May 11, 2004

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe

Like a lot of good science books, this book is a good detective story. The ancient Mayan language in written form was found on several ruins in South America in the 18th century but these inscriptions were not read until the 1950s. This book is the story of this decipherment. The subject matter of writing systems and Mayans is quite a challenge to present in a pedagogically sound way, but Michael Coe is thankfully competent enough to tell this story. And he tells it very well indeed.

Coe's introduction to writing systems in general (in Chapter 1: The Word made Visible) is extremely well written. As an aside: for some new work on the topic of writing systems there is a book coming out in 1999 by Richard Sproat ("A Computational Theory of Writing Systems": Cambridge University Press) which tries to give a general theory that covers all known writing systems.

Coe also gives a reasonable insight into the ancient Mayans (he also has another book devoted entirely to this subject) although reading up on the Mayans before reading this book is perhaps a good idea (if you haven't already suffered through several idiotic documentaries about the Mayan astronauts).

There are many surprises in the story (as it should be in a good detective story). It is inconceivable that scholars for more than 200 years preferred theories about the Mayan language involving mythical lands such as Atlantis rather than accepting that the people living there now spoke essentially the same language as the Mayans. Even more surprising that although the ruins were discovered in the late 1700s, only in 1952 the first beginnings of a real decipherment was accomplished by Yuri Knorosov in an article published in `Sovietskaya-Etnografiya' (despite Stalin's stifling influence on the content of this and other journals of the time).

Further reading in this topic includes "Understanding Maya Inscriptions: A Hieroglyph Handbook" by John F. Harris and Stephen K. Stearns and "The Decipherment of Linear B" by John Chadwick.


%T Breaking the Maya Code
%A Michael D. Coe
%I Thames and Hudson
%D 1992
%G ISBN: 0500277214
%P 304
%K science, linguistics

Review written: 1999/08/04

Posted by anoop at May 11, 2004 02:25 PM