maybe not so much at Tikal or looking at the Canool dynasty, but if you look at other Maya dynasties where it's preserved, some of these narratives are preserved, we do see these mythic origin stories, these renowned ancestors who are mythologized. Then you have even earlier godlike figures who are responsible for the creation of the dynasty. So it does seem that each of these major centers of power had their own mythic stories of beginning. Wish we had more of that. We have it for some places and not others. But yeah, these rivalries may actually have

• 24:32Speaker 06

  some mythical origins themselves.

• 24:34Tristan Hughes?

  And these figures at the top, these rulers, these people who are part of those royal dynasties, do we see in the surviving texts, are they always men or are there also women?

• 24:43Speaker 06

  Well, the prominence of women in Maya history is really remarkable and something that I think is important to highlight. Most Maya rulers that we have records of, by now there are hundreds of them, they're called Ahaus or Uhul Ahau, which means divine or holy person, godly ruler, having connections to the supernatural world. We now know that there were, in many of these dynasties, women rulers, female rulers, who were powerful warlords in their own regard and who were forming these alliances and at certain sites. The Canool dynasty, for example, would use the daughters of the kings of the Canool lords

• 25:28Speaker 06

  to form these alliances with other Maya kingdoms. This is not so surprising, but those women are then highlighted in their local communities as these super powerful people. And we have many portraits of these Maya queens, these local queens with a Canool connection, shown as warriors, shown standing on tops of kneeling captives, you know, who are bound in ropes and things. We can track their stories. And, you know, they're often much more highlighted more than the men that they're marrying, who are also the kings of their local communities, right? So then their sons and daughters become very important in all of these connections and shenanigans and histories that we can read about.

• 26:11Tristan Hughes?

  Once again, the parallels are screaming out with the Bronze Age. We were talking about Eric Cline, a good friend of both of ours, before recording this episode. And you know how 3,000 years ago, you hear of Babylonian princess going to Egypt as part of an alliance or with the Hittites and how there's that cooperation and that they're referring to each other as kings and brothers and so on. In this regard as well, with a place like Calacmool, and you're getting an insight into that politics, the classic Maya politics and of royal figures, of royal daughters going to somewhere else to marry an important figure, but remaining important in that new place, in that new palace, center of power, almost kind of being the agent of the family that you originally belonged to.

• 26:55Speaker 06

  Absolutely. They're the ones who are driving, that is, these daughters, these women who are ruling these kingdoms. They're the ones who are driving a lot of the historical events that we read about. They're the ones who are forming the alliances. There's an amazing story, for example, of a Mutul ruler who was, I think he splintered off from his brother. There are these two rival claimants to the Mutul throne in the seventh century. And one brother set up shop in his court very far away from Tikal. Now, he was a loyal Mutul lord for many decades, but then he decides, for reasons that are still unclear,

• 27:40Speaker 06

  to switch his allegiance. And he becomes an ally of the Canools, this great enemy. Now, this turncoat, you might say, his daughter becomes a major figure historically in that she becomes someone who is used by the Canool king through this alliance to form yet more networks and more connections. And she becomes a great figure in Maya history. She's the mother of another great king who becomes a powerful warlord at another kingdom we know as Narano. I could go on and on and on, probably confusing your listeners already. But this is the level of detail that we can read about.

• 28:23Tristan Hughes?

  You know, you can piece together parts of her story from inscriptions at Tikal and Calacmool and potentially other places too, then, I guess.

• 28:30Speaker 06

  Right. She's referred to in a number of different sites. And we have portraits of her on stile where she's highlighted. We didn't even know who her husband was, the local ruler, until just a few years ago, because he's not, he's barely ever mentioned. She's the one who's important. And then she's sometimes paired with her son, who was very powerful. So this mother-son combo in the history of that kingdom was very, very important. This is the sort of thing that I think, I don't know, someday I can imagine movie scripts being written about some of this history, you know, it's a Game of Thrones kind of situation.

• 29:06Speaker 01

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• 29:43Tristan Hughes?

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  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 31:03Tristan Hughes?

  One other thing I'd like to ask about that cooperation between these cities and these alliances, that diplomacy before exploring conflict when all of that falls apart. We recorded about a week or so ago, we did an episode on the Maya ballgame with Ed Barnhart, and fascinated to hear just how many ball courts there are on almost every Maya center. And I always think about, once again, a parallel with, let's say, the Roman gladiatorial games. Gladiators from one particular city will go and compete in another, and then their way following will come with them to the amphitheatre to watch their favourite gladiators. But is sport, can we see it through the glyphs? These alliances, these relationships

• 31:46Tristan Hughes?

  between cities were strengthened? Do we hear accounts of particular games, particular festivals where the ballgame was played and so on, surviving in these texts that highlights, once again, that close cooperation between cities, between dynasties and so on?

• 31:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's great to emphasise the significance of the Maya ballgame in all of this. There's a lot we still don't understand about the actual Maya ballgames. We have their courts preserved at many Maya sites, and we have images of the ballgame, sometimes carved into stone panels or monuments, that show, say, two rulers playing one another with a big ball in between them. The Kanu Kingdom, this is very interesting, the Kanu Kingdom, for example, shows its own ruler playing with these subordinate lords. And so when these alliances were formed through marriage, let's say, marrying

• 32:43Speaker 06

  a daughter off to a subordinate kingdom, there would be some sort of formal celebration of that connection, it seems, through the performance of the ballgame. And there's a lot we still don't understand about the significance of it, because there's a lot of ritual performance in the ballgame itself, where the rulers, they're not shown stripped down just playing the game, they're shown in elaborate headdresses, in elaborate regalia, sometimes even evoking supernatural ancestors. So I think there's a deep, deep meaning to these events that they commemorated, clearly, because they commemorated them in stone. But this is how they formalised maybe some of these alliances, was through this performance.

• 33:27Tristan Hughes?

  Do they preserve in the Maya hieroglyphs? Do we know, or do we hope to know in the future, whether alongside the names of these kings that competed in the ballgames, whether famous athletes were also recorded in stone or in glyphs?

• 33:39Speaker 06

  So far, we don't have the names of great ballplayers. We wish we did. What we have preserved are the nobles and the kings, the courtly performance of it. Perhaps someday we'll get a sense of maybe someone who was celebrated as a ballplayer. We have the word for ballplayer. In fact, it was fun to decipher back in the 1980s, which was the title "ahpits", which means "one who plays ball", usually referring to, like I say, a high-ranking nobleman or even a king. But yeah, I imagine there were people who were probably good at this game, and they were maybe travelling around from kingdom to kingdom, who knows?

• 34:19Tristan Hughes?

  All right, let's get on to the more chaotic side that survives these glyphs with these cities. First of all, internal struggles. Do we hear at all from the glyphs of court rivalries, of succession crises, of usurpers trying to take over particular rulers in one of these cities?

• 34:37Speaker 06

  We absolutely do. And because we have such a detailed account of individual dynasties, king lists, we often come across gaps where we'll see succession from father to son going along for a few generations, and then there'll be a big gap of 50 years, maybe even 100 years at this dynasty, and then it picks up again. That's an indirect sign of maybe some political troubles. What's nice is that sometimes we can explain those based on the histories as well. That is conquest. So we have records of kingdoms being defeated. The series of wars between the Mutules and the Kanuls, we have this back and forth of

• 35:20Speaker 06

  the Kanu Kingdom being victorious, and then the Mutules are victorious, and they kind of go back beating each other up for a while. So yeah, there's a lot of instability built into this political landscape, as you might imagine. Maya dynasties lasted for centuries, a good 400 years during the Classic Period. But what I'm sensing, and what I talk about in the book, is that there's a ratcheting up of the conflict. You get a sense of things perhaps going out of control, getting out of control in terms of dynasties being able to remain at certain places without having to leave and be thrown out, on the run. Literally,

• 36:01Speaker 06

  we see Maya kings on the run, going from one place to another, only a few decades before the so-called collapse. So yeah, there is a real sense of a political breakdown that may have to do with these rivalries just being unresolved. And they couldn't come to a point where they could fix these issues, they were just endemic to Classic Maya society, at least for the elites.

• 36:26Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, that's interesting. And I guess the scale of the warfare is another interesting question to raise. But it sounds, what you were saying there, David, over many, many centuries, there are multiple rises and falls with these cities. Kalakmul at one time is the top dog, maybe installs their own ruler on Intecal, and then it's vice versa the other way. As you say, it's repeating again and again and again, it seems, from the glyphs.

• 36:47Speaker 06

  Yes. And this is, in one sense, the Maya are never static. They seem to be always changing up their political worlds. You might look at that as a way of adapting to change, which I think the Maya were always very good at doing. But there were also these tipping points. So yes, we do see, instead of this bell curve of the rise and fall of Maya civilization, we see these ups and downs, depending on which kingdom you're looking at, depending on which alliance system you're looking at. And even outside of what we call the Classic Period, there's the pre-Classic Maya, this kind of pre-dynastic or pre-historical

• 37:30Speaker 06

  world, that's also going through ups and downs that we can see archaeologically. So it's a very dynamic landscape over the long haul. Warfare was everywhere, as I mentioned, and I think it was very important in accounting for how things finally broke down generally in the ninth century, the so-called collapse.

• 37:52Tristan Hughes?

  The so-called collapse, which we'll avoid for today, because I know that's another big question entirely, and lots of different parts of it. I'm going to ask about the religious angle as well, and the ritual angle with glyphs and gods and goddesses quickly, before going on to education, academia, science, mathematics and so on. Because with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance, it's also seen as very much holy writing, the big cartouches on the sides of temples, and very much relinked with the gods. Do we find certain inscriptions of Maya hieroglyphs, whether it's in one of these big cities or elsewhere, somewhere more liminal, like a deep in a cave, that give us more an insight into the rituals and beliefs of the people?

• 38:34Speaker 06

  Yes. I mean, we emphasise a lot the history that we can read, for good reason. But the other angle to all of this that I think is underappreciated, in a sense, because we're still writing it up and studying it, is this understanding of Maya religion, at least as it was practised by the elites in the Classic Period. We have a number of inscriptions that pertain to mythic narratives, talking about gods and events where the world is created. We have all of these records of historical rulers performing ritual acts. And whenever they're doing this, they're evoking gods, and they're evoking their ancestors.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  So it's a bit like the Egyptian system, in that much of what we see in the public-facing art is this intersection between politics and religion, the rulers and the gods, interacting with each other. A Maya king or queen was a divine actor. One of their responsibilities was to manifest and communicate with the deities, to perform these rituals of cosmic renewal every few years. And this is really what they were most concerned with, was this, I think, priestly role for the rulers, in a sense. The rituals are recorded in these formal settings in the temples, but like you say, there's a cave in Guatemala called

• 39:56Speaker 06

  Nakhthunich, which was an ancient pilgrimage site. And I visited there when I was quite young, a teenager still. It was amazing, because we went almost a kilometre inside this cave. And there on the cave walls were these beautifully painted texts, which were recording dates and the visitations of various nobles and kings to this cave. And we still are trying to work out exactly what the meaning of that was, but I think for the Maya, it was the underworld. It was the main pilgrimage place for many kingdoms to go encounter underworld deities and perform rituals there.

• 40:34Tristan Hughes?

  That is so cool. An ancient Maya pilgrimage to the underworld, deep in that cave. What a story.

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• 42:08Tristan Hughes?

  I wish we could talk more about that, but let's go on to another key area with the hieroglyphs, David, which is, you know, you mentioned how it talks about the dynasties, kings, queens, princesses, nobles. But if I think of an ancient court, I also think of the scholars, the intellectuals. And are these hieroglyphs, do they give us also an insight into the intellectual pursuits that were being pursued at these centres?

• 42:32Speaker 06

  They absolutely do. And, you know, one of the things that I am most proud of in my own kind of research is identifying the names of scribes and sculptors who signed their works, you know, whether it was a painted vase or a carved stele.

• 42:48Tristan Hughes?

  Just like the ancient Greek vase painters at somewhere like Pestom or wherever. Exactly.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  Right, right. And this is not common in the ancient world overall. I mean, to have the names of the artisans is remarkable. So we can track the names of sculptors across many different artworks, which is just wonderful to do. But beyond that, we know the Maya were very good at astronomy. We have astronomical records, you know, lunar information and so forth. But we also know from the books, the very few books that survive, that they were paying attention to Venus, they were paying attention to Mars, they were paying attention to eclipses and when those could happen potentially. You know, they were really, really good naked eye astronomers and were able to predict lots of these phenomena. And I should say,

• 43:37Speaker 06

  one of the most exciting developments recently is the identification of the name of a Maya astronomer.

• 43:44Tristan Hughes?

  Let's explore this. Tell us all about this, David. Take it away.

• 43:47Speaker 06

  Well, we just published the paper a couple of days ago. And this is work that goes back a number of years. We've been working, my colleagues and I, at a site in northern Guatemala, not too far from Tikal, called Shultun. It's a vast Maya city that very few people ever get to these days. And back in 2010, a small painted chamber was discovered just by accident. In fact, a student on the project came across a looter's trench and saw a painting poking out of the dirt. So we excavated it. Took a while, but it was

• 44:25Speaker 06

  a small chamber, a vaulted chamber with painting. And on one wall of this small chamber, curious thing, were all of these little scribbles. And I use the word scribbles loosely because some of these writings, very tiny, some glyphs were the size of my thumbnail, they were in beautiful calligraphy on the wall. Now, they were badly preserved. We had to do digital scans and lots of enhancements and so forth. And we've been studying these for a number of years, ever since. What we just published was the study of one of these little microtexts that we call them. And it turns out to be a mathematical formula.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  And it's signed by an individual. The last two glyphs in the text say, Chehen Saktanwash, which means, so says Saktanwash. Saktanwash being the name of a mathematician. The formula is this elegant representation of how time all fits together with the solar year, with Venus, with Mars, with other calendrical cycles that the Maya were paying attention to. And it's this mathematical analysis of all of these spans of times and how they fit together. It's remarkable. And as soon as we saw it, we were like, wait a minute,

• 45:48Speaker 06

  is this the name of, you know, Pythagoras or something? Is this the name of a celebrated Maya mathematician? I think it is. It's ambiguous whether it was actual signature of him, or whether they're attributing some famous formula to this person. But this is an amazing thing to find. We never expected to find the name of a Maya scientist like this.

• 46:13Tristan Hughes?

  And it sounds, from what you're saying, with not just Venus, but Mars as well, and all of these different kind of calendars, kind of ways that they're interpreting this world above them. It sounds pretty complex academia at the same time.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  It is. It's highly complex stuff. I mean, I don't know much about astronomy.

• 46:32Tristan Hughes?

  Neither do I, I'm afraid.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  And looking at all this stuff, I had to go back and what is all this Mars years? What I mean. And I had to, you know, sort of delve into that a bit, not my specialty. But, you know, the Maya were really good at this stuff. I think a lot of ancient civilizations were really good at this stuff. We just don't necessarily have their records. And what we have in this little chamber at Shultun, we think, is basically a workspace for a Maya astronomer, mathematician, scribe, who was conveniently writing on the wall behind him, like a whiteboard, various formulae and sequences of numbers that he needed to refer to from time to time. Instead of having to go look for a book and open up a codex

• 47:18Speaker 06

  and try to look up a lunar table or something, he put them on the wall, not for the public, not for anyone but himself. And this is incredible. I mean, we never would have imagined finding something like this. And so it's badly preserved, but imagine stumbling across the office of a Maya mathematician, and the whiteboard is there. It's been abandoned for 1,500 years. And then you have to kind of figure out what's there.

• 47:43Tristan Hughes?

  Well, versed in hieroglyphs, so probably in the service of the ruler. It's within an urban centre, is it, this building or just outside?

• 47:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's right, right adjacent to the royal palace.

• 47:52Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, right. Well, there you go. Yes.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  And then the thing is, you know, this was one of many mounds that were all around. You know, this was, again, an incredible chance discovery, but there are all of these other buildings and rooms around this chamber that are still covered in rubble.

• 48:11Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. What other patrons were there? What other scholars, experts, what other fields were there, having the patronage of the local ruler and living close to the court and writing down their finds in hieroglyphs? I mean, that's exciting for the future. They say this is the first evidence of an actual mathematician, but I mean, is the gut feeling is probably not going to be the last found from that site?

• 48:31Speaker 06

  Who knows? This field is full of surprises. So I would not be too surprised if we come up with another one in some other manner, some other signature or attribution somewhere. What's interesting to me is that these are, although they're beautifully produced and beautifully written, they're kind of informal texts, right? And so we still have more to study just from that wall, too, that we haven't published.

• 48:55Tristan Hughes?

  Well, this is what I find interesting, the fact that, you know, you don't have a cursive shorthand equivalent almost of this more elegant looking script, even if they're writing something informal, they're still writing it, these scholars, these intellectuals, in that hieroglyphic form.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  That's a great point. Yes. On this wall, the glyphs that you're looking at are no different really than the ones you see on vases or even carved in stone. It's the same system with the same kind of complexity.

• 49:23Tristan Hughes?

  David, we've covered so many themes already, like the rulers, the dynasties, court politics, court officials, and a bit of religion as well. I'm trying to think other key areas. I think actually maybe it's best to reinforce that key area that you've mentioned already, that frustratingly you don't have, which is regards kind of bureaucracy, tax, tributes, you know, how many llamas or alpacas are having to come into the city? How much millet or wheat is having to come into the city per year? That's the thing that is sadly lacking, is it, from this script?

• 49:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, we know they had to have had some of these records because these royal courts were places where I'm sure tribute and a certain kind of market economics were flowing in. We have Maya markets archaeologically that we can identify. We have images of people selling and buying things in some paintings. We know that this was a big part of the activity of these centres. But yeah, we don't have the precise tallies, let's say, of cacao beans coming into a Maya court. With some exceptions, I should say that on some Maya vases, there are these fantastic scenes of rulers who are, you know, seated on a throne

• 50:35Speaker 06

  with some attendants. And in front of them are these kneeling visitors with big bundles of, as it turns out, cacao beans. And written on the bundles, it says, you know, 8,000 cacao beans or 32,000 cacao beans. That's just a hint at what they must have been recording in these economic records. The Aztecs had these and the Spanish recorded them and copied them because they were very fascinated in the imperial structure, right, of the Aztecs. And I'm sure there were similar things that were going on among the Maya.

• 51:10Tristan Hughes?

  David, this has been absolutely fascinating, something I knew nothing about before looking up your work and before learning about this. And it's just so exciting for the future. I sound like a broken record because I always say this at the end, but it really is because there's so much more still to be found out from the writing system of the Maya, you know, and hopefully it'll come more and more to the fore in the coming years as well. We'll have to get you back on soon when much more research has been done on it, only in a few years, I can imagine.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I'd love to be back. And, you know, our field is changing all the time. So there's always new, new stuff to talk about. So it's been a great pleasure.

• 51:47Tristan Hughes?

  Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which explores all that we've covered and so much more. It is called?

• 51:53Speaker 06

  It's called The Four Heavens, A New History of the Ancient Maya, just out this year. And yeah, I've heard that it's coming out in French and German and a few other languages as well.

• 52:04Tristan Hughes?

  Brilliant. David, it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 52:08Speaker 06

  Thanks, Tristan. It was great.

• 52:13Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. David Stewart introducing you to the amazing world of Maya hieroglyphs. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. And I really do hope we can get David back on the podcast in the future because that was so interesting. There's so much still to find out about the classic Maya that the study of these hieroglyphs will reveal in time. So thank you once again for listening to this episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. Now, if you've been enjoying the ancients recently, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History

• 52:54Tristan Hughes?

  Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. And don't you worry, we've got more on the ancient Maya on Mesmer America coming up in the future. Stay tuned. Stay tuned.

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