Skip to main content

Cracking the Mayan Code

By

This documentary dates from 2008 on PBS, but I only saw it for the first time on History Channel the other night.  It is a fascinating exploration into the Mayan language.  The doc is based on a book by Michael Coe.  It starts with the destruction of many of the ancient codices by Diego de Landa, a 16th century priest determined to convert the Maya to Christianity.  However, the documentary fails to note that de Landa spent a long time trying to crack the code himself because he like many other priests originally saw the Maya as a lost tribe of Israel.  I have his book, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, and Hugh Thomas writes quite a bit about him in Conquest.


This intriguing special focuses on the long process of decrypting a language composed of over 800 glyphs and combined in a seemingly endless number of ways that had befuddled Mayanists for decades.  Eric Thompson, considered the dean of Mayanology, viewed the Mayans as relatively primitive and saw the hieroglyphs in purely graphic mythic terms.  Tatiana Proskuriakova, a Russian emigree, was apparently the first to see the glyphs as part of an intricate language that told the history of the Mayans, and that the stelae at   Palenque were actually stories of the dynastic rulers, dating back to the 7th century.  It took the efforts of a lone Soviet ethnologist, Yuri Knorozov, to figure out that the glyphs were symbolic of a phonetic language, but he worked largely in isolation, and his studies were discounted by Thompson, seemingly for political reasons.

It took the intuitive mind of a boy, David Stuart, to unlock the language.  He joined his father and mother on expeditions to the Yucatan, sketching the hieroglyphs like his father, and eventually finding patterns others hadn't been able to see.  He came to view the symbols as phonetic, like Knorozov, but saw that a sound could have more than one glyph, in some cases as many as fifteen, so that it could be arranged graphically into the blocks in a number of compelling ways.

The beauty is that eventually this understanding of the hieroglyphs was given back to contemporary Maya, giving them a window on their past they had thought lost forever.

Comments

  1. James FergusonMarch 13, 2013 at 12:02 PM

    There was this documentary on Knorozov a few years back,

    http://icarusfilms.com/new2001/knor.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more