At major Maya cities of the eighth century, surfaces of buildings and monuments undulated with images of nobles performing ritual gestures, often amid cosmological frameworks. Springing feathers and bulging ornaments patterned the surfaces, invading the blocks of hieroglyphic texts that framed them. These complex visual phenomena were given a degree of consistency in two principal ways. Maya artist-scribes expressed the semantic congruence between art and writing with an aesthetic focus on calligraphic line that distinguished Maya art and architecture from that of other contemporary Mesoamerican societies (Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of Line, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Furthermore, despite the tensions generated by competition for resources and cultural hegemony, Maya city-states developed relatively consistent visual communication systems that promoted the expression of common ways of understanding the world. As Reading Maya Art by Andrea Stone and Marc Zender makes clear, artist-scribes (aj ts’ihb) and ritual curators (aj k’uhuun) used many of the same visual symbols as they painted and inscribed pictorial and textual elements on public monuments and personal objects for the elite. This “free flow of pictorial elements between Maya art and writing” (12) allows both to be studied as a unified graphic communication system.

Early explorers such as Alfred P. Maudslay suspected, by the 1880s, that writing penetrated the pictorial field. However, until the mid-twentieth century, most studies of Maya graphic communication systems focused either on text or image. Experts publicly disagreed as to whether Maya script was phonetic and was used to record spoken language. Some proposed that texts contained historical information, but others argued that the glyphs were esoteric hymns to time. Progress in textual decipherment required contributions from several fields, including anthropology, linguistics, and art history. As scholars have painstakingly studied the expanding corpus of hieroglyphic texts, they have demonstrated that the Maya developed one of the world’s four pristine writing systems (in the narrowest definition of writing as graphemes that record elements of language). The written signs consist of logographs (schematized representations of things that denote words), syllabographs (signs that represent syllables, usually consonant + vowel), and some signs that stand for vowels. Scholars have also reached near agreement that the majority of written texts transcribed a pan-regional prestige language, Classic Ch’olti’an. As decipherments have become more secure, scholars have read many of the texts in this Mayan language.

Interpretations of the pictorial content of Maya painting and sculpture shifted as textual decipherments solidified. At mid-century, George Kubler considered art and writing to be distinct, complementary modes of communication. When he published Studies in Maya Iconography (Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 28, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969), few hieroglyphs had been deciphered, so he approached the topic by identifying pictorial themes. Less than twenty years later, the age of decipherment had begun in earnest, and Linda Schele and Mary Miller’s study of iconography was informed by their knowledge of glyphic names, titles, labels, and events. Their exhibition catalogue, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art, sustained this thematic approach to the visual field and added an iconographic guide to gods and icons, labeling the pictorial elements (e.g., optic nerve, GIII as the Baby Jaguar) on hundreds of drawings (New York: George Braziller, 1986). Inevitably, new studies have amplified this foundational work. Many widely accepted interpretations of images, the double-headed snake for example, have been overturned after a newly deciphered text identified the image as something quite different—in this case, Scolopendra gigantea, the poisonous tropical American centipede, chapaht in the Ch’orti’ language (179).

Thus until recently, it has not been practicable to demonstrate the intriguing interaction between image and text. The problem demanded expertise from specialists in language, writing, and art, and Reading Maya Art is the result of such a collaboration between art historian Andrea Stone and epigrapher Marc Zender. They present this first sustained attempt to examine the imagery in terms of the logographs that permeate its symbolic vocabulary as an alternative to the thematic approach. The book succeeds in its aim to help students acquire iconographic literacy so that they can view Maya art with an understanding of its subject matter as well as with an appreciation for its “perplexing beauty” (8). However, this modest statement of purpose belies the fact that the book raises important questions about the practice of “reading art” as an alternative form of literacy among the Maya.

Reading Maya Art contains entries on one hundred logographs, selected to illustrate the fluidity between writing, speech, and imagery. Each entry provides information regarding the origin and diagnostic features of the sign, offers a phonetic reading (if available), and presents examples of how the logograph appeared in a range of pictorial and sculptural contexts. The examples are illustrated in line drawings (with relevant symbols highlighted in red) and photographs. To help a reader identify a symbol, the table of contents displays the logographs in nineteen sections, including People, Parts and Positions of the Human Body, Musical Instruments, Natural Elements and Materials, Architecture, Colors, The Heavens, Animals, Plants and Their Products, etc. Terms used in the entries are defined in a glossary. A notes section is keyed to the entries and provides references to the publications in which the decipherments and interpretations were originally published. This is an invaluable aid to students and more seasoned researchers. These and more general works are listed in an extensive bibliography. Because of its limited scope, the book serves best as a supplement to earlier contributions, or as a springboard to expanding definitions of “book,” “reading,” and “literacy.”

Reading Maya Art is the third in Thames and Hudson’s series on “reading” the arts of iconographically rich non-Western societies. Not only do the three serve as dictionaries of symbols for their respective traditions, but they also provide a convenient way to compare strategies for the graphic communication of ideas. Buddhist sculptures and paintings rarely incorporate extended written texts, so Meher McArthur’s Reading Buddhist Art shows how religious symbols adapted to the different cultural systems that embraced Buddhist teachings (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). In contrast, both Maya and Egyptian pictorial communication systems employ many of the same symbols in art and writing. In Reading Egyptian Art, Richard H. Wilkinson maintains that hieroglyphic words and written signs influence the form of, or are embedded in, pictorial forms (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992). In Reading Maya Art, Stone and Zender compare Maya and Egyptian strategies of symbolic representation. They find that the more rigid Egyptian system insists on the individuality and the wholeness of each sign, while in the Maya system scribes abbreviated or combined symbolic elements. The emphasis on flexible formation of phonetic and logographic signs afforded Maya scribes great potential for creative expression.

In the introduction, Stone and Zender discuss several principles by which the Maya conveyed information graphically. The fundamental strategy was to incorporate logographs and syllabographs into a pictorial scene to provide specific information. For example, to draw a mountain, an aj ts’ihb would delineate a zoomorphic face with no lower jaw, replace the forehead with a step-and-curl contour, and infix it with the diagnostic sign for “stone,” TUUN, which served as a “property qualifier” (13). These elements—face, sign, and shape—would create a WITZ, or animate sacred mountain (entry 55). The image of a deity could sit on such a mountain, and a “dimple” could transform it into a throne, TZ’AM. With the addition of signs for “jaguar” (HIX; entry 83) the WITZ symbol could become a proper name, HIX-WITZ, “Jaguar Hill” (24), that identified the location of a figural scene. In these ways, whether the artist-scribe was designing the pictorial or textual part of an image, he (female scribes were rare) used similar compositional strategies of stylizing, abbreviating, clustering, and conflating the essential signifying elements of one thing into another form.

Just as logographs and signs are embedded in figural scenes, bodily forms, poses, and gestures seen in pictorial imagery appear in logographs. Many stelae are carved with the image of a ruler with a downward-pointing hand, elegantly tossing small circles in a ritual act of offering. The hand is usually emphasized in a scene by being centrally located or framed with negative space. The same hand may appear, disembodied, as the verb “to throw,” CHOK (entry 20), in a glyphic text, again often highlighted by appearing in a prominent place.

Although Maya art is often praised for its naturalism, Stone and Zender demonstrate that its forms are conventionalized to a significant degree, so that they function efficiently as conveyers of meaning. Human figures, for example, may have naturalistic proportions, but they will be shown in conventionalized views (primarily in profile) as bearers of symbolic gestures and regalia. However, symbolic structures were not unambiguous. Stone and Zender describe a practice of “oblique referencing” that introduces ambiguity into the reading of pictures. A scroll, for example, might refer to smoke, maize foliage, breath, water, or blood. “Motivating this extreme degree of sign standardization, perhaps, was an underlying conceptual interrelationship of the denoted items as actual or metaphorical ‘sustenance’” (24). Rather than one-to-one correspondences between symbols and their referents, Mesoamericans saw aspects of the world as related by their forms (trees and phalluses carry fluid through long shafts) and functions (the fluid possesses animating energy) in a polyvalent relational system. As an addition to each entry, Stone and Zender include a list of other logographs that participated in the conceptual web.

The combination of ambiguous and specific information in a scene allowed readers of images to improvise as they engaged a pictorial scene, bringing to it corporeal responses, personal knowledge and memory, and desire. Indeed, Stone and Zender state that “juxtaposed texts and pictures were quite possibly read aloud” (15). Whether a reading was vocalized or mentally contained, the likelihood is that each was a unique interpretive act, drawing upon and prioritizing different aspects of the symbolic webs. This feature helps situate Maya art and writing within the larger scope of Mesoamerican graphic communication systems. According to Elizabeth Boone, the Mixtec and Aztec used pictorial symbols organized in spatial syntax, so that the structure of the information—whether it was organized as a sequential narrative, or as a diagram or list that governed positionality and proximity, or as a cartographic presentation—generated relational meaning (Elizabeth Boone, “Beyond Writing,” in The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, ed., Stephen Houston, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 313–48). Although Mexican pictography, as Boone calls it, contains some names and symbols that can be spoken, these never functioned independently of the pictorial system as Maya writing could. Readers of an Aztec calendric almanac analyzed the elements of that pictorial table, considered their relationships, applied their prior knowledge to the relevant dates and deities, and generated an interpretive reading. Despite the efforts of Boone and others to point out that Mexican pictography conveys information while deliberately curtailing the use of phonetic elements, most considerations of literacy among the Maya have focused on texts and ignored the pictorial elements. Reading Maya Art provides the growing fields of graphic communication and alternative literacy studies with new ways to think about how the Maya engaged the rich pictorial textures of their monuments, paintings, and cities. With its accessible organization and well-chosen examples, it is also an essential sourcebook for students and Mayanists.