Painted wall and plaster fragments at San Bartolo (Las Pinturas complex) provided securely dated Late Preclassic evidence of Maya hieroglyphic writing, with associated radiocarbon dates indicating roughly 300–200 BCE—pushing the script’s origin centuries earlier than previously accepted.
Fragments from early construction phases at San Bartolo were assigned to 300–200 BCE and include the day record “7 Deer”, interpreted as the earliest known calendar notation from the Maya region in the 260-day divinatory cycle used across Mesoamerica.
Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo (Chiapas) preserves the earliest contemporaneous Long Count inscription yet discovered, recording a date equivalent to 36 BCE—important context for the calendrical environment in which later Maya Long Count usage flourished.
From about the Classic period (c. 250–900 CE), known inscriptions expand dramatically in quantity and media (monuments, ceramics, and other objects), reflecting the mature integration of writing into courtly politics, ritual, and historical record-keeping.
Tikal’s Stela 29 bears the Long Count 8.12.14.8.15, equivalent to 292 CE, widely cited as the earliest surviving Long Count date from the Maya lowlands and an early benchmark for Classic-period monumental texts.
The Dresden Codex is typically dated to the 11th or 12th century and is famous for astronomical and calendrical tables (including Venus and eclipse-related calculations), illustrating the sophistication of Maya written mathematical traditions.
The Madrid (Tro-Cortesianus) Codex, one of the few surviving Maya books, is generally dated to the 15th century and preserves extensive ritual-divinatory and calendrical content, providing key comparative material for reading glyphs and iconography.
Diego de Landa wrote Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (c. 1566), including a set of glyph correspondences later dubbed the “de Landa alphabet”—a flawed transcription but one that became crucial for 20th-century decipherment efforts.
Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg produced the first published edition of de Landa’s Relación in 1864, making its calendar and glyph information broadly available to scholars and shaping subsequent work on Maya writing.
In 1952, Yuri Knorozov argued that Maya writing included substantial phonetic (syllabic) values, using de Landa’s recorded signs as a starting point; this shifted the field away from purely logographic/ideographic interpretations.
Heinrich Berlin’s 1958 work defined recurring “emblem glyph” compounds (later read as including k’uhul ajaw) as markers tied to specific polities/ruling houses—helping organize inscriptions geographically and politically.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s 1960 analysis of date patterns at Piedras Negras argued that monument series encode reigns and life events of rulers, transforming Maya epigraphy by grounding texts in political history rather than only ritual/calendrics.
Development of Maya hieroglyphic writing and epigraphy (c. 200 BCE–900 CE)
