Colonial-era Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa also provided help for future scholars by getting scribes who were still able to write in the Maya language to transliterate the Spanish alphabet into Maya glyphs. Stuart describes the codices as "handbooks for priests", focusing on astronomical calculations that were quite elaborate and accurate. Three books of bark paper survived the Spanish purge and were rediscovered in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe as the Dresden Codex, the Paris Codex and the Madrid Codex. When the Spaniards arrived in Central America in the 1500s, they did their best to destroy the writings of "heathen" scribes still working in the language of the Maya. Scholars had long thought Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk' died in battle, but the new text showed that he had not. In another post, he described how the sign for the phonetic syllable "yo", meaning "his" or "her", might be the word symbol "yop", meaning "leaf", in other texts.Ī third post described a new translation of an inscription from Guatemala, recording the visit of King Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk' of Calakmul on 29 January 696, five months after his defeat by armies from the kingdom of Tikal. Last month, for instance, Stuart posted a description of new excavations from Guatemala that suggest the Maya were not necessarily direct descendants of the earlier Olmec culture, as some archaeologists have maintained. You want to lay claim to a new idea and get it noticed by colleagues." "You don't have to wait two years for publication. "The web log gets ideas out quickly, which is very appealing," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, a longtime Stuart collaborator. The work will take years, but with the help of the internet, the pace is quicker than it has ever been. So five years ago, Stuart started up Maya Decipherment, a blog for scholars and amateurs to post new inscriptions, refine translations and debate the subtleties of Mayan language, all in an effort to fill out the history of the civilisation. But I thought that if I had a blog, I could talk about new things and bring out some old stuff from my dusty files." "I had all these boxes of notes and papers in my office, and I was never going to publish every little observation. Enter University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart, one of the world's leading experts in Maya script.
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