The Ancients - Maya Hieroglyphs Decoded

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Forget everything you thought you knew about the ancient Maya. Cracking their mysterious hieroglyphs didn't just reveal boring calendars, it exposed a cutthroat, Game of Thrones-style world of rival superpowers, Tikal and Calakmul.Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor David Stuart to uncover tales of powerful female warlords, dark pilgrimages to the underworld, and the secret jungle "whiteboard" of an ancient mathematician.MOREThe Maya CollapseListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Olmec: Mother of Mesoamerican CivilisationsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight.The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Cuneerform, Linear B, hieroglyphs, mysterious ancient scripts that, when finally deciphered, revealed exciting new worlds. The cracking of hieroglyphs unlocked the world of ancient Egypt, Cunair formed the world of Mesopotamia, Linear B, Bronze Age Greece. And across the Atlantic in Central America, archaeologists have had another ancient code to crack. We know them as Maya hieroglyphs. Today, these beautiful symbols have started to reveal so much about the complex world of the ancient Maya, about their cities, their politics, their beliefs, their conflicts, their leaders. Welcome to the ancients.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is your guide to Maya hieroglyphs and the world, the stories they are revealing. Our guest is Dr. David Stewart, Professor of Mesoamerican Art, Archaeology, and Epigraphy at the University of Texas. David, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. It's great to be here. And it's talk about Maya hieroglyphs. And, I mean, reading up on your work just before this, to hear how the deciphering of this script, it's opening up this world of the ancient Maya, learning so much more about them and how they lived. It's opening up a whole world. I mean, imagine studying ancient Egypt at a time when one couldn't read the hieroglyphic writing, and then you could read the hieroglyphic writing. I think we've gone through a transition in our field, in Maya studies like that over the past 40, 50 years, something like that. And the decipherment really, really happened, I think, in the 80s and 90s. And we're still catching up to everything we can study. And there's still so much.

And is this quite interesting because, yes, you mentioned the deciphering of hieroglyphs and people will think Rosetta Stone and Champollion and like, I've got it, that kind of the Eureka moment. But as we're going to find it in this chat, is the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs? Is it much more than just kind of one moment? Is it a much more prolonged process? It's absolutely more than one moment. It's been many people over, I would say, the past hundred years. Small incremental breakthroughs, you might say, you know, a,

sign here, a sign there. My hieroglyphs were words or phrases deciphered almost 100 years ago. Actual signs were deciphered back in the 19th century. Just a small, small, small percentage of what's out there. And then there was more progress, a better understanding of how the script actually worked. That was the real work that so many people were doing was just to try to figure out how the system worked. And even though a few signs could be read, the general system was really hard to fathom until I would say the 1980s. And that's when we really were able to first get it and see how it worked as a system. And David, for you reading about your story and your links to Maya archaeology, you mentioned at the 1980s and the 1970s, because this is something that has

fascinated you since you were a child. You've been visiting sites with Maya Hieroglyphs, you know, since you were yay high. That's right. I mean, I was very, very fortunate in the fact that my mother and father were both archaeologists. They met on a dig, in fact, back in the 1950s, a great family story there. My father was running a archaeological project in Mexico, you know, when I was about eight, nine, ten years old. But I was in the field with them. And I remember vividly the discovery of, well, first of all, it was at a site called Kobach in Yucatan, and it has some of the most massive pyramids, you know, in the jungle. This was a very remote place back then. And I remember walking around, looking at these pyramids and wondering about them,

very innocently, very naively as a kid, and the discovery of monuments with writing on them. And my father becoming very excited, and he would drop everything and go, draw them and photograph them, and I would look over his shoulder and ask him, what do these things say? What are these odd-looking carvings, these squiggles on the rocks? And I remember my dad saying, oh, you know, we can't read these. No one can read these. Maybe a date. You know, back then, the only thing that anyone could read were the dates on the monuments, right? And this created this kind of vision of the Maya being only interested in time, which is not true. The Maya calendar and stuff like that, I'm guessing.

Right, right. That was understood a long time ago. I don't know. Something stuck with me when my dad said, no one can read these. It's not like I had any ambitions, but I was just curious. And I was also bored in the middle of the jungle. As my dad was working, I had little to do. I would sit there and read some of the technical books he had on the Maya.

And I would look at the drawings of the hieroglyphs and just wonder what in the world are these things. They're beautiful to look at. This is something that maybe some of the listeners have seen Maya hieroglyphs visiting sites or in publications, but they're gorgeous and they're curious-looking, they're odd-looking things. Well, David, that's exactly what I was going to ask next. I mean, if someone mentions hieroglyphs, a lot of us will be thinking of the pictograms that you can see in ancient Egypt or maybe even very early Kunayr form as well, where they got like depictions of the vases and so on. When talking about Maya hieroglyphs, what do they look like? What types of images should we be imagining? Well, when one looks at a Maya text, whether it's painted on a ceramic vessel or whether it's carved in stone,

what you're looking at is a bit like a grid. You're looking at a complicated array of roughly square or rectangular shaped things that are all clustered together. And within each one of those squares is an assemblage of what we call signs. You know, each sign is very complex visually. And so when you stand back and look at a Maya text, it's, overwhelming in terms of its visual richness. It's not immediately clear that you're looking at images of things that are recognizable, although people usually can pick out, oh, you know, there's a human hand over there, and there's a animal head over there. A lot of the signs look really abstract.

And unlike Egyptian, let's say, you know, you look at an Egyptian text and, you know, it's fairly easy to recognize an owl, a kneeling person or something like that. I think in Egyptian writing, there was a conservatism about the system over such a long period of time. With the Maya, you see a lot of variation. You see scribes, individual scribes, deciding, oh, I'm going to be creative, and I'm going to use this particular form of this sign here, writing a king's name, let's say. I know of inscriptions where a king's name will pop up several times, as you might expect, but each time it looks different because the scribe is being playful. And there's a certain amount of artistry and playfulness baked into the system that I don't think

exists in a lot of other writing systems. Did this also become a lingua franca for the ancient smear? Because when I think of the ancient Maya, David, I think of all these different cities, calacmole or caracol or chittanyat, Palenke, Tikal, Copan, and so on. spread over a huge area in Mesoamerica, divided, as probably will explore with their dynasties and their particular cultures. But did they all speak the same language? Did they all have this same hieroglyphic script? Well, this is a great question. You're absolutely right that Maya writing crops up in this vast region. You know, one third of Mesoamerica is the Maya world. And

And throughout what's now Guatemala, part of Honduras, Mexico, Belize, you find sites where Maya writing existed and you find monuments. Now until fairly recently, we weren't sure how to answer your question, which is, are the texts that we see at Chechenica, way up in the north of Yucatan? Is that the same writing system really in the same language that we're seeing in Copan or in Palenke, these sites further to the south. What we stumbled upon in a way in the, I would say in the early 90s is when this really came into focus, is that it is the same system. And if you can read the glyphs in one Maya site, you pretty much can read them at any Maya site. Now, there are

two things about this that are interesting. One is we know that there are lots of Mayan languages. Even And today, there are about five million speakers of Mayan languages, and there are lots of them, right? In the highlands of Guatemala, in the lowlands of Chiapas and Yucatan, the question was, which language are we looking at in the ancient texts? So with the precision of the writing system, the grammar, the phonology, I mean, this is really specific writing, we were able to pin down the language in how it relates to other historical or modern languages. It is a lingua franca. It seems to be that in ancient times,

this was a courtly language, an elite kind of formal language for official texts that didn't always reflect what the general population was speaking. So we call the language classic Mayan. This is the language we see in the glyphs. We have grammars that we've written about it, linguistic studies of the language. It's close to some contemporary languages. Not so close to others, but no matter where you were, if you were a Maya elite, if you were a nobleman or a priest throughout the Maya world, I think you would have been trained in this language and in this script. And that's interesting, because I had this later, but I think I might as well ask it now. The everyday person from the classic Maya period, let's say, from the ancient Maya, the indication is that they would not have been able to read that script? And I guess the next one is, would there have been a cursive script equivalent so that they still spoke the same language, but they wrote it down in a different form or interpreted it in a different form? Or would they have spoken a completely different language full stop?

Yeah, this is a great question. From what we can see, and we have to acknowledge that we have a skewed sample of these texts, you know, the ones that preserve on ceramics or in stone. We don't have the books. We don't have maybe some of the informal records. that may have been kept here and there by, say, a middle class, a merchant or something like, we just don't have those kinds of records that they existed. But I'm fairly comfortable in saying that, look, my writing was really reserved for the elites. It was a courtly art form and a courtly language. There well could have been simpler kinds of texts and written forms that, like I say, we just don't have. There must have been economic, records and fairly dry tallies of tribute coming into Maya courts and that sort of thing. I wish we had those, like linear B text or something, it was don't have that stuff.

Rather, what we have are the, you know, records of rituals and historical narratives about wars and alliances and, you know, names of these great people. I mean, it's a bit hard to answer that question. We have the more official, more formal texts instead of the larger body of things. David, I'm sorry, but from what you were just saying, it just sounds like the grass is always greener on the other side, because I know many people who study the Mycenaeans and Linear B, who are clamoring to find like a name of an actual Mycenaean ruler, like an Agamemnon-like person, but all they have is the bureaucratic text that survive in Linear B, like, and you want that, you want that boring bureaucracy stuff to get more of that insight, and they want the epic tales, and you've got the epic tales. But regardless, that gives us an insight of the type of material that you have surviving. from these hieroglyphs that we're going to explore. My last question on the background, first of all, is then when looking at these hieroglyphs,

we should be thinking of them, all shapes and sizes, some very big on the sides of great stone temple, was very clearly public and for everyone to see, but others deep in caves and painted onto walls. So the context in which this script, the hieroglyphs have been discovered across the my world, they vary significantly, do they?

Oh, yeah. I mean, we have, like you say, public texts, or let's say out in the open text, I don't know how accessible they were to the general public if they were on a facade or something like that. But very visible, you know, if you were walking around a plaza in Palenke, you know, or something around 700 AD, you would have seen Maya texts and decorations all integrated on the stucco decor of the temples, beautiful things, all colored brightly. And then if you walked into some of the palace hallways or into the temple shrines, you would have seen also tablet, stone tablets with long inscriptions on them. If you had walked around a throne room of a Maya ruler or nobleman, you would see vases and portable objects with writing on them too. This was, again, something they wanted to present as part of their visual culture, if you were a high-ranking person, was to use hieroglyphs. And, you know, they wrote little name tags on jewelry, for example. This is so-and-so's jade necklace or this is so-and-so's drinking cup.

That's pretty mundane. But then you have the much more public-facing formal narratives about mythology and about history. Gosh, okay, we've got to delve into that. What were the big things on figuring out how this script work? Is it very much based on sounds? Is it phonetic? I mean, what do we know about that? I think the biggest insights that we had in the 1980s was understanding

the visuals, the visual system. That is, cutting through all the noise, you might say, the visual noise of a Maya text, like I was describing earlier. It can be overwhelming to look at one, the artistry of a Maya inscription or Maya text. One of the things I remember working on, and this would have been around 1983, 84 especially, was realizing that underneath a lot of that complexity was a rather simple system where, again, scribes had a lot of options in front of them, where they could choose five or six or seven variants, forms of, let's say, writing the syllable, just the sound, bah, okay, something like that, or ku, right? You could use that to spell lots of different words, but each time they would bring in a sound like that, they could choose one of

several different variants. And one of the things I was working on was identifying those variants. So I was working on, you know, oh, okay, over here, this word is spelled this way, but over here, it looks a little bit different, and they're substituting this sign for that sign, but it looks like it's the same word. Maybe those two are equivalent, you know. And so it was making these, these what we call the substitution patterns, realizing that underneath all of that was a legible system. And then things really started to snowball in the decipherment. And then adding more and more pieces, like when you get near to the completing of a puzzle, the final piece of the puzzle are much easier to add because most of that image is already

there. Is that idea? That's right. I mean, through the process of elimination, once we started to really churn out these patterns, I mean, it was crazy. I remember in the late 80s, early 90s, it was almost every day. There was a new word, a new phrase that we would realize, you know, we were sending letters to each other. And then a little bit later, it was emails. You know, hey, I've got this one. You know, hey, we've got this. So maybe it's this. Maybe this is the syllable here. So there was about a, I don't know, a five or six year window in there in the late 80s, early 90s when it was just happening at lightning speed. And none of us could kind of catch up to what was going on. David, when I think about this, going back to another script, let's say when Kunaire form was deciphered,

But still today, there are so many kind of clay tablets that people haven't yet studied because there are so many cuneer-form texts that have survived. So more is being found out every year. The fact that Maya Hieroglyphus have only been completely deciphered, as you say, in the last few decades, and given the quantity of them and all of these different sites, there must still be so many texts, so many inscriptions out there that scholars have yet to study. that may reveal even more insights and new stories, new kings, new rulers and new politics and so on that we don't know yet because we haven't had the time to get to them yet. Well, I think that's true. I mean, every few weeks, there's some new email that comes in my inbox from a colleague where, hey, there's a new king of this dynasty.

I don't think we ever saw him before, you know, double checking, that kind of thing. And it's amazing to be in the mix there of reconstructing history. I'll be honest with you, as someone in the mix here, in the center of the study of my aglifts, it is a bit overwhelming because, yeah, we have so much data that we're processing. I'm still writing up research I was doing 30 years ago because, you know, things get pushed to the back burner and then there's a new discovery and I have to work on this. And, you know, it just becomes, I don't know, it's like a whack-a-mole of scholarship, but what a great problem to have, right?

I mean, we have so much rich material. And yeah, I mean, it's going to be generations of work, to be honest. People will be writing dissertations on texts that, you know, maybe I glance at and say, oh, okay, that's what that says, right? And a few emails are exchanged. But, you know, this will be the stuff of future work. And that's exciting. Well, given how much there is in this chat, we can focus in on a few examples of glyphs

that have been deciphered and what they're revealing about particular cities of the ancient Maya. And two particular cities that I noticed in your work, David, are those of Tikal and Kalak-Mul. So before kind of delving into what survives from these cities and what the glyphs tell us about them, can you give us an introduction to where these two cities are in the ancient Maya world and how prominent they were? So Tikal and Kalak-Mul are two of the largest Maya cities of the classic period. So they're roughly contemporaneous with each other. The classic period spans about, say, 200 AD up to about 900 AD. And within that period, you see the rise of lots of Maya city states.

Tikal and Kalluk-Mool by the 600s emerge as really two of the most powerful. And sometimes we even call them the superpowers of Maya politics. Tikal has been known archaeologically a lot. longer. It was excavated quite a bit, especially back in the 1950s and 60s. Calac Mool in Mexico, much more recently. So one thing to understand is that these are in two different countries. Tikal is in northern Guatemala. Kalakmul is in southern Mexico, but they're actually not that far apart from each other. And what we've come to understand in looking at their histories and their records is that they were great rivals. They were really really.

the two kingdoms who were driving a lot of alliance networks, for example, over centuries, two separate dynasties really at each other's throats for centuries. And going into the details of the politics of all of that has been pretty extraordinary and realizing what they were all up to to form these alliances. And then the wars between them. We have many records of different wars between the two sites themselves and also their allies. Oh, come on then. Let's do it. Let's do that. now. So what are the dynasties that we have for these two, well, the megacities, the centers of their own areas of influence, the dynasties of Tikal and Kalakmole. Do we know their names? Do we know much

about their stories? We do know their names. And so one thing that we've teased out of the inscriptions are the names of these royal houses, you might say. The Tikal dynasty was called Mutul, and the Kalakmul dynasty, which also was based at an even earlier site called Tsibanchet, was called the Kanul dynasty. And so the Mutuls and the Kanul's are, in the way I frame it in the book, are kind of the two great enemies that define much of what we see in my history in terms of geopolitics. And do they say, my mind is thinking, for instance, of the city-states of ancient Greece, where, yes, you have those kind of key figures at the top,

But another thing that is mentioned in the surviving text is how they always have their origin story, their mythological origins, whether it's linked to certain gods or rulers and so on. Do we see that, for instance, with Tikal and Kalakamur? Do they have stories about how these cities were founded and whether, you know, it was a member of this dynasty that was there and founded the city on their behalf and so on? Yeah, you know, that's a little hard to access. But I think the parallel is roughly the same as what you describe. I do sense, maybe not so much at Tikal or looking at the Kanul dynasty, but if you look at other Maya dynasties where it's preserved, some of these narratives are preserved, we do see these mythic origin stories, these renowned ancestors who are mythologized. Then you have even earlier godlike figures who are responsible for the creation of the dynasty. So it does seem that each of these major centers of power had their own mythic stories. of beginning. Wish we had more of that. We have it for some places and not others. But yeah, these rivalries may actually have some mythical origins themselves. And these figures at the top,

these rulers, these people who are part of those royal dynasties, do we see in the surviving texts, are they always men or are they also women? Well, the prominence of women in Maya history is really remarkable in something that I think is important to highlight. Most Maya rulers, that we have records of, by now there are hundreds of them, they're called Ahau's or a Khuhulahau, which means divine or holy person, godly ruler, having connections to the supernatural world. We now know that there were in many of these dynasties, women rulers, female rulers, who were powerful warlords in their own regard and who were forming these alliances at certain sites. The Kanul dynasty, for example, would use the daughters

of the kings of the Kanul lords to form these alliances with other Maya kingdoms. This is not so surprising, but those women are then highlighted in their local communities as these super powerful people. And we have many portraits of these Maya queens, these local queens with a Kanul connection shown as warriors, shown standing on tops of kneeling captives, you know, who are bound in ropes and things. We can track their stories. And, you know, they're often much more highlighted more than the men that they're marrying were also the kings of their local communities, right? So then their sons and daughters become very important in all of these connections and shenanigans and histories that we can read about. Once again, the parallels are screaming out with the Bronze Age.

We were talking about Eric Klein, a good friend of both of us before recording this episode. And, you know, how 3,000 years ago you hear of Babylonian princess going to, Egypt, if part of an alliance or with the Hittites and how there's that cooperation and that they're referring to each other as kings and brothers and so on. In this regard as well with a place like Kalakamol and you're getting an insight into that politics, the classic myopolitics and of royal figures, of royal daughters going to somewhere else to marry an important figure, but remaining important in that new place, in that new palace, centre of power, almost kind of being the agent of the family that you originally belong to?

Absolutely. They're the ones who are driving, that is these daughters, these women who are ruling these kingdoms, they're the ones who are driving a lot of the historical events that we read about. They're the ones who are forming the alliances. There's an amazing story, for example, of a Mutul ruler who was, I think he splintered off from his brother. There are these two rival claimants to the Mutual throne in the 7th century. And one brother set up shop and his court very far away from Tikal. Now, he was a loyal Mutual lord for many decades, but then he decides, for reasons that are still unclear, to switch his allegiance. And he becomes an ally of the canoels, this great enemy. Now, this turncoat, you might say, his daughter,

becomes a major figure historically in that she becomes someone who is used by the Canul king through this alliance to form yet more networks and more connections. And she becomes a great figure in my history. She's the mother of another great king who becomes a powerful warlord at another kingdom we know is Naranjo. I could go on and on and on, probably confusing your listeners already, but this is the level of detail that we can read about. You know, you can piece together parts of her story from inscriptions at Tikal and Kallekmal and potentially other places too, then, I guess. Right.

She's referred to in a number of different sites, and we have portraits of her on Steele, where she's highlighted. We didn't even know who her husband was, the local ruler, until just a few years ago, because he's barely ever mentioned. She's the one who's important. And then she's sometimes paired with her son, who was very powerful. So this mother's son combo in the history of that kingdom was very, very important. This is the sort of thing that I think, I don't know, someday I can imagine movie scripts being written about some of this history.

You know, it's a Game of Thrones kind of situation. One other thing I'd like to ask about kind of that cooperation between these cities and these alliances, that diplomacy before exploring kind of conflict when all of that falls apart. we recorded about a week or so ago. We did an episode on the Maya ball game with Ed Barnhart. And fascinated here just how many ball courts there are on almost kind of every Maya center. And I always kind of think about, once again, a parallel with, let's say, the Roman gladiatorial games. You know, gladiators from one particular city will go and compete in another, and then their way following will come with them to that amphitheat to watch their favorite gladiators. But is sport, can we see it through the glyphs?

These alliances, these relationships between cities were strengthened. Do we hear accounts of particular games, particular festivals where the ballgame was played and so on? Surviving in these texts that highlights, once again, that close cooperation between cities, between dynasties, and so on. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's great to emphasize the significance of the Maya ball game in all of this. There's a lot we still don't understand about the actual Maya ballgame. We have their courts preserved at many Maya sites. And we have images of the ballgame, sometimes carved into stone panels or monuments,

that show, say, two rulers playing one another with a big ball in between them. The Kanul Kingdom, this is very interesting. The Kanul Kingdom, for example, shows its own ruler playing with these subordinate lords. And so when these alliances were formed through marriage, let's say, marrying a daughter off to a subordinate kingdom, there would be some sort of formal celebration of that connection, it seems, through the performance of the ballgame. And there's a lot we still don't understand about the significance of it because there's a lot of ritual performance in the ballgame itself where the rulers, they're not shown stripped down just playing the game. they're shown in elaborate headdresses and elaborate regalia, sometimes even evoking supernatural ancestors. So I think there's a deep, deep meaning to these events that they commemorated, clearly, because they commemorated them in stone. But this is how they formalized maybe some of these alliances was through

this performance. Do they preserve in the Maya hieroglyphs? Do we know or do we hope to know in the future, whether alongside the names of these kings that compete in the ball games, whether like famous athletes were also recorded in stone or in cliffs? So far, we don't have the names of great ballplayers. We wish we did. What we have preserved are the nobles and the kings, the courtly performance of it. Perhaps someday we'll get a sense of maybe someone who was celebrated as a ball player. We have the word for ball player.

In fact, you know, it was fun to decipher back in the... the 1980s, which was the title Ahpitz, which means one who plays ball, usually referring to a, you know, like I say, a high-ranking nobleman or even a king. But yeah, I imagine there were people who were probably good at this game and they were maybe traveling around from kingdom to kingdom. Who knows? All right. Let's get on to the more chaotic side that survives from these glyphs with these cities. First of all, internal struggles. Do we hear at all from the glyphs of like kind of court rivalries of succession crises, of, you know, usurpers trying to take over particular rulers in one of these cities? We absolutely do. And because we have such a detailed

account of individual dynasties, you know, king lists, we often come across gaps where we'll see, you know, succession from father to son going along for a few generations. And then there'll be a big gap of 50 years, maybe even 100 years at this dynasty, and then it picks up again. That's an indirect sign of maybe some political troubles. What's nice is that sometimes we can explain those based on the histories as well. That is conquest. So we have records of kingdoms being defeated. The series of wars between the Mutuls and the Kanul's and the Kanul's, we have this back and forth of the Kanul kingdom being victorious, and then the motuls are victorious, and they kind of go back beating each other up for a while. So, yeah, there's a lot of instability built into this

political landscape, as you might imagine. Maya dynasties lasted for centuries, you know, a good 400 years during the classic period. But what I'm sensing and what I talk about in the book is that there's a ratcheting up of the conflict. You get a sense of things perhaps going out of control, getting out of control in terms of dynasties being able to remain at certain places without having to leave and be thrown out on the run. Literally, we see Maya Kings on the run, going from one place to another, only a few decades before the so-called collapse. So yeah, there is a real sense of a political breakdown that may have to do with these rivalries just being unresolved. And they couldn't come to a point where they could fix these

issues, they were just endemic to classic Maya society, at least for the elites. Absolutely. That's interesting. And I guess the scale of the warfare is another interesting question to raise, but it sounds what you were saying there, David, over many, many centuries. They're like multiple rises and fools with these cities. Calac Mall at one time is the top dog, maybe installs their own rule on Intercal and then it's vice versa. The other way, as you say, it's kind of repeating again and again and again, it seems from the glyphs. Yes. And this is, in one. sense, the Maya are never static. They seem to be always changing up their political world. You might

look at that as a way of adapting to change, which I think the Maya were always very good at doing, but there were also these tipping points. So yes, we do see, instead of this bell curve of the rise and fall of Maya civilization, we see these ups and downs, depending on which kingdom you're looking at, depending on which alliance system you're looking at. And even outside of what we call the classic period, there's the pre-classic Maya, this kind of pre-dynastic or pre-historic world that's also going through ups and downs that we can see archaeologically. So it's a very dynamic landscape over the long haul. Warfare was everywhere, as I mentioned. And I think it was very important in accounting for how things finally broke down generally in the 9th century,

the so-called collapse. The so-called collapse, which will avoid for today, because I know that's another big question entirely and lots of different parts of it. I'm going to ask about the religious angle as well, and the kind of ritual angle with glyphs and gods and goddesses quickly before going on to education, academia, science, mathematics, and so on. Because with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance, it's also seen as kind of very much holy writing, the big cartouches on the sides of temples and very much relinked with the gods. Do we find certain inscriptions of Maya hieroglyphs, whether it's in one of these big cities or elsewhere, you know, somewhere more liminal, like a deep in a cave, that give us more an insight into the rituals and beliefs of the people? Yes, I mean, we emphasize a lot the history that we can read for good reason. But the other angle to all of this that I think is, under the appreciated in a sense because we're still writing it up and studying it is this understanding of Maya religion, at least as it was practiced by the elites in the classic period. We have a number of inscriptions that pertain to mythic narratives, talking about gods and events where the world

is created. We have all of these records of historical rulers performing ritual acts. And whenever they're doing this, they're evoking gods and they're evoking their ancestors. So it's a bit like the Egyptian system and that much of what we see in the public-facing art is this intersection between politics and religion, the rulers and the gods, interacting with each other. Amaya king or queen was a divine actor. One of their responsibilities was to manifest and communicate with the deities, to perform these rituals of cosmic renewal every few years. And this is really what they were most concerned with, was this, I think, kind of priestly role for the rulers in a sense.

The rituals are recorded in these formal settings in the temples, but like you say, there's a cave in Guatemala of Nathunich, which was an ancient pilgrimage site. And I visited there when I was quite young, a teenager still. It was amazing because we went almost a kilometer. are inside this cave. And there on the cave walls were these beautifully painted texts, which were recording dates and the visitations of various nobles and kings to this cave. And we still are trying to work out exactly what the meaning of that was, but I think for the

Maya, it was the underworld. It was the main pilgrimage place for many kingdoms to go encounter underworld deities and perform rituals there. That is so cool. An ancient Maya pilgrimage to the underworld deep in that cave. What a story. I wish we could talk more about that, but let's go on to another key area with the hieroglyphs, David, which is, you know, you mentioned how it talks about the dynasties, kings, queens, princesses, nobles. But if I think of an ancient court, I also think of the scholars, the intellectuals. And are these hieroglyphs, do they give us also an insight into the intellectual pursuits that were being pursued at these centres? They absolutely do. And, you know, one of the things that I am most proud of in my own kind of research is identifying the names of scribes and sculptors who signed their works, you know, whether it was a painted vase or a carved steely.

Just like the ancient Greek like vase painters at someone like Pestim or wherever, exactly. Right, right. And this is not common in the ancient world overall. I mean, to have the names of the artisans is remarkable. So we can track the names of sculptors across. many different artworks, which is just wonderful to do. But beyond that, we know the Maya were very good at astronomy. We have astronomical records, you know, lunar information and so forth. But we also know from the books, the very few books that survive, that they were paying attention to Venus. They were paying attention to Mars. They were paying attention to eclipses and when those could happen potentially, you know, they were really, really good, naked-eye astronomers and were able to predict lots of these phenomena.

And I should say one of the most exciting developments recently is the identification of the name of a Maya astronomer. Let's explore this. Tell us all about this, David. Take it away. Well, we just published the paper a couple of days ago, and this is work that goes back a number of years. We've been working my colleagues and I at a site in northern Guadena.

Not too far from Tikal called Shultun. It's a vast Maya city that very few people ever get to these days. And back in 2010, a small painted chamber was discovered just by accident. In fact, a student on the project came across a looters trench and saw a painting hooking out of the dirt. So we excavated it took a while, but it was a small chamber, a vaulted chamber with painting. And on one wall of this small chamber, curious thing were all of these little scribbles. And I use the word scribbles loosely because some of these writings, very tiny, some glyphs were the size of my thumbnail. They were in beautiful calligraphy on the wall. Now, they were badly preserved. We had to do digital scans and lots of enhancements and so forth. And we've been studying these for,

a number of years ever since. What we just published was the study of one of these little micro-texts that we call them, and it turns out to be a mathematical formula. And it's signed by an individual. The last two glyphs in the text say, Chehens Saktanwash, which means, so says Saktanwash, Saktanwash, being the name of a mathematician. The formula is this elegant representation of how time all fits together with the solar year, with Venus, with Mars, with other cylindrical cycles that the Maya were paying attention to. And it's this mathematical analysis of all of these spans of times and how they just like they fit together. It's remarkable. And as soon as we saw it, we were like, wait a minute, is this the name of Pythagoras or something?

He uses the name of a celebrated Maya mathematician. I think it is. It's ambiguous whether it was actual signature of him or whether they're attributing some famous formula to this person. But this is an amazing thing to find. We never expected to find a name of a Maya scientist like this. And it sounds, from what you were saying, with not just Venus, but Mars as well,

and all of these different kind of calendars, kind of ways that they're interpreting this world above them. It sounds pretty complex academia at the same time. It is. It's highly complex stuff. I mean, I don't know much about astronomy. No, neither do I, I'm afraid. And looking at all this stuff, I had to go back and, what is all this? Mars years, but I mean, and I had to sort of delve into that a bit, not my specialty, but, you know, the Maya, we're really good at this stuff. I think a lot of ancient civilizations were really good at this stuff, we just don't necessarily have their records. And what we have in this little chamber at Shultoon, we think, is basically a workspace for a Maya astronomer, mathematician, scribe,

who was conveniently writing on the wall behind him, like a whiteboard, various formulae and sequences of numbers that he needed to refer to from time to time. Instead of having to go look for a book can open up a codex and try to look up a lunar table or something, he put them on the wall, not for the public, not for anyone but himself. And this is incredible. I mean, we never would have imagined finding something like this. And so it's badly preserved, but imagine stumbling across the office of a Maya mathematician and the whiteboard is there. It's been abandoned for 1,500 years, and then you have to kind of figure out what's there. Well, versed in hieroglyphs, so probably in the service of the ruler.

it's within an urban centre, is it, this building or just outside? Yeah, it's right adjacent to the Royal Palace. Oh, well, there you go, yes. And the thing is, you know, this was one of many mounds that were all around. You know, this was, again, an incredible chance discovery, but there are all of these other buildings and rooms around this chamber that are still covered in rubble. Yeah, what other patrons were there?

What other scholars, experts, what other fields were there, having the patronage of the local ruler and living close to the court and writing down their finds in hieroglyphs. I mean, that's excited for the future. They say this is the first evidence of an actual mathematician, but is the gut feeling it's probably not going to be the last found from that site? Who knows? This field is full of surprises. So I would not be too surprised if we come up with another one in some other manner, some other signature or attribution somewhere. What's interesting to me is that these are, although they're beautifully produced and beautifully written, they're kind of informal texts, right? And so we still have more to study just from that wall, too, that we haven't published. Well, this is what I find interesting. The fact that, you know, you don't have a cursive shorthand equivalent almost of this more elegant looking script. Even if they're writing something informal, they're still writing it, these scholars, these intellectuals, in that hieroglyphic form.

That's a great point. Yes, on this wall, the glyphs that you're looking at are no different really than the ones you see on vases or even carved in stone. It's the same system with the same kind of complexity. David, we've covered so many themes already, like the rulers, the dynasties, court politics, court officials, and a bit of religion as well. I'm trying to think other key areas. I think actually maybe it's best to reinforce that key area that you've mentioned already, that frustratingly you don't. have, which is regards kind of bureaucracy, tax, tributes, you know, how many llamas or alpacas are having to come into the city, how much millet or wheat is having to come into the city per year? That's the thing that is sadly lacking, is it, from this script? Yeah, I mean, we know they had to have had some of these records because these real courts were places where, I'm sure, tribute and a certain kind of market economics were flowing in. We have Maya markets, archaeologically, that we can identify.

We have images of people selling and buying things and some paintings. We know that this was a big part of the activity of these centers. But yeah, we don't have the precise tallies, let's say, of cacao beans coming into a Maya court. With some exceptions, I should say that on some Maya vases, there are these fantastic scenes of rulers who are seated on a throne with some attendants. And in front of them are these kneeling visitors with big bundles of, as it turns out, cacao beans. And written on the bundles that says, you know, 8,000 cacao beans or 32,000 cacao beans. That's just a hint at what they must have been recording in these economic records.

The Aztecs had these and the Spanish recorded them and copied them because they were very fascinated in the imperial structure, right, of the Aztecs. and I'm sure there were similar things that were going on among the Maya. David, this has been absolutely fascinating, something I knew nothing about before looking up your work and before learning about this. And it's just so exciting for the future. I sound like a broken record because I always say this at the end,

but it really is because there's so much more still to be found out from the writing system of the Maya, you know, and hopefully it'll come more and more to the four in the coming years as well. we'll have to get you back on soon when much more research has been done on it, only in a few years, I can imagine. Yeah, well, I'd love to be back, and, you know, our field is changing all the time. So there's always new, new stuff to talk about. So it's been a great pleasure. Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which explores all that we've covered and so much more it is called. It's called The Four Heavens, a new history of the ancient Maya, just out this year. And yeah, I've heard that it's coming out in a French and German and a few other languages as well. David, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Thanks, Tristan. It was great. Well, there you go. There was Dr. David Stewart introducing you to the amazing world of Maya hieroglyphs. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. And I really do hope we can get David back on the podcast in the future because that was so interesting. There's so much still to find out about the classic Maya that the study of these hieroglyphs will reveal in time. So thank you once again for listening to this episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. Now, if you've been enjoying the ancients recently,

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