Editor's note: Portions of this column are revised from a blog entry by one of the authors.
Roughly 50 Maya “emblem glyphs” can be found in Classic Maya inscriptions, although more are slowly being discovered. These emblem glyphs symbolize a city-state and its land, generally attached to the Maya title “ajaw” (pronounced “aha”), meaning “lord/king.”
Some of these cities are known from glyphs alone; their precise location is uncertain. The pronunciation of many emblem glyphs is unknown; for many others it’s uncertain. Some are logographic (purely symbolic); others have a phonetic component that allows reconstruction of partial or complete ancient pronunciation. Several emblem glyphs seem to be mythical, related to divine realms or legendary places and kings.
Perhaps half a dozen are attested before A.D. 400 (when Book of Mormon civilization ended). These 50-odd emblem glyphs are our only source for place names (toponyms) from Book of Mormon times. By contrast, thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of toponyms can be found in ancient Near Eastern sources from the age of the Bible.
It should also be noted that place names change through time. This explicitly occurs in the Book of Mormon when, in Ether 15:11, the Hill Ramah became the Hill Cumorah. Classic examples are the changing of Greek “Byzantium” to Christian “Constantinople” to Turkish “Istanbul,” and when Hebrew Jerusalem (“Yerushalayim”) becomes Latin “Aelia Capitolina” and, later, Arabic “al-Quds.” Changes in place names usually occur during times of major political or cultural upheaval — such as occurred at the end of the Book of Mormon.
The ancient pronunciation of emblem glyphs undoubtedly also varied among different ancient Maya dialects would have been pronounced differently in non-Maya languages, and would have changed through time — just as happens to proper names in all languages.
Furthermore, different cultures commonly have different toponyms (place names) or ethnonyms (ethnic names) for given places or peoples. The Greeks, for example, gave Greek names to all Egyptian cities, usually with little phonetic relationship to the Egyptian original (e.g., Egyptian “iwnw” became “Heliopolis”). Take, for example, the many variations for one very common ethnonym: While the Germans call themselves “Deutch,” their neighbors rather obstinately use different names: English calls them “German.” In French, “Allemand”; Italian = “Tedesco”; Russian = “Nemetskiy”; Finnish = “Saksa”; medieval Hebrew = “Ashkenaz”; Lithuanian = “Vokiškai.”
A linguist given only fragmentary data like the Maya emblem glyph ethnonyms could scarcely tell from them that all of these dramatically different and phonetically unrelated names refer to precisely the same German people. Likewise, it seems probable that the various peoples labeled “Lamanites” by the Nephites didn’t use that name for themselves.
Only a few dozen Maya personal names are attested in pre-A.D. 400 inscriptions. Significantly, we probably have several thousand times more inscriptional information about Classic Maya (post A.D. 250/300) than about Preclassic.
The phonetic pronunciation of many, perhaps most, of the Maya proper names surviving in emblem glyph inscriptions is generally uncertain, and often completely unknown.
When phonetic data is provided in the emblem glyphs, their ancient pronunciation is often at best an educated guess, based on assumed pronunciation changes to modern Maya. (There are, furthermore, many dialects of modern Maya, and there’s no reason to assume that ancient Maya wasn’t pronounced as differently from modern Maya as Old Anglo-Saxon was pronounced differently from modern English.) Hence, the Preclassic pronunciation of many city and royal names/emblem glyphs is often unknown, and frequently very hypothetical.
So, given the extraordinarily sparse and ambiguous data we possess, it would be difficult if not impossible to identify Book of Mormon place names in inscriptional Maya emblem glyphs — our only source of contemporary data. Critics of the Book of Mormon often maintain that this fact somehow constitutes evidence against the historicity of the Book of Mormon. It doesn’t. Rather, the lack of data simply means that no significant conclusion can be drawn regarding Book of Mormon place and personal names.
Because of the absence of ancient Maya data, attempts to correlate Book of Mormon place names cannot be evidentially significant. In other words, without sufficient data, the question cannot be examined or answered in any meaningful way. The Book of Mormon doesn’t fail the test, because there’s insufficient evidence to undertake a test at all. There is, thus, no test to fail.
If we had hundreds or, better, thousands of Preclassic Mesoamerican toponyms, a significant examination of their relationship (or lack thereof) to Book of Mormon proper names could be undertaken. But we don’t.
Daniel Peterson founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.