Скачать или смотреть Dr Christian Prager - Visual Iconographic Dimension of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing

The subject of my talk is the written language of the Classic Maya. Maya hieroglyphic writing is a mixed logo-morphographic system that was used between 300 BC and 1600 AD. The sign inventory comprises around 800 elements depicting figurative and abstract objects from the natural environment and material culture, human and animal body parts, heads of humans and animals or portraits of supernaturals, among others. Texts, often associated with images and scenes, survived on more than 10,000 monuments, architectural elements or portable objects. To create a hieroglyphs text signs were “squeezed and stacked” into quadratic or rectangular blocks, the basic structural unit of a Classic Mayan text usually corresponding to the emic concept of a word. Blocks were arranged in double columns, read from left to right and from top to bottom. The elements within a block can be subdivided into main and small graphs, with the main graphs being spatially larger and approximately square in shape, and the small graphs being attached to the periphery of the main characters and oriented along their vertical or horizontal axis. These writing principles are consistent throughout the history of Maya writing, but texts and signs have a high degree of complexity and variation.

This talk was part of the CREWS Project conference 'Exploring the Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Systems', held in Cambridge in March 2019. For more information, visit https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/so....

The CREWS Project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758).