About the Rabbit

The scribe rabbit comes from a scene on a painted Classic Maya (circa 300 to 900 AD) vase, probably used to hold a chocolate drink.

In the Classic Maya culture (~300 to ~800 AD), scribes recorded important events for royalty using a phonetically-based hieroglyphic script. The Classic Maya 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. 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—ceramics, vases, walls, stairs, statuary, plates, nearly anything. Although many examples of this writing exist on ceramics and other items, only 3 confirmed Mayan codices exist in the world today. Researchers, called Maya epigraphers, are learning to read these writings.

Since Sharon Burton, CEO of Anthrobytes Consulting, is trained as a Mayan anthropologist, this rabbit scribe is the perfect company logo. It was redrawn by David Moore. To see a roll out photo of the original vase, click here. The little rabbit is sitting right side, bottom.

The Mayan glyph is the way that the word Scribe was written in Mayan script. Pretty neat.