Stephen Houston

Literacy among the Pre-Columbian Maya: A Comparative Perspective

Literacy, the ability to link language and script, forms one of the most important topics in twentieth-century linguistics (e.g., Ong 1982). On a practical level literacy relates to matters of pedagogy and societal development (Cipolla 1969; Sanderson 1972; Street 1984), and on a theoretical level to the interaction of spoken and written language and the intensity of cognitive change (Chafe and Tannen 1987; Goody 1987: 263). Still undeveloped, however, is an understanding of literacy in the Pre-Columbian world, particularly among the Maya of Mesoamerica, where scribal arts reached an extraordinary degree of accomplishment and complexity. This essay explores the Maya evidence for literacy against a backdrop of comparative information from other parts of Mesoamerica and the Old World. Its aim: to present a perspective on literacy that goes beyond the particulars of Maya culture, yet enriches the debate on ancient literacy and its consequences with evidence from a region that has been persistently neglected or misunderstood by writers on the subject (e.g., Goody 1987: 22, 23).

Perspectives on Ancient Literacy

The subject of ancient literacy presupposes several questions: Is there a universal definition of literacy, or should literacy be defined in highly variable and culturally determined ways? How does reading depart from writing—that is, to what extent does a text record a complete message, to be studied at leisure in a setting divorced from the oral recitation of that message? By their nature do certain writing systems, particularly those of a logosyllabic kind, inhibit the growth of widespread literacy and reflective mindsets? And how many could read and write in the ancient world?

What makes these questions difficult to answer is the nature of the available evidence. Unlike modern linguists, who have the benefit of living speakers to survey and interview, we cannot study ancient literacy by direct means. In archaeological terms, this stems from the problem of inadequate sampling. Often, the relative lack or abundance of inscriptions reveals little or nothing about literacy, about how many people could write, who could write, and to what degree. Other forms of writing simply failed to survive, so that negative evidence cannot be interpreted as a sign of limited literacy (Harvey 1966: 586, 590; Mann 1985: 206; Johnston 1983: 66). We can escape from this impasse by dealing with the few direct clues that survive and by examining indirect clues—expectations derived from the study of comparable writing systems, from what the ancients themselves said about literacy, and from an understanding of how scripts functioned in society.

Defining Literacy

With such evidence we can address the first question: What are the definitions of literacy? The more abundant data from the Old World reveal an enormous range of meanings (Schofield 1968: 313-314; Thomas 1989: 19-20, 33-34). In the first place, the ability to read was not necessarily the same as the ability to write (Clanchy 1979: 183; Harris 1989: 5), since the latter often involved greater preparation and skill. Ironically, in some societies of Late Antiquity, a person could be regarded as "literate" or even be termed a "scribe," yet show minimal competence; that is, some people could write but not read! The scribes from Fayum, Egypt, barely able to scrawl their names or copy another's script, are notorious in this regard (see also Troll 1990: 113-114); yet witness their anger when characterized as illiterate (Youtie 1971: 248), a situation that compelled the Emperor Justinian to avoid confusion in his notarial system by recognizing various degrees of literacy (Youtie 1971: 254, 261). At the other extreme lies the Chinese conception of "full literacy" (Rawski 1979: 4-5). In imperial China, literacy presupposed a thorough grounding in Confucian learning. Nonetheless, more objective measures of literacy in China signal the widespread ability to use Chinese characters as early as the fifth century A.D., although exegetical skill is likely to have been limited in all periods (Rawski 1979: 5).

The essential point here is that literacy was often defined in cultural terms and in ways that make it difficult to evaluate the meaning of ancient references to the numbers of people who could read or write. For this reason alone, we should adopt a flexible definition of literacy. Attempts to define "full" literacy in rigid terms, such as Eric Havelock's emphasis on a personalized literary tradition recorded in alphabetic script (e.g., Havelock 1982: 6, 27, 57), cast the term in ways that seem tendentious, leading to invidious comparisons with Classical Greece. By liberating the word from Havelock's Classical grip, we can acknowledge not so much different kinds of literacy, as a continuum of scribal practice that ranges along two axes.

The first axis is production ("writing"), which extends from the Fayum scribe's crude signature to the calligraphic masterworks of Chinese mandarins. The second axis charts the response to an encoded message ("reading"), ranging from the bare perception of meaning or sound to a facility with detailed exegesis. States of literacy may be illustrated graphically by imagining a two-dimensional coordinate system, with production on the x axis and response on the y. If ascending competence is charted from left to right, and from top to bottom, then the lower left and upper right corners represent, respectively, the nadir and pinnacle of scribal accomplishment; the terms of reference are not an absolute standard of literacy, but lie within the tradition itself. A person capable of fluent reading and exegesis, but incapable of effective draughtmanship, would fit into the lower right corner; a craftsman carving a Maya text or a Medieval scribe copying a passage composed by another would fit a slot in the upper left.

There is another point to keep in mind. The biaxial continuum of production and response touches on literacy at both the personal level and within the scribal tradition as a whole. Just as ability shifts within a person's lifetime (not always progressively!), so does the level of scribal expertise change within a single society. In the case of ancient Egypt, such changes occur in response to moments of political and economic...