Question: What civilization's writing system did Ernst Wilhelm Förstemann contribute to the decipherment and understanding?

full_context: Document 1: Early Indian epigraphy: The earliest traces of epigraphy in the Indian Subcontinent are found in the undeciphered inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization (Indus script), which date back to the early 3rd millennium BC. Two other important archeological classes of symbols are found from the 1st millennium BCE, Megalithic Graffiti Symbols and symbols on punch-marked coins, though most scholars do not consider these to constitute fully linguistic scripts, and their semiotic functions are not well understood. The earliest deciphered epigraphic inscriptions of significant length are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, written in forms of Prakrit in the Brahmi script. Jain inscriptions in South India written in Tamil-Brahmi, Bhattiprolu alphabet and the Kadamba alphabet are also of relatively early date. Short Brahmi inscriptions on potsherds from the 4th century BCE have been reported from the ruins of Anuradhapura and are the only pre-Ashokan examples of Brahmi that have received any scholarly acceptance, though reports have appeared in the Indian press claiming potsherd inscriptions from an even earlier period (6th to 4th century BCE).
Document 2: Cascajal Block: The Cascajal Block is a tablet-sized writing slab in Mexico, made of serpentinite, which has been dated to the early first millennium BCE, incised with hitherto unknown characters that may represent the earliest writing system in the New World. Archaeologist Stephen D. Houston of Brown University said that this discovery helps to "link the Olmec civilization to literacy, document an unsuspected writing system, and reveal a new complexity to [the Olmec] civilization."
Document 3: Carl Erdmann: Carl Erdmann (17 November 1898 – 5 March 1945) was a German historian who specialized in medieval political and intellectual history. He is noted in particular for his study of the origins of the idea of crusading in medieval Latin Christendom, as well as his work on letter collections and correspondence among secular and ecclesiastical elites in the eleventh century. He is often mentioned alongside Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst H. Kantorowicz as one of the most influential and important German scholars of medieval political culture in the twentieth century. His promising and remarkably prolific career was cut short by his death in the German army at the end of World War II. His grandson Martin Erdmann is a professor for experimental particle physics at the RWTH Aachen University.
Document 4: Yuri Knorozov: Yuriy Valentinovich Knorozov (alternatively Knorosov; Russian: Ю́рий Валенти́нович Кноро́зов ; November 19, 1922 – March 31, 1999) was a Soviet linguist epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly renowned for the pivotal role his research played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica.
Document 5: Hermann Grassmann: Hermann Günther Grassmann (German: "Graßmann" ; April 15, 1809 – September 26, 1877) was a German polymath, known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties.
Document 6: Ernst Windisch: Ernst Wilhelm Oskar Windisch (4 September 1844, Dresden30 October 1918, Leipzig) was a German scholar and Celticist. He is known as an Indo-Europeanist. He was a son-in-law to economist Wilhelm Roscher. He was also a friend of the young Friedrich Nietzsche.
Document 7: Jean-François Champollion: Jean-François Champollion (Champollion "le jeune"; 23 December 17904 March 1832) was a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic and Arabic fluently. During the early 19th-century French culture experienced a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1797–1801) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were phonetic (representing speech sounds) or ideographic (recording semantic concepts directly). Many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information. The significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, and made it possible to begin to retrieve many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.
Document 8: Star war: A star war was a decisive conflict between rival polities of the Maya civilization during the first millennium AD. The term comes from a specific type of glyph used in the Maya script, which depicts a star showering the earth with liquid droplets, or a star over a shell. It represents a verb but its phonemic value and specific meaning have not yet been deciphered. The name "star war" was coined by the epigrapher Linda Schele to refer to the glyph, and by extension to the type of conflict that it indicates.
Document 9: Galina Yershova: Galina Gavrilovna Yershova, or Ershova (Russian: Гали́на Гаври́ловна Ершо́ва ; born 17 March 1955) is a prominent Russian academic historian, linguist, and epigrapher, who specialises in the study of the ancient civilisations, cultures, and languages of the New World. As an Americanist scholar, her area of expertise is in the field of Mesoamerican studies, and in particular that of the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation, its historical literature, and its writing system. Yershova is a former student and protégé of the famed Russian linguist and epigrapher Yuri Knorozov, renowned for his central contributions towards the decipherment of the Maya script.
Document 10: Ch’orti’ language: The Ch'orti' language (sometimes also "Chorti") is a Mayan language, spoken by the indigenous Maya people who are also known as the Ch'orti' or Ch'orti' Maya. Ch'orti' is a direct descendant of the Classic Maya language in which many of the pre-Columbian inscriptions using the Maya script were written. This Classic Maya language is also attested in a number of inscriptions made in regions whose inhabitants most likely spoke a different Mayan language variant, including the ancestor of Yukatek Maya. Ch'orti' is the modern version of the ancient Mayan language Ch'olan (which was actively used and most popular between the years of A.D 250 and 850).
Document 11: Ernst Mayr (computer scientist): Ernst Wilhelm Mayr (born May 18, 1950) is a German computer scientist and mathematician. He received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1997 awarded for his contributions to theoretical computer science.
Document 12: Maya priesthood: Until the discovery that Maya stelae depicted kings instead of high priests, the Maya priesthood and their preoccupations had been a main scholarly concern. In the course of the 1960s and over the following decades, however, dynastic research came to dominate interest in the subject. A concept of royal 'shamanism', chiefly propounded by Linda Schele and Freidel, came to occupy the forefront instead. Yet, Classic Maya civilization, being highly ritualistic, would have been unthinkable without a developed priesthood. Like other Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican priesthoods, the early Maya priesthood consisted of a hierarchy of professional priests serving as intermediaries between the population and the deities. Their basic skill was the art of reading and writing. The priesthood as a whole was the keeper of knowledge concerning the deities and their cult, including calendrics, astrology, divination, and prophecy. In addition, they were experts in historiography and genealogy. Priests were usually male and could marry. Most of our knowledge concerns Yucatán in the Late Postclassic, with additional data stemming from the contemporaneous Guatemalan Highlands..
Document 13: Maya script: Mayan script, also known as Mayan glyphs or Mayan hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE in San Bartolo, Guatemala. Maya writing was in continuous use throughout Mesoamerica until the Spanish conquest of the Maya in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Document 14: Maya calendar: The Maya calendar is a system of calendars used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in many modern communities in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.
Document 15: Ernst Förstemann: Ernst Wilhelm Förstemann (Danzig, September 18, 1822 – Charlottenburg, November 4, 1906) was a German historian, mathematician, doctor of linguistics and librarian, director of the Saxon State Library (German: "Sächsische Landesbibliothek" ) in Dresden. He is known as a founder of onomastics and folk etymology studies in Germany, and also for his seminal contributions made in the early years of Mayanist research, towards the decipherment and understanding of calendrical elements in the pre-Columbian Maya script.
ground_truth: Maya civilization