Alphabet Soup, Maya-style:
A Historical Perspective of the Decipherment
Of the
Written Text of the Ancient Maya Language
By
Arthur I. Gould
Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club
April 27, 1998
In 1969, when visiting Chichén Itzá, the spectacular Maya ruin
in the Yucatan peninsula, my wife and I were told by a government
guide that the engraved symbols on the ancient monuments were either
ornamental decorations or, if they constituted a written form of
communication, their meaning did not extend beyond calculations of
astronomical and calendrical events. Our guide explained that
notwithstanding continuing attempts over the past 100 years or more
to decipher the engravings in a broader light, all such efforts had
failed. Accordingly, it was generally conceded by professionals
involved in uncovering the history of the Maya civilization that the
Maya did not have a written form of communication that reflected
their spoken language.
Almost a quarter of a century later, when visiting the
equally
spectacular Maya ruin of Uxmal, also in the Yucatan, I was astonished
to hear a local guide state that great progress had been made in
deciphering the text of the ancient Maya language, that the
engravings on the monuments represented a distinct form of a Maya
language spoken centuries ago and that roughly 40 percent of the
written language appearing on the monuments could be understood
generally by those involved in the deciphering project. Based upon
my prior understanding, I seriously questioned the accuracy of a
claim suggesting that almost one-half of the of Maya symbols, known
as glyphs, engraved perhaps as far back as 1,000 years ago,
represented a spoken language which could be understood by present
day scholars. Indeed, after further study on this subject matter, I
was proven to be correct in my skepticism, but for the wrong reason.
In 1993, the year of our visit to Uxmal, approximately 85 percent,
not a mere 40 percent, of the symbols comprising the Maya language
could be read in a meaningful manner by scholars involved in
deciphering the text of the ancient Maya language.
It is a remarkable achievement
that so much progress had been
made in such a short time frame in unlocking the meaning of the
written symbols of the language, the glyphs, spoken by the Maya 600
to 1900 years earlier. Viewed in another light, though, the history
of the decipherment is a sad commentary on the incompetent level of
academic scholarship, lack of intellectual curiosity and arrogance
which had been displayed by so many individuals over the years in the
process of uncovering the meaning of the mysterious symbols which
appear on Maya monuments and bark paper manuscripts, known as the
"codices". However, whether one concludes that uncovering the
meaning of the ancient Maya writings constituted a remarkable
achievement or a sad commentary, the story of the decipherment of the
ancient written Maya language and of the persons involved in this
undertaking is a fascinating tale.
The history of the decipherment of the written
language of the
Maya can be traced back to the conquistadors, the Spanish conquerors
of Mexico, who first entered the Yucatan in 1519. It covers people
from many geographic areas ranging from the jungles of "Mesoamerica"
(i.e., Central America including Mexico) to the Baltic shores of
Russia's second city now called St. Petersburg but known as Leningrad
in 1952. It includes a wide variety of individuals such as Hernan
Cortès, the leader of the conquistadors; a 16th Century Spanish bishop
of the Yucatan who rigidly enforced the dictates of the inquisition
by burning Maya manuscripts but provided the key to unraveling the
meaning of the Maya glyphs; an American lawyer on a presidential
mission in the early 1840's to gather intelligence on the newly
independent states of Central America who also explored and wrote
about the Maya ruins and thereby aroused the interests of scholars in
the ancient Maya civilization; a French abbe who discovered the
"Rosetta Stone" of the Maya written language only to misinterpret
most of its meaning; a Russian who as a soldier in World War II
rescued a copy of the Maya codices from destruction in Berlin during
the closing days of the Third Reich and then as a scholar seven years
later set the stage for the decipherment of the Maya writings; and,
several brilliant young scholars, mainly Americans, who collectively
carried out the decipherment in the late 1970s and 1980s. Finally,
underlying the story of the decipherment of the written language are
the Maya -- their civilization, culture and history. The society
they created, which thrived for over 2,500 years and which we have
only recently begun to understand, was remarkable.
There are no more than 5 million Maya living today. They reside
in southeast Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras (i.e., the Maya
territory). There are approximately 30 Maya languages which are
spoken today, however, no Maya language is permitted to be taught in
the Mexican school system. For at least the past 300 years until
recently, no Maya (or for that matter anyone else) was able to read
the written script which their ancestors developed almost two
thousand years ago. Since the Spanish conquest, the Maya have
suffered terribly at the hands of those who dominated them. The
Spanish slaughtered many and probably annihilated the entire elite
class. However, much more devastating to the Maya were the diseases
the Spanish brought with them from Europe. It is estimated that 90
percent of the Maya population died from Spanish atrocities or
diseases and those who survived were virtually enslaved by their
conquerors. Military regimes in several countries, such as
Guatemala, until quite recently, were intent on destroying the
culture of the Maya people as well as decimating the population. Even
today, in the Chiapas region of Mexico, many Maya have been
brutalized, indeed murdered, by paramilitary groups.
It wasn't always like this.
Twelve hundred years ago the Maya
civilization was dominant in Mesoamerica. It occupied the same area
as today, however, the population was at least twice as large as it
is now. It is estimated that at the apex of the golden age of the
Maya civilization, 800 A.D., the population of certain areas of the
Maya territory was as dense as anywhere in the world today. About
1000 B.C. the Maya began to speak a language which is the forerunner
of the many Maya languages spoken today, and toward the end of the
Pre-Classic period, about 100 A.D., the Maya language was first
expressed in written form as evidenced by engravings which appear on
stone monuments.
The Classic Period of the Maya civilization, the golden age,
carried on for at least 650 years, ending in 900 A.D. The great
cities of the southern lowlands of the Maya territory were
constructed of limestone masonry and included stone monuments, such
as pyramids, to house the remains of the dynastic rulers.
Politically the Maya society was organized into city-states
consisting of as many as 25 at any one time. Among these were the
great cities of Copàn, Tikal and Palenque.
By 900 A.D. all the great cities in the
southern lowlands were
deserted and the jungle, from which they had been carved, returned.
It is unclear why the Classic Period ended. Theories suggest that it
may have been due to a variety of factors: environmental problems
such as the destruction of forests and the water supply,
overpopulation, constant wars between the city-states, invasions from
outsiders and incompetent leaders.
After the Classic Period ended, the cities in the
Yucatan, such
as Chichén Itzá, Uxmal and Mayapán, began to flourish. However, they
were not purely Maya in that they were either strongly influenced or
perhaps even largely controlled by the Toltecs and later by the
Aztecs. The Post-Classic Period ended in 1521 A.D. when their empire
was destroyed by the conquistadors.
The Maya excelled in agricultural
achievements such as
irrigation which was necessary to support the huge population
clustered into small areas. They traded in large sophisticated local
markets as well as regional ones throughout Mesoamerica. Corn was
(and continues to be) the backbone of the Maya diet.
Almost all Maya lived in
villages, towns or cities and most were
farmers. Their rulers, the royal elite, exercised autocratic
authority over the population and were considered immortal who after
death would be resurrected as gods to be worshiped in perpetuity by
their decendents. Members of the royal elite probably also served as
artists and calligraphers as well as scribes for the writings which
appeared on the monuments.
The Maya had a sacred calendar based on a 260 day
cycle as well
as a 365 day solar calendar. The Maya were extremely accurate in
their calendric determinations. According to their calendar the
world began on August 13, 3114 B.C. and will end a little over 14
years from now, on December 23, 2012, a rather disturbing thought.
The Maya were also very intrigued by astronomical events and spent
a great deal of time searching the heavens. Their constant
involvement in astronomical and calendrical calculations, which set
the dates for ceremonial events commemorating the major occurrence in
the life of a ruler, reflected their exceptional abilities as
mathematicians. They developed the concept of zero long before it
was introduced to Greece or Rome.
The Maya were obsessed with blood. They
believed that humans
had to shed their own blood to replenish what they had taken from
nature such as crops and game. This was particularly true with the
ruling class. It has been speculated that the pain involved in
bloodletting through self-mutilation coupled with their taking
hallucinogenics enabled the rulers to enter into a trance-like state
where they believed they could communicate with their ancestors.
Royal bloodlines were considered essential to authenticating a claim
to the throne; accordingly, if one could summon the earliest ancestor
who ruled the kingdom, he or she could justify his or her title.
The Maya lived a
brutal and warlike existence. There were
constant wars between the city-states, although generally the
defeated cities were not sacked nor were the non-combatants harmed.
However, captive warriors, including the ruler, were tortured and
then killed, sometimes many years later, by decapitation or by being
thrown down the steps of the pyramids. Human sacrifices, including
infants, were carried out to appease the gods. In addition, the
sacrifants were often the losers in a game played with a hard rubber
ball on a masonry-walled court. Thus, it can be said the Maya played
"hard-ball" -- both literally and figuratively.
Although other ancient civilizations in
the Western Hemisphere
may have had a limited ability to express some of their spoken
language in a written text, only the Maya had a complete script. The
recent successes achieved in deciphering the Maya text has been an
invaluable tool in understanding the Maya civilization since their
writings addressed historical information such as the genealogies of
their rulers, warfare and alliances between the city-states and
conquests. Even though incredible progress has been made recently in
deciphering the written language of the Maya, when we examine the
skill carried out in the decipherment of another ancient language,
Egyptian, which occurred 175 years ago, it becomes embarrassingly
clear that the Maya written language should have been understood by
scholars no later than the beginning of this century.
The Egyptians developed a
written form of communication over
5,000 years ago, in 3100 B.C. The symbols used in the ancient
Egyptian writing are known as hieroglyphics, which in Greek means
"sacred carvings", perhaps because they were engraved on the walls of
obelisks and religious monuments. Egyptian hieroglyphics continued
as a form of written communication, although gradually in diminished
use, until approximately 400 A.D. when their meaning was lost. The
Greek and later the Roman conquest of Egypt caused the people to
adopt the alphabetic writing styles of their conquerors.
Beginning in the Middle
Ages and continuing through the early
part of the 19th Century, most scholars considered hieroglyphics to
represent ideographic symbols, i.e., the signs conveyed metaphysical
ideas; they did not reflect phonetic sounds. In other words, they
bore no resemblance whatsoever to a spoken language. This view lead
to the conclusion that the hieroglyphic symbols were not a viable
means of communication and slowed down considerably the decipherment
of the writings. Unfortunately, it also prevailed as the
conventional wisdom with respect to the written language of the Maya
and caused the decipherment of it to suffer by reason of the same
misconception as to the meaning of the symbols.
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt 200
years ago, in 1798, laid the
groundwork for the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. His army
was accompanied by a legion of scientists and scholars whose mission
was to uncover all available knowledge about the ancient Egyptian
civilization which had been lost over the ages, including Egyptian
hieroglyphics.
One of the first finds of the scholars and scientists assigned
to Napoleon's Egyptian project was the Rosetta Stone in 1798. It
contained identical text in three different languages; Greek,
Egyptian hieroglyphics, and another Egyptian form of writing known as
demonic, a cursive script which differs in form from hieroglyphics,
but in substance is the same. It was recognized immediately that the
Rosetta Stone was an incredible find and copies of it were made and
circulated throughout Europe among scholars interested in the subject
matter.
Soon thereafter it became clear to a few scholars that the
hieroglyphic and demonic scripts of the ancient Egyptian language
were two forms of the same writing system. Moreover, it soon became
apparent to an even smaller number of scholars that the Egyptian
writing scripts were not ideographic but rather logagraphic, a
writing system which consists of a mixture of phonetic symbols (i.e.,
speech sounds) and semantic symbols (i.e., visual signs that convey
meaning without being linked to speech sounds).
Today we know that all written
languages are phonetic to some
extent. An alphabetic language is basically phonetic, whereas a
logagraphic language has a mix of phonetic and semantic symbols.
However, even in an alphabetic language, semantic symbols exist. For
example, in the written text of the English language, the alphabet
represents the phonetic symbols, however, there are semantic
symbols, such as the ampersand and the dollar sign.
In 1822, a brilliant French
scholar, Jean-François Champollian,
began to unravel the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was one
of the few scholars who recognized that Egyptian hieroglyphics
represented logagraphic symbols. He applied this knowledge to the
vast findings of ancient hieroglyphics gathered during the Napoleonic
campaign in Egypt. It finally led him to be able to read the names
of many of the Roman emperors whose inscriptions were recorded on
Egyptian obelisks and other monuments as well as rulers from the
pharaonic era of Egypt. His vast knowledge of the Coptic language,
the liturgical language of the Christian Coptic Church with roots in
ancient Egyptian, was invaluable in his decipherment of the Egyptian
language, particularly in working out the grammar of the texts of
hieroglyphic writings. In 1824, he published a book on the meaning
of Egyptian hieroglyphics and for all intents and purposes, the
mystery surrounding the meaning of that writing system had been
solved.
Thus, in barely a quarter of a century from the time of the
discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Egyptian writing system of
hieroglyphics had been deciphered so that almost all ancient Egyptian
script can now be read with understanding. The scholastic exercise
which resulted in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics has led
scholars to agree that five factors should be present for a
successful uncovering of the meaning of a "lost" written language:
(1) a large database of the written script must be available; (2) the
language must be known, susceptible to being reconstructed, or at
least identifiable by the linguistic family to which it belongs;
(3) there should be a bilingual text containing the known and unknown
languages; (4) the cultural context of a script, including the
history, traditions, names of locations, royal names and titles,
should be known; and (5) if the script is logagraphic, there should
be pictorial references accompanying the text.
Ironically, all of the requisite factors
were available to those
who attempted to decipher the written language of the Maya in
greater quantity, better quality and at an earlier date than those
who struggled with uncovering the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics
in the early 19th Century. However, it took almost five times as
long to decipher the Maya glyphs as it did Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The reasons for the extended period to decipher the Maya written
script are regrettable, if not inexcusable.
Surprisingly, evidence of a Maya written
script reached Europe
two years prior to the time that the conquistadors conquered Mexico.
In 1519, Cortés and his subordinates sent to the King of Spain
several items acquired during their Yucatan expedition including
several bark paper manuscripts, the codices. Although copies were
made of the codices for review by various scholars throughout Europe,
no particular significance was attached to these manuscripts for over
350 years.
Perhaps even more surprising is that in 1566 the "Rosetta Stone"
of the Maya script had been set out in writing by a Spanish bishop
who lead the Church's activities in the Yucatan. Bishop Diego de
Landa was a very zealous follower of the proscriptions of the
inquisition. He destroyed all the Maya manuscripts he could locate
because, in his view, they dealt with idolatry. Ironically, he also
prepared a manuscript, based upon extensive discussions he had with
knowledgeable Maya scribes, which not only explained the Maya
calendar and many of their astronomical observations but also set
forth a passably accurate transliteration of Maya written symbols
into Spanish. Here again, no use was made of Bishop Landa's
manuscript for 300 years.
The lack of intellectual curiosity over this long period of
time
toward the codices and Bishop Landa's manuscript was also reflected
in the indifference shown to the Maya monuments and ruins located in
the southern lowlands and the Yucatan. Although a few expeditions at
the end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century were
directed toward finding the monuments and ruins, the members of the
expeditions were untrained adventurers, soldier of fortune types
rather than archeological scholars, and little, if any, findings of
consequence were developed by reason of their expeditions. However,
in 1839 an American lawyer, John Lloyd Stevens, was commissioned by
President Martin Van Buren to assess the power structure of Central
America and to make contact with appropriate persons on behalf of the
United States. Stevens, apparently concluded that he would have
spare time to explore the ruins in Mesoamerica, because he requested
a friend of his, an Englishman, Frederick Catherwood, an accomplished
artist who had substantial archeological experience, to join him in
this venture. The two made a very significant inroad in bringing the
Maya civilization to the attention of interested scholars throughout
the world. Together they explored, surveyed and described, in writing
and pictorially, major buildings and monuments located on several
Maya sites, including Copàn, Palenque and Uxmal. Stevens strongly
suspected that there was a linguistic significance to the
inscriptions on the monuments they uncovered.
Interestingly, the next major exploration to the Maya territory
which resulted in uncovering Maya ruins had no relationship
whatsoever to any scholarly goal; rather, it was strictly business.
In the 1890's, chewing gum became widely accepted by Americans.
Chicle, the base for chewing gum, is located in the jungle areas
where Maya ruins exist. Inadvertently, those searching for chicle to
be made into chewing gum discovered several Maya monuments and ruins
which otherwise may not have been uncovered.
On the scholarly front, a French
abbe, Charles Brosseur de
Bourboury made a series of discoveries in the 1860's which should
have led to the decipherment of the Maya text soon thereafter. Abbe
Brosseur, unlike virtually all of his predecessor and most of his
successor Mayanists, studied and became conversant in several Maya
languages during his assignment in Guatemala. In 1862, while
researching material about the Americas in the Royal Academy of
History in Madrid, he came across the manuscript of Bishop Landa
containing the transliteration of the Maya glyphs. From that he was
able to understand the Maya calendar, including the names of the days
of the 260 day sacred calendar and the months in the 365 day solar
calendar, by noting the appropriate glyphs; he also mastered the
numerical system used by the Maya. Applying his knowledge to copies
of the codices which were located in various cities in Europe,
Brosseur was able to identify the day and month signs in the codices
as well as the numerical system set forth in those manuscripts. He
also correctly concluded that the inscriptions on the codices were
substantially the same as those on the Maya monuments in Central
America. However, he misunderstood Bishop Landa's explanation on how
the Maya writing system worked. Abbe Brosseur assumed that all
glyphs were phonetic rather than logagraphic, a mix of both phonetic
and semantic symbols. Also he read the writings backwards from right
to left. Finally he was fixated with a view that the Maya were
descended from the inhabitants of the lost continent of Atlantis and,
in attempting to prove this point, he twisted the meaning of the Maya
text to comport with his theory.
Brosseur's romantic misconception regarding the
origin of the
Maya people was a common failing of many who were attempting to
understand the mysteries of the ancient Maya civilization. Most of
these people were not professional scholars, and even several
professionals approached the subject matter with a lack of
objectivity. More often than not, they could not accept the fact
that an indigenous people from the New World created the monuments
and structures which evidenced a highly developed civilization that
once existed in the land occupied by the Maya. Therefore, it was
often claimed that those who built the monuments and other structures
in the Maya territory were descendants of such disparate groups as
the lost tribes of Israel, pharaonic period Egyptians, Mesopotamians,
Phoenicians and numerous others from ancient civilizations.
Toward the end of the 19th Century two schools of view had
developed with respect to the meaning of the Maya glyphs. One
school, the anti-phoneticists, asserted that the glyphs were merely
symbols denoting numbers, days, months and astronomical events. They
did not refer to history or reflect a written language. The other
school, the phoneticists, maintained that the glyphs represented a
phonetic link to a spoken language. The clash between the two
schools was quite intense as demonstrated by an incident involving an
American scholar, Cyrus Thomas, who in the late 19th Century
maintained that the Maya script was both phonetic and semantic and,
accordingly, represented a spoken language. Thomas, however,
appeared to be somewhat embarrassed by his meager scholastic
credentials compared to the anti-phoneticists whose academic
accomplishments were most impressive. After his pronouncement on
the phonetic nature of the Maya script, he was repeatedly attacked by
the anti-phoneticists, more on the grounds of his modest academic
accomplishments than on the merits of his position. A few years
later, in the early 1900's, Thomas completely recanted his view and
subscribed to the position of the anti-phonetic school, perhaps
because he was overwhelmed by the imposing academic credentials of
members of that group.
The blatant display of intellectual arrogance which
caused poor
Cyrus Thomas to recant his theory concerning the phonetic nature of
the ancient Maya text at the beginning of this century continued to
be directed toward other proponents of the phonetic school until the
struggle between the two ended in the mid 1970's. Ironically, the
most flagrant intimidator of the phoneticists was the foremost Maya
scholar of his day, Sir Eric Thompson.
Thompson was exceptionally well versed in
many disciplines,
including classical literature and Greek mythology. He became
interested in Maya studies and in the 1930's associated with the
Carnegie Institution of Washington, the leader in Maya research at
that time. Although he was a superb archeologist and made many
contributions as a Mayanist, he never was able to speak, or even
bothered to learn, a Maya language.
Thompson advanced many theories, some of
which had been
articulated by his predecessors, concerning the Maya people. He
asserted that they were a very peaceful nation, concerned with the
supernatural and absorbed with a metaphysical life. As to the Maya
text, Thompson, being an ardent anti-phoneticist, contended that the
inscriptions on the monuments, the Maya glyphs, did not reflect a
spoken language but rather were idiographs which related to mystical
and mythological occurrences and astronomical and calendrical events.
He also asserted rather forcefully that the text in no way related
to the history of the people.
By reason of his intellectual prowess and keen mind,
which his
colleagues both respected and feared, Eric Thompson was a very
formidable opponent to those who asserted that the Maya written text
reflected the spoken language of the people. He attacked all
phoneticists vociferously, generally by seizing on certain details
of their thesis rather than challenging the central point of their
position. He overwhelmed the phoneticists with his incredible
command of facts and his erudition. However, in 1952, a Russian
phoneticist appeared on the scene who could not be silenced by him.
Yuri
Knorossov served in the Red Army as an artillery spotter
during World War II. In early May 1945, he entered Berlin with his
army unit and noted that the national library was being consumed in
a fire. He rescued a book from the flames and, amazingly, it was a
one volume edition of copies of the then three known existing Maya
codices. After the war, Knorossov studied ancient languages,
specializing in comparative linguistic analysis. During the course
of his studies he was challenged by a professor to attempt to
decipher Bishop Landa's work and to seek to unlock the meaning, if
there was one, of the Maya script. As a consequence, he wrote his
dissertation on Landa's work.
In 1952, Knorossov, then a resident of Leningrad,
published the
seminal paper on the key to deciphering the ancient Maya written
language. By employing his speciality, comparative linguistic
analysis, to ancient languages, Knorossov asserted that all early
scripts, whether Egyptian, Chinese or Mesapotamian, follow the same
pattern; they are all logographic and therefore use a mix of phonetic
and semantic symbols. He stated that a particular symbol can be
both phonetic as well as semantic. Finally, he stated that Bishop
Landa's transliteration of the Maya text reflected the verbal meaning
of the language that was spoken at that time. In short, Knorosov was
suggesting, although never stating it as such, that Landa's work
represented the "Rosetta Stone" for uncovering the meaning of the
ancient written language of the Maya.
Knorosov's work was immediately attacked
by Thompson and other
members of the anti-phonetic school. Gradually, however, in the
early 1960's other scholars took notice of Knorossov's premise, and
some were able to apply his approach in translating an occasional
Maya word inscribed on a monument by using Bishop Landa's work.
Moreover, and unlike the phoneticists who preceded him, Thompson's
attacks never caused Knorosov to waiver in asserting the merits of
his hypothesis.
Following the attacks on Knorossov's approach by Thompson and
his fellow anti-phoneticists, two significant events occurred which
caused the anti-phoneticists' position to collapse. In 1960, another
Russian born Maya scholar, but one who became a naturalized American
citizen, Tatiana Proshouriakoff, reached a conclusion which was in
direct conflict with one of Thompson's most cherished theories.
After endless studies of Maya monuments and other physical
structures, she published findings that the figures on the monuments
did not represent gods, spirits or any other religious characters but
instead represented the rulers and their families. She further
asserted that the dates on the monuments represented births, deaths
and other records of the lifetime of the rulers. They had nothing
to do with metaphysics or mysticism. In short, Proshouriakoff
established that the engravings related to history. Thus, it
followed that the Maya recorded their history. Thompson, although
initially rejecting Proshouriakoff's work, eventually, but
reluctantly, accepted her thesis and in doing so indirectly
acknowledged the error of one of his basic, deep-seated theories
regarding the Maya, i.e., his claim that they were oblivious to their
history.
Then in 1973, three scholars involved in Maya studies, an
American linguist well-versed in Maya languages and two knowledgeable
epigraphers (scholars who study ancient writing systems), one an
American and the other an Australian, gathered at a Maya ruin in
Palenque and successfully carried out a project which clearly
established that the glyphs reflected the spoken language of the
Maya. In two and a half hours they were able to decipher the
engravings on the monuments which told the life history of the last
six successive rulers of Palenque , a time frame which spanned 200
years. Their approach was to rely on Knorossov's method of linguistic
analysis together with Bishop Landa's transliteration. They also
followed Proshouriakoff's thesis that the engravings represented
historical events in the life of the ruler. Finally, and to a
considerable extent, they relied upon their intuition and instinct.
Approximately one year later, in a three and half hour period, they
were able to decipher the balance of the history of Palenque, the 200
years preceding the period they uncovered a year earlier. Thus, the
entire life history of the kings of Palenque as written in the Maya
text on the monuments had been deciphered. Ironically, the following
year, 1975, Eric Thompson was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II; a few
months thereafter he passed away. With his passing, or perhaps
because of it, the decipherment of the Maya written text began to
proceed at a rapid pace.
After many years, indeed centuries, of neglect, in the late
1970's the study of Maya civilization, including the written
language, became a fashionable subject of inquiry. Accordingly, many
brilliant young scholars have been attracted to this field. Most of
the scholars are Americans, however, regardless of their national
origin, all are well versed in at least one or more Maya languages.
Because of the
work of the present day Mayanists, 800 symbols
in the Maya language have now been identified; however, less than
one-third appear more than once in Maya writings. Of the 800 glyphs,
over 150 are known to be phonetic, and most of them have been
deciphered. It was predicted a few years ago that all phonetic
symbols in the Maya language will be deciphered in the near future.
It had been
assumed for the past 100 or more years that there
were only two sources for the Maya glyphs: the codices and the
monuments. As to the codices, until recently there were only three
known to be in existence, all located in Europe as a result of
Cortes' expedition into the Yucatan. Recently, a fourth codex was
located in Mexico. However, the codices do not provide a wealth of
information since the subject matter covered is largely limited to
astronomical and calendrical events. Moreover, the monuments on
which the Maya inscriptions are engraved, stone walls, stelae and
masonry structures, are sometimes in a state of disrepair, but even
when in good condition the wording, as with all inscriptions on
monuments, is rather sparse. Fortunately, a new source, ceramic
pottery produced during the Classic Period, is now being read by
Mayanist. It is anticipated that the writings on the ceramics may
be a fertile source of knowledge reflecting the written records of
the Maya during their golden age and may cover subjects or events
which have not as yet come to our attention.
Perhaps someday deciphered Maya writings will reveal why their
civilization collapsed at the end of the Classic Period. This may
be very instructive for those inhabiting our planet when this mystery
is solved. The apparent reasons suggested for the collapse
environmental problems relating to the destruction of forests and the
water supply, overpopulation, constant wars between national states
and incompetent leaders do not seem to be far removed from our
problems of today and those we foresee for the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coe, Michael, Breaking the Maya Code, 1992
Freidel, Schele and Parker, Maya Cosmos, 1993
Gillette, Douglas, The Shaman's Secret, The Lost Resurrection
Teachings of the Ancient Maya, 1997
Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings, The Untold Story of the
Ancient Maya, 1990
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