Maya hieroglyphic writing was carved on stone monuments, written in bark-paper codices, and painted upon funerary pottery. The stone inscriptions, formerly thought to record only calendrical information, have been found to contain dynastic histories. The codices treat exclusively of ritual matters, while the texts and pictures on the pottery are concerned with the perilous voyage of the soul to the underworld. The script evolved from a highly pictographic system into one that had a strong phonetic-syllabic component. As calligraphy, Maya writing was a basically painterly art.
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