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Project “Xoc” Some Keys to Maya Hieroglyphics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
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Project “Xoc” is an attempt to discover new keys to Maya hieroglyphics, using readily available source material. “Xoc” is the Maya word for “count”; the authors found that counting the progression of days in the Maya calendar forward and backward numerous times led to their first stage of discovery. The Maya use of hieroglyphics in the ceremonial and secular calendars was pointed out by Bishop Diego de Landa in his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, written during the 1560's. Landa's book was lost for three hundred years, but in the century since it was rediscovered, other scholars have expanded his findings to the point that the Maya calendar use of hieroglyphics is well understood.
The hieroglyphic text is another matter. Scholars are generally agreed that the codices deal with astronomy and agriculture and that any text, if and when deciphered, would deal with those fields only, rather than in the broad spectrum of Maya life.
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- Copyright © University of Miami 1968
References
1 We used the Seventh Edition (México, D.F., Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1938).
2 Ephemeris of the Sun, Polaris and Other Selected Stars, prepared by Nautical Almanac Office, United States Naval Observatory (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office).
3 Star map from Vincent de Callatay, Alias of the Sky, tr. by Sir Harold Spencer Jones (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1958), p. 28.
4 See sketches in George Brainerd, “The Archaeological Ceramics of Yucatan,” Anthropological Record No. 19 (Berkeley: University of California), and Figs. 5a and 5b of this report.
5 If our research had been far enough advanced at the time, we would have been able to see Venus and the “Snared Deer” as depicted in the Madrid Codex. Our point of observation, Miami, Florida, and Yucatán are within four degrees of latitude. (Yucatan's northern tip is about N. latitude 21.5°; Miami is 24° N.)
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8 Italics ours.
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11 “Mr. Magoo” is a North American motion picture cartoon character. The striking resemblance of this glyph to Mr. Magoo provoked the thought that the making of face profiles might be a device of the Maya hieroglyphic system.
12 Eric, J. Thompson, S., A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, 1st. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962).Google Scholar