POLITICAL DOMINATION AND LINGUISTIC PREFERENCES IN ANCIENT MAYA HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING: A CASE STUDY OF PIEDRAS NEGRAS AND YAXCHILAN

Abstract

Long prior to the arrival of the Spanish to the New World, ancient Maya history relates tales of contact and conquest among the inhabitants of the Maya region. Composed of a set of related but distinct cultures who spoke a spectrum of Mayan languages, the prestige language used in the written tradition was broadly homogeneous. Prior studies have suggested that regional language varieties influenced scribal preferences in a handful of linguistic features that appear in the texts. New linguistic data from Late Classic (AD 650–830) monuments reveal a more nuanced story — a tale in which political domination impacted the elite written language. This paper looks at a case study of monuments from Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras whose authors employed specific linguistic traits. I argue these were enforced at the level of the scribal school, and these same traits are reflected in the scribal preferences of the sites subordinate to each. Scribal schools, as they can be identified by paleographic, iconographic, and now linguistic styles, are themselves manifestations of the contemporaneous political dynamic. While conquest in the Classic era took a very different form than later colonization by Europeans, it nonetheless left a significant mark on Maya peoples’ history.