Mayan writing and modern graffiti

Call me strange, but I love the artwork of street graffiti. Not garden-variety gang nametags, but the colourful lively art like... like... Well, like the above picture. Why express in words what pictures can a thousand times better?

Strange as it may seem this has more to do with Mayan writing than you might think. We always like to feel smug in our modern world and believe that we've invented the best thing since sliced bread. For example, we like to think that we're the only civilization that has reached such stupendous levels of brilliance that we've invented machines despite the fact that machines were already in existence well before Julius Caesar. Putting away our delusions, we've just been reinventing the wheel over and over again. Of course, each time we end up with an exotic permutation but basically the same basic ideas are used and reused throughout eons.

Mayan writing was a beautifully complex hieroglyphic system that in some respects went much further than, say, Egyptian hieroglyphs, in terms of artistic license. I think it really shows off the creative intelligence of the Maya. One stele in particular really shines through in my mind as a perfect example of the extremes that the Maya went through to display both a robotic mastery of mathematical precision and yet also a divine inspiration in their expression. The stele is located in Quiriguá and has got to be one of the most complex examples of the Mayan writing system discovered so far.

Maybe with this example you can see what I mean now. Here is where ancient writing and image successfully merge together, as we find in modern street graffiti. Is it an image or is it a word? Why choose? It's both. It's meant to express on a far more profound level by displaying not only the nude word but also its personal clothing, a plethora of so many other ideas, related in a kind of artistic form of "hypertext", if I may be permitted to indulge in conceptual pun. Of course ironically, pun is itself a verbal form of hypertext. Mayan writing is seldom inanimate. The hand who carved this monument was intentionally endowing each glyph with the breath of life.

It's interesting how while the Maya believed this art to be sacred, we've by and large come to see the similar, talented creativity in street graffiti as profane. Perhaps in a thousand years, when prints of Warhol's Campbell's Soup become stale and bland, the art of meaning and the meaning of art will be once again respected as divine. Round and round the cultural wheel turns. When she stops, no one knows.

Egyptology and the modern world without time

So I've been obsessed with Egyptian for a while, noticing some interesting things about how the Egyptians represented words. It's not as simple as it first looks. Basically, Ancient Egyptians used pictographic symbols to spell out sounds like 's' or 'm', to represent entire words as a whole, and to signal what kind of word something is (ie. as 'determinatives'). So the word 'sun' can be spelled out as [rˁ] (for actual *rīʕa) with an accompanying determinative symbol to both describe the word (and perhaps also to delimit one word from the next somewhat), or it can be conveyed with the sun symbol itself followed by a single stroke to tell the reader that the symbol is to be read as a full word instead of a sound.

At first it all appears simple enough until you realize that Egyptian scribes were sometimes so ingeniously creative in exploring multiple ways of writing the same word that it's hard to tell sometimes whether a particular symbol in a particular sentence was really meant as a sound, an entire word or just a type of word.

To illustrate, take the word for 'father'. Sometimes people will tell you it was spelled [ỉtf] and sometimes [ỉt]. The later forms of this word in Coptic dialects show no trace of the supposed 'f' (Sahidic eiwt; see A Coptic Dictionary by Walter Crum, p.86). The sound 'f' in Ancient Egyptian is written as a horned viper. It turns out that since 'fathers' in the plural is also written out simply as three horned vipers, and since it's clear that the word is not really *[fff], we should probably understand the trailing 'f' not as a sound, but as a determinative conveying fatherhood somehow. Thus the true word for 'father' should be understood as simply [ỉt] despite the occasionally added horned viper glyph, thereby corresponding to both Coptic and Old Egyptian representations of the word lacking the 'f'. Anyone who continues to say that the word is really [ỉtf] should be slapped with a salami sandwich on rye.

Egyptian hieroglyphs never cease to fascinate me but all of these interesting cases of misreadings make me ponder more on how deceiving outdated books are, such as that of Sir Wallis Budge called An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. You can see the various Egyptian representations of the word 'father' here as it was represented in a similarly ancient book by Erman and Grapow called Ägyptisches Handwörterbuch. As you can see, the word is often spelled various ways without 't' making it clear that the word couldn't in reality have contained the sound 'f'. There are many misreadings like these commited eons ago that deserve a footnote commentary yet are absent in these republished books, whether online or in print. Yet it seems to me that it's this up-to-date information like the above factoid that is more educational to the general public than continually dishing out outdated sources for empty profit.

At that thought, my cynical mind starts analysing what "Information Age" really implies and its relationship to the concept briefly mentioned in the movie Matrix, that of a world without time. In some ways perhaps, it's a world of misinformation, previously four-dimensional, flattened into a three-dimensional one that pales in comparison, a universe that no longer distributes what is currently known to the general public because the masses no longer care about truth.

And then I chuckle at my internal, nihilistic musings while sitting in the café as usual, sipping my coffee, in solitude and deep reflection.

Origins of Mayan writing pushed back in time

And more on the Maya theme, it turns out that the Mayan writing system is really old (as if that wasn't already clear by the fact that it's insanely abstract and complex):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10724962/

Mayan-o-mania

So you want to learn some Mayan, eh? This site has hours and hours and hours of fun for those that can't stop marvelling at the intricate beauty of this ancient language and writing system:

http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/montgomery/index.html