All Mayan Icons from famsi.org for Free
(WIP)
Drawn from the light that waxes and wanes, MoonMark traces the celestial rhythm that guided the scribes, priests, and astronomers of the ancient Maya. It remembers a world measured not in years but in cycles, the turning of the moon, the return of Venus, the dance of shadow and illumination across the heavens. Each glyph is a fragment of that cosmic calendar, a vessel of meaning shaped by ritual, vision, and time itself. The script is not merely written, it is counted, spoken, observed.
Mayan hieroglyphic script stands among the most intricate writing systems of the ancient world. Carved into jade, painted on codices, and incised into temple walls, it flourished between roughly 300 BCE and 1500 CE, spanning over a thousand years. Each glyph intertwined sound, image, and number, a fusion of language and the hidden realms that mirrored the structure of the universe itself.
For the Maya, writing, astronomy, and divinity were inseparable. Priests and scribes, often one and the same, charted the heavens to guide ritual life, record dynasties, and synchronize human order with the hidden systems deep inside the universe. Time was sacred and cyclic, governed by the interplay of sun, moon, and Venus. The moon, waxing and waning in pretty much perfect intervals, embodied recurrence, prophecy, and renewal, the living pulse of the calendar. Its phases marking beginnings, transitions, and returns.
MoonMark is a distilled/simplified visual bridge to that world, a collection of over 1,000 Maya hieroglyphs, redrawn from the great work of a few people curating everything for the famsi.org dictionary project (FAMSI, Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.). Their drawings and such came from all over, from monumental inscriptions, codices, and scholarly reconstructions. MoonMark font makes these unified and accessible, making it quick to see them all or make use of them for whatever you'd like.
The goal is not archaeological replication but clarity basically. Each glyph has been cleaned, balanced, and redrawn to preserve its structure and ultimately to unify the stuff and make it easy to access. Even though it won't be Unicode, it's still nice to have in one simple file and whatnot.
Of random note, but relevant and kind of crazy, UC Berkeley has been working on a Mayan Unicode font since 2016 (!), but no sign of it being finished is in sight. So we rebuilt the icons from scratch hoping to move things along meanwhile.
Made by ClueSurf, meditating on the universe ¤. Follow the work on YouTube, X, Instagram, Substack, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and browse more of our open-source work here on GitHub.