This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For most of the twentieth century, the leading authority on Maya writing insisted the glyphs could not be sounded out. Eric Thompson, the era's most influential Mayanist, argued that Maya hieroglyphs worked as a rebus system, symbols standing for whole words and ideas rather than for sounds, and largely as a record of calendar, astronomy and ritual rather than of ordinary history. In 1952, a Soviet linguist named Yuri Knorozov, working in Moscow with no access to the archaeological sites themselves, published an argument that the glyphs were substantially phonetic, that many combined a consonant and vowel into a single syllable sign and that Maya scribes had written their own spoken language much as any other syllabic script does. Thompson dismissed the claim, at one point describing it as Marxist propaganda, and given the Cold War political climate of the early 1950s the accusation carried real weight in Western academic circles. Knorozov's approach was not seriously tested against the actual inscriptions for years, and wide acceptance took decades longer still, arriving only after Thompson's death in 1975 as a new generation of epigraphers began testing the phonetic method directly against the stone monuments and painted ceramics of the Maya lowlands and found that it worked. The eventual vindication reordered the whole field: rather than a static ceremonial calendar, the glyphs turned out to record the names, wars, marriages and successions of real Maya kings and queens, a written history hiding in plain sight for a century of scholarship that had assumed it could not exist.