This is Tommy, reporting in on some exciting developments. Over the past few weeks I have been testing the reading portion of the Ancient Maya App on the Dresden Codex, as part of my long term goal to better understand and develop the syllabaries and images we use in the app. What I have found so far has been extremely useful and will give us solid direction for expanding the utility of the app on multiple fronts.
For this experiment I used three tools: a full upscalled black and white printout of the Dresden Codex, printouts of four different syllabaries, and the app on my phone. I dowloaded the 78 pages of the Dresden Codex from the Library of Congress website (https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667917/) at the maximum resolution and printed them on legal paper, as that was close to the correct dimentions (though enlarged by about 1.5x). The four syllabaries I used where Kettunen & Helmke’s (https://www.mesoweb.com/resources/handbook/IMH2020.pdf), David Stuart’s (https://mayadecipherment.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/maya-syllabary-v2.pdf), Alexandre Tokovinine’s (https://www.mesoweb.com/resources/catalog/Tokovinine_Catalog.pdf), and a syllabary by Carlos Pallan Gayol I found in this Unicode document (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18038-mayan.pdf). And then obviously the Read function of the Ancient Maya App uses Tokovinine’s syllabary, the same one referenced above.
At first I started by simply using the app to decipher glyphs in the codex, and found that the app was working wonderfully to fulfill the purpose for which it was designed! As you can see from the images above matching certain glyphs from the codex to images in the app went smoothly. The two glyphs circled in red are for the syllable “li” and are very close to the image drawn by Tokovinine. However, as I continued I found that matching all of the glyphs was going to be much more difficult, as the style employed by Tokovinine (and thus used as our reference in the app) is very different from the style used by the scribes who wrote the Dresden Codex. His glyphs are very elaborate with lots of detail, while theirs are pared down and comparatively simple. This is when I realized that Gayol’s syllabary was a perfect match! All of the images he used are pulled directly from the Dresden Codex, making identifying the glyphs extremely easy. Below you can see side by side how much easier a glyph like “chi” is to identify using Gayol’s syllabary rather than Tokovinine’s.
So what does this mean? Firstly the layout and baseline function of the app as is proved itself to be very useful. The digital version of Tokovinine’s syllabary was much more accessibly and util than the printout I also had on hand. However, the stylistic and artistic differences between the syllabary in the app and the specific work I was trying to decipher was extremely impactful. As such, I think a future area of development for the app would be to add additional syllabaries to our system, and allow the user to choose which “font” they would like to use in any given moment. This would allow for greater utility on a larger number of applicaitons.
That’s it for now, thank you all for reading! Best, Tommy