The Mayan writing system is very complex, somewhat between a being phonetic like our own alphabet, and logographic such as Chinese. The most amazing thing about ancient Mayan glyphs is that scribes could modify and change the writing to give it their own personal style. They could either spell words out phonetically, represent the word with a picture, or do a combination of both. In addition to that, each individual glyph could be modified as the scribe thought fit.
However, because of the phonetic nature of the Mayan alphabet, modern-day scribes are able to recreate almost any word or name by simply places the syllabic glyphs together in the proper order to form the whole word. The picture shown here is a great example of this. It is a Mayan glyph block representing the girls' name
Ava or
Eva, a popular baby name in the last few years. Hand-drawn prints like the one here can be purchased on our Etsy website,
NombreMaya.
