Origin Tales: The Beginnings of Maya Writing
There are two tales for the first writing: external accounts from scholars grappling with sparse evidence, and internal, explanatory ones arising from later makers and users of that writing. Both form their own realities and lend themselves to their own metaphors of "creation" or of organisms that are "born," "grow," and "die." This talk explores, 20 years after a similar exposition by the presenter, current evidence and models, both external and internal, for the inception of Maya glyphs, a system that flourished for close to 2000 years in and near the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Central America. Fresh data augment and sometimes counter earlier narratives. Yet there are many remaining gaps of understanding. With variable success, we still tangle with the meanings or functions of these early glyphs, the "ecosystem" of graphic display from which they arose, the influence of concurrent scripts in the region, the role of grounding materials, the enigma of limited genres or registers of meaning, and the overall relation of graphs to language. How crucial was the play of homophones and rebus, how central were the accounting concerns or political objectives of rulers, how conditioned is scholarship by the allure of teleology or beliefs about cognitive consequences? What principles informed such graphs from their inception, what changed over time, was there a single "system" of script -- above all, to what degree are early signs even readable? Themes that emerge include the relation of spirit to matter, the importance of possession, and the local belief that writing was supra-human, the gift and practice of deities.
