How it began
The earliest known example of Maya writing was found at San Bartolo, a Preclassic Maya site in the lowlands of present-day Guatemala. In 2005 the archaeologist Boris Beltrán found a stone block from a dismantled wall deep inside the Las Pinturas pyramid, in a construction phase called Sub-V. Ten glyphs had been painted on it in a calligraphic hand. William Saturno, David Stuart and Beltrán reported the find in the journal Science in 2006.
Before it existed
Before the find, Maya writing was thought to have appeared later and to derive from other Mesoamerican scripts. Earlier claims for writing in the region include signs on Olmec objects of about 650 BCE in what is now Mexico, which some scholars regard as iconic symbols without a reading order. It had been widely assumed that the writing of Kaminaljuyú in the Guatemalan highlands was the direct precursor of lowland Maya writing.
How it works
True writing records spoken language in linear sequences. The San Bartolo text is a vertical column of painted signs that was probably part of a longer sequence. Only one sign can be read with confidence, the logogram AJAW, meaning lord or ruler. In glyphs painted about a century later in the murals room of the same pyramid, the syllables po, mo and ja can also be made out. The remaining signs are hard to read because so few texts of that age survive for comparison.
What changed first
The text was dated to between 300 and 200 BCE by radiocarbon analysis of five charcoal samples from sealed contexts in the building phases that bracket the painted room. This showed that Maya writing began significantly earlier than had been thought and placed it close in age to the earliest scripts known anywhere in Mesoamerica. The authors suggested that Maya writing might have influenced the Isthmian script instead of the reverse.
What lasted
The find supports the view that writing in the Maya lowlands had an older and independent history. The epigrapher David Stuart observed that a near-contemporary inscription on Stela 10 at Kaminaljuyú looks significantly different from the writing at San Bartolo, and that the two sites may represent different writing systems. In 2022 researchers reported fragments from the same site bearing the earliest known calendar notation from the Maya region.
