Mayan

Around thirty Mayan languages are spoken today in Guatemala, southern Mexico and Belize, by roughly six million people, and the family is one of the best described in the Americas. It is also the family that made one of the great decipherments possible. For most of the twentieth century the leading authority on Maya writing, Eric Thompson, held that the glyphs recorded symbols and calendrical information rather than a language.

Yuri Knorozov argued in 1952 that the script was partly phonetic and that the sounds it recorded were Mayan, and the decipherment that followed proceeded by reading the glyphs as words in languages that people still speak. The living languages were the key, and native speakers have been central to the work since. The family divides into groups including Yucatecan, Ch'olan, Q'anjob'alan, Mamean and K'iche'an, and the language of the classic inscriptions is closest to the Ch'olan branch. What that history demonstrates is that a language family is not only a scholarly abstraction. Here it was the instrument that returned a written history to the descendants of the people who wrote it. The unified alphabet adopted for the Mayan languages of Guatemala in 1987, developed with Maya linguists and now official, belongs to the same story: the spellings used across this atlas, K'iche' rather than Quiche among them, follow it, and the choice of spelling is itself a position about who the languages belong to.

The Popol Vuh, the fullest surviving account of Maya creation and of the Hero Twins, is a K'iche' text, written in the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century by K'iche' authors and copied in the eighteenth by the Dominican Francisco Ximenez, whose manuscript is why it survives. The four surviving pre-conquest codices are in Mayan languages in the hieroglyphic script, and the monumental inscriptions of the classic cities record dynastic and ritual history in the same.

Taken together this is a larger and older body of indigenous religious text than survives from anywhere else in the Americas, and almost all of it was destroyed: Diego de Landa's burning of Maya books at Mani in 1562 is the single best documented act of that destruction and was not the only one. What survives alongside the texts is practice. The 260-day count has been kept without a break for more than two thousand years, and it is kept today by daykeepers in the Guatemalan highlands who name the days, read them and train successors. The atlas notes this carefully: the calendar is a living office held by particular people in particular towns, not a system anyone can pick up, and the correct description of it is the one those communities give.