If You Don't Write It, It Didn't Happen

Our recent Rosetta Stone project left me with a dusty taste in my mouth.  Granted, that is probably because I spent the better part of two days carving messages into stone, and the residual dust got everywhere.  As I both carved in stone, and watched others do so, I had significant amounts of time to reflect on the lives of those people who previously would have done the same thing.  As it turns out, carving stone is tedious (who knew?) and takes a while to complete.  You want to do it right the first time, and you need to know what you're going to say, before you say it.  As our group was, in the majority, representing cultures where the only written records are monuments that have weathered millenia, it was interesting for us to decide on what we were going to write that would have been important enough to put on a stone monument.

Rosetta Project: My Maya Akkadian experience (Part 1 and 2)

First, this post is a compilation of both the first half and second half of my Rosetta learning experience. Some parts are labelled and specifically discuss on part of the project. Others are mixed.

Akkadian is tedious. When I found out we were assigned Akkadian, I found some basic information online regarding the grammar and symbols Source, but not enough to make sense of the lines and triangles on the clay tablet. Thus, I enlisted the help of Dr. Stratford, a BYU Professor and expert in Akkadian. I set up a meeting with him, and Erin met with him as I was unable to go at the time that worked for him. He provided as valuable information, informing us that the group had written the text in the wrong direction and gave us a guide of the symbols, which helped us to efficiently translate the cuneiform Akkadian, to the syllables, to English when we met as a group that night. These symbols then represent other syllables that have to be translated to English. Did I mention tedious? I wish we had included the syllabic translation of Akkadian on our Rosetta Stone, because it added another complicated dimension. The second half of the project Holland, Erin, Mike and I met at Mike's apartment to put all of our information together and resources together into the lovely "Rosetta Stone" pictured above.

I learned many things during this experience:

•  Make sure your source is accurate. If not, it will add additional complications.


• It fascinates me that these lines and triangles actually communicate something as it just looks like geometric configurations to me.  However, if these triangles are misplaced, it doesn't actually mean anything. If you are unfamiliar with the language, it can take a while to realize this. 

We not only had to deal with an unfamiliar language, but also with the mistakes of the group who wrote Akkadian. (This is understandable as it was a learning experience for them too.) Erin shared with us that Dr. Stratford had told her that the cuneiform text should be written horizontally–left to right. However, the Akkadian group had written their word vertically, top to bottom. . We wrote it correctly on our Rosetta Stone. I wonder how many mistakes and misinterpretations have been made throughout history. . . ?

Handle Your Medium with Care: 
The tablet broke while in class moments after we got it. Thankfully we had the modern technology of photographs and the internet so that we did not have to carry our broken slab of clay around throughout the entire translation process and risk losing this valuable information. This photo was an effective way to share the tablet so that we could all work on the translation process simultaneously in different places. Imagine how little information we would have today if the mediums were as fragile as this piece of clay. . .

This is the Akkadian clay tablet we received to translate. Notice the faint crack on the right hand side.
Yes, it broke into two pieces. Thankfully, it was still legible. Lesson learned: Some mediums need to be handled with more care than others.

Creating My Maya Signature

Sticking with the ongoing signature theme, and because I am in the Americas group, as a preface to the project this week I decided to do some more in-depth research in how to write in Maya. I realize it is quite complicated and will be a challenging project.
I learned there are multiple ways to write syllables and sounds. Thus, people could often have a unique style in writing their name. For this post, I am going to attempt to write my name in Maya.
I got my syllable glyph information from Famsi.org
The Mayas used what is called a "syllabrary", like an alphabet, but with syllables. This means that consonants and vowels are paired together. The phonetics of the vowels in Maya are similar to Spanish.

My name is "Brianne".  Based on what I read, in Maya, this would translate into the syllables Ba-Ri-an-ne and would be meshed as one glyph based on the number of syllables.
However, because there is NOT a hieroglyph that represents R I use the L+i sign. (According to Famsi.org). Thus, the Maya syllables I will use are Ba-Li-An-Ne.
 I used this image showing compilations of glyphs based on syllables in another post. However, now I actually know what it means.

The first half image is an example of a simple In the latter half, glyphs are numbered. Glyphs change shape, significance, and position depending on the numbers of syllables in a word. Each number represents a different glyph that represents a syllable. Because my name has 4 syllables in maya, I will use the structure with only 4.

Maya Stela 5: Mormon Myths, Misconceptions, and Methodology

Izapa Stela 5

Today my post is a response to a presentation by Dr. Mark Wright that I attended yesterday at the Religion Symposium regarding Izapa Stela 5 (pictured to the right). As I reflected on his presentation, what I learned helped tie together written knowledge and the misconceptions that can occur when one misinterprets the written word of another culture or worse, takes it out of its cultural context. If these misinterpretations are then spread through both modern oral folklore and written knowledge, it becomes especially difficult to learn the truth as one's judgement's becomes trained to see what they want to believe.  
Dr. Wright is an expert in the Maya Hieroglyphs and has spent many field studies studying the Maya. He is particularly interested in correlations between the ancient Maya people and the Book of Mormon. 


Many experts have their theory about Stela 5. Some LDS scholars think that it depicts Lehi's Vision of the Tree of Life as found in the Book of Mormon in 1 Nephi Ch 8.  I have heard this Mormon myth before and was excited to learn if it had any validity.


Wright's objective was to demonstrate the importance of having good data and good methodology in order to have the most accurate conclusions that are not biased by one's assumptions regarding the interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs. 

Intro to Maya glyphs

This serpent is a hieroglyph at the Maya ruin Uxmal. I took this picture during a light show,
Thus, it's lit up and easy to see the snake on the Maya ruin wall.

When I went to Mexico,  I saw their hieroglyphs first hand, preserved after thousands of years. . There are hundreds of hieroglyphs. The Maya can write anything that they can say. Hieroglyphs consist of logograms (to express meaning) or syllabograms (to denote sound values), and are used to write words, phrases, and sentences (Source).



I found this fantastic reference online that goes through the different Maya glyphs. It's interesting that their structure of writing was so advanced that they have slightly varying hieroglyphs to represent different tenses of verbs.

Popol Vuh Preservation and Modern Maya

I went to the HBLL today and learned that there are 36 books on the Popol Vuh--most of them being different translations and editions of the book. I checked out one in English and one in Spanish from 1905 (the oldest edition I could find) 1954, (bonus: I speak Spanish :) ) and have been studying them to learn more about their oral tradition and preservation. Books can't be translated perfectly from one language to another without losing some of the savor of the original meaning of the text. For example, the Popol Vuh was translated from Maya, to Spanish, to English, and other languages.

What originated from an oral, fluid tradition is now locked into words on a page. Words can change from edition to edition, but they don't have the same fluidity as speaking.

In my research I've learned that the Popol Vuh originated as part of an ancient oral tradition and consists of a collection of traditions that are based in a mix of historical fact and mythical interpretation. It makes sense that the mythical interpretation came about from passing the history down through stories. Eventually, these stories were written down (in the 1500's) to be preserved.  Maya hieroglyphs could record any idea that could be spoken because it is a phonetic language rather than a pictorial form of writing (Source). 

The Mayas valued knowledge and the scribes--who kept the records--were among the most valued people in their society. 

The Popol Vuh frequently uses the mnemonic device of parallelism within the stories to connect ideas and increase fluidity. This Quiché tradition has its roots in using parallelism in speech oral tradition  Parallelism was often used so that the storyteller could easily connect from one part to another and have key words and phrases to help them remember and tell the stories orally. (Source)