Some pictures made whole words and they could make sentences or stories by drawing different pictures together. They carved their hieroglyphs in stone and put them in their cities and buildings.

They made books out of the bark from the wild fig tree. The book was written on the paper they made from the bark. Each book was made of one piece of paper folded over and over to make pages. They made their pens from turkey feathers. Only four books have survived because the Europeans burned all the others when they tried to turn the Mayans into Christians.

The Maya only used three different symbols in their maths. They used a dot to represent one, a bar to stand for five and a shell for zero. At the time no civilization had anything to represent zero.The Mayas used their math symbols in different combinations to show numbers from zero to nineteen.They made numbers above nineteen by the position the symbols are placed in. The number was based on 20. The numbers were read vertically from bottom to top.

They also used head glyphs which are pictures of heads, for different numbers. Here are some example of how the Mayas wrote their numbers.