isolated personal-name glyphs carved in a royal tomb at palenque. It was beginning to appear that history was indeed recorded in the Maya hieroglyphs. In 1960 the issue was put beyond doubt with the publication of a brilliant paper by the U.S. scholar tatiana proskouriakoff. This paper dealt principally with the inscriptions from the site of Piedras Negras: Proskouriakoff showed that the carved stone monuments were grouped into “sets,” each of which addressed the reign of an individual king. She identified birth and coronation glyphs and also showed that the same pattern seemed to occur in other classic Maya sites. Much of the work in the decades following the publication of Proskouriakoff’s paper has focused on deciphering the exploits of the various Maya kings and their relationships—both peaceful and bellicose—with one another.

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Mayan lintel listing the nine generations of rulers at Yaxchilan ca. A.D. 450–550

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Meanwhile, advances were being made on another front. By the early 1950s a thorny issue concerning Maya writing was being revisited—whether the script was purely logographic (made up of word signs) or whether it contained syllabic signs. On two previous occasions, in the 1890s and 1930s, proponents of “phoneticism”—who believed that syllabic signs were a component of Maya script—had lost the debate. Now a young Russian scholar, Yuri Knorosov, was renewing the battle. He had an advantage over earlier researchers in that he had studied other writing systems and thus knew the kinds of features and structures to expect in ancient scripts. He argued that Maya script contained both logograms and syllabic signs and (acknowledging earlier work) that Landa’s “alphabet” was in fact primarily a list of syllabic signs corresponding to the pronunciation of the Spanish letters Landa had elicited. In this way—and by using examples drawn mostly from the codices—Knorosov proposed correct readings of many Maya syllabic signs; he also gave the first plausible account of the structure of Maya writing. Although his work was heavily criticized by several scholars (led by Sir Eric Thompson), his arguments gradually gained favor, and today they form the basis on which the very successful phonetic decipherment of Maya writing has been made.

In many ways research since the 1960s has been a refinement and extension of the foundations laid by Proskouriakoff, Berlin, and