The Ancient Maya App is a tool to explore ancient Mayan language and culture. With it you can decode glyph blocks, hear a stela read in Mayan and convert dates. It is useful when you’re in a classroom, a museum, an archeological site or when studying on your own.
Reading ancient text typically requires identifying several glyphs, understanding what they mean and how they are combined. The app’s Decode Text feature includes over 600 glyphs and their meaning from Professor Alexandre Tokovinine’s “Beginner’s Visual Catalog of Mayan Hieroglyphs”. It makes it easy to start reading Mayan text. Technically speaking, it walks the user through converting glyphs block into transliterations. Here’s a short video showing it in action.
Mayan writing is wonderfully different from the writing systems found in Africa, Asia and Europe. This can serve as a hurdle for the uninitiated. To overcome this hurdle the app includes a gentle, example based learning module. This module starts with Professor Linda Schele’s drawing of Yaxchilan Stela 11. It explains Mayan writing via an audio track as different portions of Stela 11 are highlighted. This introductory track is available in both Spanish and English. It also contains an Ki’che Mayan audio track so the user can watch glyph blocks highlight they hear the words spoken by a native Mayan speaker.
Much ancient Mayan writing is based on a phonetic syllabary. The app includes a complete syllabary with their definitions using glyphs form Professor Nicholas Carter. They appear in a very traditional presentation to highlight the phonetic aspects of Mayan writing.
Mayan writing often includes calendar dates. The app can convert dates between the ubiquitous Gregorian calendar and the Mayan Long Count calendar.
The Ancient Maya App is a completely free app available to everyone in the iOS and Android app stores. Source code for the app will be released under an open source license. It collects absolutely no user data. Special thanks to those that have allowed us to include their material in this app: Professor Nicholas Carter, Professor Linda Schele via the Los Angles Country Museum of Art and Professor Alexandre Tokovinine. Comments and suggestions are most welcome at this site and at AncientMayaApp@gmail.com.
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