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Archeologists excavating a pyramid complex in the Guatemalan jungle have uncovered the earliest example of Mayan writing ever found, 10 bold hieroglyphs painted on plaster and stone.

The 2,300-year-old glyphs were excavated last April in San Bartolo and suggest the ancient Mayas developed an advanced writing system centuries earlier than previously believed, according to an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The glyphs date from between 200 BC and 300 BC and come from the same site in the Peten jungle of northern Guatemala where archeologist William Saturno found the oldest murals in the Mayan world in 2001. Radiocarbon tests prove the writing is 100 years older than the murals depicting the Mayan creation myth.

The glyphs, thin black paintings on off-white stucco, lay in a plastic tub in a laboratory in an old house in the colonial city of Antigua on Thursday as archeologists cleaned and cataloged other stones from the San Bartolo site.

While the writing is mostly indecipherable, Saturno and his team claim one glyph could be an early version of the word "ajaw" or "ruler."

"People have long been hoping to find a carved stone monument from this period of the Maya," said Mary Miller, a Mayan art expert at Yale University.

"It turned out not to be carved in stone but instead associated with this incredible complex of early paintings," she said. "It’s as if we were to find pictures of Jesus on the cross from the time when he was really alive."

The pyramids at San Bartolo were constructed over several centuries with newer structures built over the old. Guatemalan archeologist Boris Beltran discovered the hieroglyphic writings by accident while excavating a structure buried deep below the room housing the ancient murals.ancient Mesoamerican civilizations.

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