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Recent years have seen rapid advancement in our understanding of the phonology and grammar of Classic Ch'olan and the distribution of Lowland Mayan languages in the Classic period. The control over the data has advanced to such an extent that Classic Ch'olan should no longer be considered chiefly a product of reconstruction, but rather a language in its own right, providing fresh input to historical reconstruction. The interpretation of writing system principles has moved into the forefront of research, and recent discussions of these and other major issues are summarized here. This review suggests that the exceptional phonological transparency of the Maya script, which is a precondition for the current advances in linguistic epigraphy, is rooted in the need of scribes to spell out regional linguistic variants, and a sociolinguistically oriented theory of the evolution of writing in general is formulated and tested on the Mayan hieroglyphic materials.

The unique relationship between word and image in ancient Egypt is a defining feature of that ancient culture's records. All hieroglyphic texts are composed of images, and large-scale figural imagery in temples and tombs is often accompanied by texts. Epigraphy and palaeography are two distinct, but closely related, ways of recording, analyzing, and interpreting texts and images. This Handbook stresses technical issues about recording text and art and interpretive questions about what we do with those records and why we do it. It offers readers three key things: a diachronic perspective, covering all ancient Egyptian scripts from prehistoric Egypt through the Coptic era (fourth millennium BCE-first half of first millennium CE), a look at recording techniques that considers the past, present, and future, and a focus on the experiences of colleagues.

This paper aims to locate the research potential and necessity of monuments within the study of archaeology and epigraphy. Leading to that it is important first to give the backgrounds and development of the two disciplines in this country. Thus, some brief presentations of the more recent works will hopefully serve the purpose. From here, the paper will focus on the current findings of the research on Islamic monuments. Unlike archaeological works, monuments will be more democratic as they include diverse builders, beyond the formal and the powerful.Atcheology

This book provides a general survey of epigraphy in Southeast Asia. Epigraphy is an academic discipline for the scientific study of all kinds of inscriptions on durable media. Despite the fact that interest in inscriptional materials goes back more than two centuries in Southeast Asia, until now the field had never been the subject of a panorama, an introduction, or a general discussion. Thomas Stamford Raffles was the first in Southeast Asia, precisely in 1815, to emphasise the importance of inscriptions for linguistics, the study of religions and history in general. Until the middle of the second millennium CE, apart from a number of religious and literary texts, inscriptions in fact constituted unique local written sources providing detailed, accurate, and often well dated historical data for many aspects of ancient life in Southeast Asia. The concept underlining this volume is that of corpus, a set of documents brought together according to various criteria. In the field of epigraphy, these corpora are crucial tools informing multiple fields of analysis for historians. This volume gathers together eighteen contributions by renowned scholars of Southeast Asian epigraphy and history whose essays are focused on corpora of inscriptional materials written using Indian scripts and local variants, Chinese script, or Arabic script and local variants. Other corpora are discussed in the introduction to this volume, in order to try to provide the fullest possible overview.

Abstract
Over the past several decades, hundreds of donor inscriptions (zaoxiangji 造像記) and works of Buddhist epigraphy have been discovered, making them an abundant historical source on medieval China. To date, research related to these artifacts has mainly concentrated on the religious and political function of these inscriptions. This article, considering the literary and cultural aspects of these pieces, investigates how Buddhist epigraphy can be used to trace the development of traditions of writing during the Northern Dynasties period. It starts by analyzing a seldom-researched inscription, "Dangchanggong Huifusi bei" 宕昌公暉福寺碑 (The Duke of Dangchang's Huifu Temple Stele), and then examines its historical and cultural context. The article continues with an investigation into the common trends found in Northern Dynasties epigraphy by comparing "Dangchanggong Huifusi bei" with other pieces of extant Buddhist inscriptions. The analysis explores the literary characteristics of these works, the political and social background of their creation, and the culture associated with such inscriptions.