The decipherment of ancient Maya writing

This anthology of classic articles documents the cognitive history of decipherment of ancient Maya writing. The editors present 48 milestone studies, introducing each with a biographical sketch of the author and brief but substantive commentary on the treatise's place in decipherment history. Together the essays comprise a fascinating historical reflection on the intellectual process of hieroglyphic decipherment that may prove to be its dominant lasting contribution. The book's organizational principle is thematic, which illuminates the incremental complexity of decipherment research. This format complements the editors' proclivity for the gradualist philosophical approach that "distinguishes between distinct yet interrelated trajectories of theories, methods, and goals" (p. 5). The book opens with Colonial-period chronicles by Europeans who encountered native writings and authors. These sixteenthand early seventeenth-century authors gave surprisingly detailed descriptions of the nature and content of the Maya tradition of writing and books. In light of these accounts, we may wonder at the ensuing centuries' debates over whether the glyphs represent writing and whether the Maya were the creators of the graphic system. This section includes writings by Constantine Rafinesque-Schmaltz and James McCulloh, two nineteenth-century scholars who made fundamental contributions but who have been overlooked because, in part, they published in newspapers and obscure, rare journals. Rafinesque-Schmaltz elucidated the bar and dot numerical system (published in 1832), and McCulloh identified the Dresden Codex script as the same as that on the monuments at Palenque, Mexico (published in 1829). The section's final three articles establish nineteenthcentury scholars as crucial contributors whose methods presage the modern period's decipherment strategies. For example, Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg was the first to apply Diego de Landa's sixteenth-century alphabetic concordance to the decipherment of a glyphic text (published in 1869). Charles Rau's pioneering article, published in 1879, features his glyph-block designation system, which remains in use today, and his rigorous contextual, descriptive, and image reproduction methods. In 1876 Leon Prunol de Rosny defined the three different types of signs in Maya writing: "figurative," "ideographic," and "phonetic. " The section closes with an excerpt from Daniel Brinton's "A Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphs. " Although important for its systematic approach, its historical interest lies in its shift away from earlier efforts at phonetic decipherment to one focusing on the rebus principle and calendrical matters. The articles comprising part 2 ("The Nature of Maya Writing") chronicle the deviation from the phonetic approach to one that views the writing system as primarily ideographic. The leading scholars include Cyrus Thomas, Eduard Seler, and J. Eric Thompson. Their principal contributions were methodological in nature, such as Thompson's discovery of patterns of substitution (written in 1944). Part 3 ("Principles of Decipherment") is composed of six key articles that track the maturation of Maya hieroglyphic studies from the 1930s to the 1980s. They highlight the writing system's more salient graphic and linguistic features and the methodological approaches characteristic of the modern era. As such, they embody a succinct reading package for the classroom. The book's final parts introduce the primary informational domains of hieroglyphic texts: time, history, supernaturals, and objects. The "Time" section presents distinguished articles on Maya calendrics beginning with the overlooked Mexican scholar Juan Pio Perez (written in 1846). The remaining articles address the Maya-Christian calendrical correlation problem and astronomical contents of the inscriptions, including John Teeple's remarkable study, written in 1928, in which he applied astronomical data to the interpretation of Maya history. The concluding article by Heinrich Berlin is a masterpiece of analytical reasoning and scholarly insight. The eight chapters in the "History" section encapsulate twentieth-century developments toward recognizing the historical, dynastic contents of the monumental inscriptions. These articles provide insight into the processes that advanced some researchers' ideas while suppressing others. For example, they illuminate the Thompsonian trajectory that caused Mayanists to eschew the pursuit of a historical content in favor of Thompson's conviction that the texts pertain to religious and mythological matters. A second repressive factor, as noted by the editors, is that of scholastic institutionalization. That is, the contributions of such researchers as Jean Genet and Yuri Knorosov were not recognized because they worked outside the mainstream of Mayanist studies and they lacked powerful mentors to promote their ideas. The short "Supernaturals" section presents studies that identify deities or supernaturals in the codices, monumental inscriptions, and the pictorial art. This is a weak section due to the omission of important articles on the topic. Many of these writings rely heavily on the nonglyphic, pictorial record. Given the book's epigraphic focus, the editors may have been obliged to abbreviate this section. The "Objects" section contains four articles that feature hieroglyphic texts on portable artifacts. They establish the concept of personal ownership among the