Classic Maya is the language recorded in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Classic Maya civilization, flourishing across the Yucatan Peninsula and neighboring lowlands from roughly the third through ninth centuries CE, belonging to the Mayan language family and standing in a documented ancestral relationship to several modern Mayan languages including Ch'orti', while related to but linguistically distinct from K'iche' Maya, spoken in the Guatemalan highlands rather than the lowland Classic Maya heartland. Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing, a complex script combining logographic and syllabic signs, was carved on stone monuments, painted on ceramics and recorded in a small number of surviving bark-paper books called codices, and its decipherment, achieved substantially through the combined work of scholars including Yuri Knorozov, Linda Schele and David Stuart across the twentieth century, revealed that Classic Maya inscriptions recorded specific historical events, royal genealogies and dynastic politics in far greater factual detail than earlier scholars, who had assumed the script recorded only calendrical and astronomical material, initially believed possible.
J. Eric S. Thompson's influential mid-twentieth-century view that Classic Maya writing recorded only calendrical and religious abstraction rather than concrete history delayed decipherment for decades, and it was Knorozov's 1950s recognition that the script combined logographic and syllabic phonetic signs, initially dismissed by Thompson, that eventually broke the impasse and opened the door to reading actual historical content.