4. Hieroglyphs
For a long time, researchers were of the belief that the hieroglyphs the Mayans used were originated from how the Zapotecs wrote. This was a civilisation that was pre-Columbian and they lived in a valley called Oaxaca which lay to the south of Central Mexico. This assumption was squashed in recent years after a new set of hieroglyphs that were discovered showed that the Mayan people had been writing at an advanced level over 150 years before it had previously been believed.
While they were not the inventors of the written word in the continent, this newly discovered script is unoriginal and had not been based on any other form of the written script such as that of the Zapotecs. The place in which these new hieroglyphs were found was within a pyramid building called Las Pinturas in the area of San Bartolo, Guatemala. To date, the researchers have been unable to make much headway in the deciphering of this script even though it clearly showcases how this was a written text that was carefully developed.
This form of writing was used right until the close of the 17th century. Most of the Mayan inscriptions were seen on stone lintels, stelae (stone slabs standing up in the ground), pottery and sculptures, with codices and Mayan books only very rarely having been found intact. This system had over 800 characters, with it being a combination of hieroglyphics and various signs that represented syllables. All of the hieroglyph characters were pictorial, meaning that they were clear pictures of actual objects in daily life, such as of people, possessions and animals.
It was not until the middle of the 20th of century that these symbols were able to be able to be somewhat deciphered. Up until then they had only figured out those symbols that were representative for dates and numbers. It had been believed that this writing system was completely logographic, which means that each of the glyphs would represent a complete word. They also thought most of these glyphs had a religious meaning.
It was in the 1950s that it was discovered that the system was a combination of hieroglyphic as well as being phonetic. This helped showcase that the writing was not overly religious and was more of a documentation of historical events related to the various Mayan rulers and their kin.