Oldest Mayan Writing Discovered
Posted on January 5, 2006
An MSNBC.com article says hieroglyphs discovered at Las Pinturas, in San Bartolo, Guatemala take the earliest Mayan writing back 150 years earlier than earlier discoveries. The new heiroglyphs date back to 250 B.C. However, that is still thousands of years after writing is known to have began in Egypt and India.
Writing emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India as far back as 3,000 B.C. Yet the first full-blown text -- a series of signs that are clearly telling a story— does not show up in the New World until about 400 to 300 B.C. They were left by the Zapotecs in the Oaxaca Valley south of central Mexico. Most of the early Maya writing comes from between A.D. 150 and 250.Archaeologists do not know how to to read the new glyphs so it may be a while before we know what story was being told. The article says the archaeologists believe Mayan writing probably goes back even farther than these newly discovered glyphs.Because Zapotec writing emerged so much earlier, researchers have long believed that the Maya were influenced by it.
The earliest single Mayan glyph — which could have stood for a person's name or might have been a sign on a calendar — dates to about 600 B.C. But it isn't considered writing. These new glyphs are much more complex, project leader William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire said.
"This is a full-blown and fully developed script," Saturno told LiveScience. "Which is not to say that the Maya invented writing and not the Zapotec, but it does lead us to question the origins and the complexities of these origins."