Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan

Established in 2014 by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste) in Düsseldorf, together with the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities (Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften) in Berlin, the Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan (Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya) at the University of Bonn investigates the hieroglyphic writing and language of the ancient Maya. In cooperation with the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen), the project develops a digital text database, corpus-based dictionary, and interdisciplinary research environment for Maya inscriptions, images, linguistic analyses, and contextual information on text-bearing artefacts. The Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) later joined the project and contributed to the development of the research portal.

Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan

Project Overview

The Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan (Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya, TWKM) is a long-term research project at the University of Bonn. It was established in 2014 by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste) together with the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities (Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften).

The project is directed by Prof. Dr. Nikolai Grube and coordinated by Dr. Christian Prager at the Department of Anthropology of the Americas (Abteilung für Altamerikanistik) at the University of Bonn.

The project studies the writing and language of the ancient Maya on the basis of the surviving hieroglyphic inscriptions. More than 10,000 texts are known from monuments, ceramics, wood, bone, shell, and other materials.

The aim of the project is to document this material systematically and to develop a digital text database and a corpus-based dictionary of Classic Mayan. The inscriptions also provide important evidence for the history, politics, religion, and culture of the ancient Maya. Since many texts contain exact calendar dates, they make it possible to study changes in writing and language over time and across different regions.

Digital Research Infrastructure

Much of the project's digital work is organised through the Interdisciplinary Database of Classic Mayan (IDIOM). IDIOM was created within the TextGrid research environment in collaboration with the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen). The Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) later joined the project and was responsible for developing the research portal.

IDIOM is used to document and interlink information on:

inscribed artefacts,
hieroglyphic texts,
archaeological sites and places,
persons,
historical events,
provenance information, and
scholarly literature.

The underlying data structure is based on RDF and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM), allowing inscriptions to be linked directly to their material, archaeological, and historical contexts.

Text Encoding and Research Data

The hieroglyphic texts are encoded in TEI/XML and linked to other project resources.

Controlled vocabularies are used to describe objects, materials, findspots, museums, and other relevant information in a consistent way.

The project bibliography is maintained in Zotero, while the Maya Image Archive (MIA) contains photographs, drawings, and other visual documentation of inscribed objects.

Digital Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs

The Digital Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs documents the individual signs of the Maya writing system and provides stable identifiers for them.

The catalog supports the systematic identification, comparison, and description of hieroglyphic signs across the corpus.

Linguistic Annotation

Linguistic analysis is carried out with the Annotator for Linguistic Analysis of Maya Hieroglyphs (ALMAH).

ALMAH supports:

transliteration,
morphological analysis,
morphosyntactic analysis,
semantic annotation,
the documentation of alternative readings, and
the comparison of textual variants.

Research Goals

Together, these resources allow researchers to work with Maya inscriptions as a structured digital corpus and to compare texts, signs, words, linguistic structures, places, objects, and historical contexts across different sites and periods.

The database supports the continuing decipherment of Maya writing as well as research on Classic Mayan language, writing, history, and culture.

Project Resources

Further information and related digital resources are available through the following project websites:

Data in the TextGrid Repository

The research data published in this TextGrid project form part of the digital research infrastructure of the Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan.

Individual datasets and resources may be connected to external project services and research applications through persistent identifiers and linked-data references.

Citation

If you use data from this TextGrid project in a publication, please cite the relevant dataset or resource using its persistent identifier.