Editing Maya script (section)

== History ==
It was until recently thought that the Maya may have adopted writing from the [[Olmecs|Olmec]] or [[Epi-Olmec culture]], who used the [[Isthmian script]]. However, murals excavated in 2005 have pushed back the origin of Maya writing by several centuries, and it now seems possible that the Maya were the ones who invented writing in Mesoamerica.{{sfn|Saturno|Stuart|Beltrán|2006 |pp=1281–1283}} Scholarly consensus is that the Maya developed the only [[Writing system#Complete and partial writing systems|complete writing system]] in [[Mesoamerica]].{{sfn|Coe|1992|loc=preface}}

Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs destroyed many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Murray |first=Stuart |title=The Library An Illustrated History |publisher=Skyhorse Publishing |year=2009 |isbn=9781628733228 |pages=107}}</ref> Knowledge of the Maya writing system continued into the early colonial era and reportedly{{By whom|date=October 2017}} a few of the early [[Spain|Spanish]] priests who went to [[Yucatán]] learned it. However, as part of his campaign to eradicate pagan rites, Bishop [[Diego de&nbsp;Landa]] ordered the collection and destruction of written Maya works, and a sizable number of [[Maya codices]] were destroyed. Later, seeking to use their native language to convert the Maya to Christianity, he derived what he believed to be a Maya "alphabet" (the so-called [[de&nbsp;Landa alphabet]]). Although the Maya did not actually write alphabetically, nevertheless he recorded a glossary of Maya sounds and related symbols, which was long dismissed as nonsense (for instance, by leading Mayanist [[J. Eric S. Thompson|J. E. S. Thompson]] in his 1950 book ''Maya Hieroglyphic Writing'')<ref>{{Cite book|last=Robinson|first=Andrew|title=Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered- Scripts|publisher=Nevraumont Publishing Company|year=2002|location=New York City|pages=122}}</ref> but eventually became a key resource in [[decipherment|deciphering]] the Maya script. The difficulty was that there was no simple correspondence between the two systems, and the names of the letters of the Spanish alphabet meant nothing to Landa's Maya scribe, so Landa ended up asking things like ''write "ha": "hache–a",'' and glossed a part of the result as "H," which, in reality, was written as a-che-a in Maya glyphs.[[File:Diego de Landa's Maya alphabet, from page 36 of 'A larger history of the United States of America to the close of President Jackson's administration ... Illustrated, etc'.jpg|thumb|[[Diego de Landa|Diego de Landa's]] Maya alphabet was an early attempt at decipherment.]] Landa was also involved in creating an [[orthography]], or a system of writing, for the [[Yucatec Maya language]] using the [[Latin alphabet]]. This was the first Latin orthography for any of the Mayan languages,{{citation needed|date=February 2007}} which number around thirty.

For many years, only three [[Maya codices]] were known to have survived the conquistadors; this was expanded with the 2015 authentication of the [[Grolier Codex]] as the fourth.{{sfn|McKillop|2004| p=294}} Most surviving texts are found on pottery recovered from Maya tombs, or from [[monument]]s and [[stele|stelae]] erected in sites which were abandoned or buried before the arrival of the Spanish.

Knowledge of the writing system was lost, probably by the end of the 16th&nbsp;century. Renewed interest in it was sparked by published accounts of [[List of Maya sites|ruined Maya sites]] in the 19th&nbsp;century.{{sfn|McKillop|2004| p=294}}