![]() (This was before the age of the Internet, so it was easier to stop people from making their discoveries known.)Īrchaeologist David Stuart, a genius who wrote his first scholarly paper on the Maya at age 12, has been doing much of the Maya decipherment from the late 1980s onward. He proposed that the Maya used both word signs and phonetic signs in their script, but Thompson, a vehement anti-communist, discredited him in the West. While it was the dominant view, proposed by Eric Thompson, that the Maya used a limited logographic script, Knorozov knew that no script fell completely into one of the three categories. Maya had 800 symbols-too few to have a symbol for each word, but too many for the script to be alphabetic or syllabic. A script with several hundred letters was logographic, with a symbol for each word (like Chinese). A script with 80 to 100 letters meant the script was syllabic, with letters representing syllables (like Cherokee or Hindi). ![]() He learned while obtaining his linguistics degree that the first step to analyzing Maya would be counting the letters: A script with 20 to 30 letters was usually alphabetic (like English or Somali), with letters representing sounds. A hieroglyph shown in the documentary Cracking the Maya Code.Ī Russian linguist named Yuri Knorozov opposed Thompson’s theory. His theory was problematic because not only was it inaccurate but it was also an oversimplification of a complex and sophisticated culture, which led to stereotyping the Maya as “noble savages” who didn’t suffer from “European vices” like war and greed. He concluded that, unlike spoken Maya, written Maya was limited, and beyond dates and astronomical references, there was nothing more to it. Eric Thompson, an Englishman who lived among the Maya and studied their language, argued that time and astronomy were the focus of their culture, leading to a view of the Maya as a peaceful civilization of stargazers. Written Maya had a script of 800 symbols, and it was taken for granted that these were logographs and not phonetic letters. Linguists tried for decades to crack the Maya code using only a few books and glyphs carved into ancient Maya pyramids. Only a handful of Maya books survived, and they resurfaced in the late 1880s. And it worked-by the eighteenth century, there was no one left who could read or write Maya. To us editors, the act of burning countless ancient texts seems worse than blasphemy, but to the mercurial Friar de Landa, it was a powerful method of oppression. He sanctioned the mass burning of hundreds to thousands of Maya books-the exact number will never be known. A zealous friar, Diego de Landa, made it his mission to destroy Maya hieroglyphs, seeing them as tools of the devil. Under the sixteenth-century Spanish inquisition, the Maya were tortured or killed for engaging in “superstitious” behaviour, such as writing in their language or worshipping their gods. ![]() Much like the other indigenous civilizations of the Americas that encountered Europeans hundreds of years ago, the Maya experienced cultural and linguistic oppression at the hands of Spanish colonizers. Recently, I watched an informative PBS documentary about the history of the Maya language called Cracking the Maya Code ( watch it online here). ![]()
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