Should we be surprised by these strange parallels? Neil Cohn at the University of California, San Diego (who edited The Visual Narrative Reader) points out that communicating with visual narratives may be as natural as speech or hand gestures; it should really be considered another form of language. Like spoken or signed languages, he therefore thinks each visual language may evolve their own vocabularies and grammars.

You can see this all across the world; he has found that American comics and Japanese manga books follow distinct rules when constructing their stories, for instance, while the Arrernte aborigines of Australia have a series of complex signs that they will draw in the sand during spoken storytelling that again follow a different “grammar”. So even though the drawings on Mayan vessels may look like modern comics, they will have their own conventions too, he thinks; they are not the same thing.

Even so, some of the similarities have caught his attention; he is intrigued that visual metaphors like fire are still used to represent an emotion, even hundreds of years ago in a distant culture. “That anger is associated with fire in the Mayan narratives as well as contemporary speech and drawings is informative for how we conceive of these types of abstract ideas.”

If nothing else, these fantastic pieces of artwork should remind us that comical, visual stories were once the gifts of kings – the Mona Lisas of their day.

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David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on twitter.

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