Maya Scribes — Keepers of Glyphs

The Maya writing system is the most fully developed writing system in pre-Columbian America — a combination of logograms and syllabic signs that could express any concept in the spoken Maya language. Maya scribes — the Ah Tz'ib — were members of the elite, trained from childhood in the art of carving stone and painting books. They created the Dresden Codex, the only nearly complete Maya manuscript that survived the Spanish burning of Maya libraries in 1562. Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the books burned. He then wrote his own description of the Maya writing system. Both the destruction and the preservation happened in the same year, by the same hand.

These signs carry the Maya glyph blocks, the scribe's brush, the codex pages, and the writing system that a civilization encoded its entire knowledge into.