The writing rabbit used in this web site comes from a scene on a painted
Classic Maya (circa 300 to 900 AD) vase, probably used to hold a chocolate drink. The question mark does not appear in the original.
Scribes recorded events for royalty using a
phonetically-based hieroglyphic script. The Classic Maya frequently depicted scribes as rabbits on vases and murals.
The rabbit in this graphic is writing on a jaguar-skin covered fan-folding
book called a codex by modern researchers. Many of these books survived and were still being read after the Spanish conquest. Unfortunately, the Spanish thought the books were the work of the
devil and were preventing the Maya people from becoming civilized.
After the conquest, the Spanish Father Diego de Landa ordered all Mayan books gathered and burned in a huge bonfire in a town
in the central Yucatan called Maní. (The town still exists and is a lovely, sleepy, small town.) Any Maya person caught with a book was tortured and put to death.
The Maya thought that writing
was very important and wrote on everything—vases, walls, stairs, statuary, plates, nearly everything. Only 3 confirmed Mayan codices exist in the world today. Researchers, called epigraphers, are
learning to read these writings.
This rabbit is the company logo of
