![]() As cities grew and their populations became more diverse and interdependent, creating and maintaining common and consistent means of measurement, and assigning collective meaning to events and structures, became more important. Tangible records did not depend on human memory, but were external to the individual they transcended particular contexts and could be inspected and verified. Writing systems-and other forms of information technology-were invented or adopted as a way to organize and run cities that had become too large to administer by word of mouth, and to store, sort, and retrieve information across space and time. Writing was invented independently in at least three places-Sumer, China, and Mesoamerica-and perhaps in many more, and it spread from the places it was invented just like any other technology, through conquest, trade, and imitation. Writing began not as a way to record speech, but to record data, such as tallies of days, animals, people, or measures of grain: it was an information technology that later became a communications technology. This short teaching module includes guidance on introducing and discussing the four primary sources. This module includes four examples of Maya writing, one of which led to frenzied claims that the Maya had predicted the end of the world or a great transformation would come December 21, 2012. ![]() Others relate to the two cyclical calendars used by the Maya to determine the proper times for religious rituals, one of them cyclical and the other linear. Many of the surviving large-scale inscriptions are historical documents recording events in the lives of the Maya kings, queens, and nobles. Classic Maya writing was painted or inscribed with large glyphs in public places where it could be easily seen, on books made of treated tree bark, on dishes and cups, and on smaller objects made of valuable materials designed to be worn or diplayed. It’s not a bad effort in some places, but note the ‘bird with wings’ the artist has created in the bottom rightmost glyph, as well as some missing or invented details in a few other places.” So my intuition’s that (1) it was partially invented and (2) the artist followed the Portlandia mantra “put a bird on it” both check out! I was paying attention.In the period from 200 to 900 C.E, which scholars later labelled the Classic Period, the Maya developed the most complex writing system in the Americas, a script with nearly a thousand characters (termed “glyphs”) that represent concepts and sounds, which over the last fifty years has been largely deciphered. He went on to explain that “the Chipotle artist has also picked glyphs at random from this collection and has made his best attempt to copy them. Primarily because their original order couldn’t be determined, but also because most of them couldn’t be read at that time, the curators at Palenque’s archaeological site museum unfortunately ended up mounting them in (unreversible) cement, placing similar signs next to one another and creating a nonsensical text. ![]() The stuccos were then recovered piecemeal by several different archaeological projects between the 1920s and 1950s. He explained: “The text was commissioned by the early 8 th-century king K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Nahb, and had fallen from the rear wall of a temple in antiquity.
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