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Breaking the Maya Code
The inside story of one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of our time—the first great decipherment of an ancient script—now revised and updated.
In the past dozen years, Maya decipherment has made great strides, in part due to the Internet, which has made possible the truly international scope of hieroglyphic scholarship: glyphic experts can be found not only in North America, Mexico, Guatemala, and western Europe but also in Russia and the countries of eastern Europe.The third edition of this classic book takes up the thorny question of when and where the Maya script first appeared in the archaeological record, and describes efforts to decipher its meaning on the extremely early murals of San Bartolo. It includes iconographic and epigraphic investigations into how the Classic Maya perceived and recorded the human senses, a previously unknown realm of ancient Maya thought and perception.
There is now compelling documentary and historical evidence bearing on the question of why and how the “breaking of the Maya code” was the achievement of Yuri V. Knorosov—a Soviet citizen totally isolated behind the Iron Curtain—and not of the leading Maya scholar of his day, Sir Eric Thompson. What does it take to make such a breakthrough, with a script of such complexity as the Maya? We now have some answers, as Michael Coe demonstrates here.
419 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 7, 1992
133 people are currently reading
1524 people want to read
About the author
Michael D. Coe
59 books60 followersMichael Douglas Coe was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, epigrapher, and author. He is known for his research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya, and was among the foremost Mayanists of the late twentieth century.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
November 17, 2020
Although reluctant to be a first world tourist in a third world area, my wife Linda eventually got me to go down to Quintana Roo in the NE Yucatan with her. Ultimately, I made three trips, all of them to the area midway between Cancun and Belize, preparing for them each time by reading up on the region and its original inhabitants, the Maya.
While Linda preferred the beach, I preferred exploring the ruins which are abundant in the area. To do so I befriended the locals, the descendants of the Maya, particularly the children, asking them where interesting things were. Then, following the paths of generations of little kids, I would go into the jungle to the places the tourists never venture, the places without roads. There, among other things, I found a cave with an island in it, and many square limestone structures, open on their sides, ranging in size from buildings a dozen feet tall to stupas the height of one's chest. And, yes, of course, I also went to Tulum and Xelha and Coba and other more touristic sites, pretty much covering the coast from Cancun to the southern border with Belize, much of it on foot.
Now, three trips and dozens of books into the matter, I'm an amateur student of the Maya, a culture at once so distant from ours and so close. The conquest of it only happened 400-500 years ago. The paint on some of the ruins, compared to those of ancient Greece or Rome, is still fresh.
One of the better introductory works on the Maya that I read was Coe's book by that title. Published in 1966, it still looked at Mayan civilization as a mystery. We could read their numerations, but not their language at that time. This book, published in 1992, tells a very different and much more hopeful story, the written Mayan language having been substantially deciphered in the intervening years.
'Breaking the Maya Code' is at once a history of the study of Mayan civilization and an explanation as to how their written language worked--and why we took so very long to come around to understanding it. The historical part of the book is very accessible, almost as exciting as a good mystery. The linguistic part of the book tends to get technical, though the author does adequately explain things for the layperson.
While Linda preferred the beach, I preferred exploring the ruins which are abundant in the area. To do so I befriended the locals, the descendants of the Maya, particularly the children, asking them where interesting things were. Then, following the paths of generations of little kids, I would go into the jungle to the places the tourists never venture, the places without roads. There, among other things, I found a cave with an island in it, and many square limestone structures, open on their sides, ranging in size from buildings a dozen feet tall to stupas the height of one's chest. And, yes, of course, I also went to Tulum and Xelha and Coba and other more touristic sites, pretty much covering the coast from Cancun to the southern border with Belize, much of it on foot.
Now, three trips and dozens of books into the matter, I'm an amateur student of the Maya, a culture at once so distant from ours and so close. The conquest of it only happened 400-500 years ago. The paint on some of the ruins, compared to those of ancient Greece or Rome, is still fresh.
One of the better introductory works on the Maya that I read was Coe's book by that title. Published in 1966, it still looked at Mayan civilization as a mystery. We could read their numerations, but not their language at that time. This book, published in 1992, tells a very different and much more hopeful story, the written Mayan language having been substantially deciphered in the intervening years.
'Breaking the Maya Code' is at once a history of the study of Mayan civilization and an explanation as to how their written language worked--and why we took so very long to come around to understanding it. The historical part of the book is very accessible, almost as exciting as a good mystery. The linguistic part of the book tends to get technical, though the author does adequately explain things for the layperson.
October 31, 2017
Ter-glyph-ic !
Having worked in academia for a number of years, Coe's story of overbearing professors belittling opposing views on a personal level, of scholars unwilling to grant even the slightest kudos to people who had made major discoveries, of jealousies galore, of careers threatened for failing to toe the line, was not surprising to me. It took several centuries to break the Maya system of writing. After any number of cockeyed theories had been mooted, it was a Russian scholar, who had never been out of the USSR, who realized how the system worked. Before him, a number of people approached the same answer---even Benjamin Whorf, a famous American linguist got into the act--- but were pooh-poohed and disparaged by other, more powerful scholars. Coe weaves a most interesting story, combined with numerous pictures, maps, and photographs, of how the Mayan glyphs were finally read. The problem was that, for some reason, most epigraphers did not connect the writing with the spoken Mayan languages of Mesoamerica though the example of how Egyptian "hieroglyphic" writing was read by Champollion (and others) who knew Coptic, was available to all. The Rosetta Stone is famously known to have aided the French scholar, but Spanish Bishop Landa's work of the 16th century, which could have performed a similar function, was long ignored. Maya writing was neither alphabetic or completely logographic, but a combination of both. Coe's book tells of the various characters and scholars who tried to break the code, who went down any number of wrong roads, and fought among themselves. After the main debate was settled, young scholars deciphered increasing numbers of glyphs, a kind of fascinating academic process which seldom reaches publication especially in such readable style. It's an 'archaeological saga' for sure. Coe also connects Maya writing to Maya history, to the civilization that flourished in the forests of Central America and Yucatan for many centuries, and to other systems of writing in the world, Egyptian, Hittite, Chinese, etc. All in all, it is a fascinating, well-written study that will hold your attention. No terms are used without explanation. Though obviously an academic subject, anyone can read this story of how the work of many individuals finally opened Maya (elite) history to the rest of the world.
Having worked in academia for a number of years, Coe's story of overbearing professors belittling opposing views on a personal level, of scholars unwilling to grant even the slightest kudos to people who had made major discoveries, of jealousies galore, of careers threatened for failing to toe the line, was not surprising to me. It took several centuries to break the Maya system of writing. After any number of cockeyed theories had been mooted, it was a Russian scholar, who had never been out of the USSR, who realized how the system worked. Before him, a number of people approached the same answer---even Benjamin Whorf, a famous American linguist got into the act--- but were pooh-poohed and disparaged by other, more powerful scholars. Coe weaves a most interesting story, combined with numerous pictures, maps, and photographs, of how the Mayan glyphs were finally read. The problem was that, for some reason, most epigraphers did not connect the writing with the spoken Mayan languages of Mesoamerica though the example of how Egyptian "hieroglyphic" writing was read by Champollion (and others) who knew Coptic, was available to all. The Rosetta Stone is famously known to have aided the French scholar, but Spanish Bishop Landa's work of the 16th century, which could have performed a similar function, was long ignored. Maya writing was neither alphabetic or completely logographic, but a combination of both. Coe's book tells of the various characters and scholars who tried to break the code, who went down any number of wrong roads, and fought among themselves. After the main debate was settled, young scholars deciphered increasing numbers of glyphs, a kind of fascinating academic process which seldom reaches publication especially in such readable style. It's an 'archaeological saga' for sure. Coe also connects Maya writing to Maya history, to the civilization that flourished in the forests of Central America and Yucatan for many centuries, and to other systems of writing in the world, Egyptian, Hittite, Chinese, etc. All in all, it is a fascinating, well-written study that will hold your attention. No terms are used without explanation. Though obviously an academic subject, anyone can read this story of how the work of many individuals finally opened Maya (elite) history to the rest of the world.
August 13, 2007
I was really excited to read this book; as a linguistics dork this sounded great. The pseudo-anthropologist in me felt his heart go pitter-pat. But the book itself is so incredibly tedious in tone that I quickly lost enthusiasm. Praise for certain academics and descriptions of their quirks as people; crotchety indictments of others, along with descriptions of their quirks as people. Shut up and tell me about the role of phonetics in the deciphering of the script already! Sheesh.
December 27, 2019
This is a must read for students of MesoAmerican studies. It gives the background on uncovering the meaning of the Glyphs and the efforts to thwart the deciphering by fellow archaeologists in the field - most notably the revered (perhaps feared) Thompson. The backgrounds on two of my professors: David Kelley and Peter Mathews was enlightening.
I had always favoured Kelley's correlation preference over Thompson's yet Coe (the author) sticks by Thompson when he was wrong in so many other areas (Thompson not Coe). And Coe is incorrect in his assertion that you have to read a language before you can write it. In Arabic I learned to write it in a year yet still could not read it (because they leave out the vowels). Or take English I can't imagine reading it without having learned to make the letters one by one.
The book offers insights as to how to decipher Mayan script but is not a primer. It more on the steps and missteps attaining what Coe calls one of the most significant achievements in archaeology.
I had always favoured Kelley's correlation preference over Thompson's yet Coe (the author) sticks by Thompson when he was wrong in so many other areas (Thompson not Coe). And Coe is incorrect in his assertion that you have to read a language before you can write it. In Arabic I learned to write it in a year yet still could not read it (because they leave out the vowels). Or take English I can't imagine reading it without having learned to make the letters one by one.
The book offers insights as to how to decipher Mayan script but is not a primer. It more on the steps and missteps attaining what Coe calls one of the most significant achievements in archaeology.
May 21, 2008
Breaking the Maya Code is not so much about deciphering the Mayan script as it is about the adventurers, divines, scholars, librarians, insurance salesmen, and students who contributed to -- and often befuddled -- our understanding of Mayan epigraphy for over four centuries.
Before actually discussing how the Mayan code has been recently deciphered, Coe indulges himself in nearly two-hundred pages of scholarly anecdotes, brief biography, and sometimes curious, though often pointless trivia as he traces in great detail how, in spite of centuries of effort, the writing on the monuments of Chichen Itza, Copan, and Palenque was misunderstood or intentionally disregarded by feuding scholars. With perfect hindsight, Coe waspishly criticizes predecessors and colleagues whose attempts at decipherment either failed or whose opinions and renown in academia hindered others from making progress toward understanding the true nature of the glyphs. With great embellishment, he heaps praise on the work of the "Young Turks" who have finally adopted phonetic principals to crack the code.
What results is Coe's book of remembrance, his memoirs of fifty years in some of the more privileged corners of academia (he never fails to mention he took his degrees from Harvard and taught at Yale) spent trying to make sense not only of the "Lords of the Forest" but also of the gods, men, and monsters in the university.
Before actually discussing how the Mayan code has been recently deciphered, Coe indulges himself in nearly two-hundred pages of scholarly anecdotes, brief biography, and sometimes curious, though often pointless trivia as he traces in great detail how, in spite of centuries of effort, the writing on the monuments of Chichen Itza, Copan, and Palenque was misunderstood or intentionally disregarded by feuding scholars. With perfect hindsight, Coe waspishly criticizes predecessors and colleagues whose attempts at decipherment either failed or whose opinions and renown in academia hindered others from making progress toward understanding the true nature of the glyphs. With great embellishment, he heaps praise on the work of the "Young Turks" who have finally adopted phonetic principals to crack the code.
What results is Coe's book of remembrance, his memoirs of fifty years in some of the more privileged corners of academia (he never fails to mention he took his degrees from Harvard and taught at Yale) spent trying to make sense not only of the "Lords of the Forest" but also of the gods, men, and monsters in the university.
January 5, 2019
REVOLUTION AMONG MAYANISTS
FROM SIR ERIC (THOMPSON) TO REAL EPIGRAPHY
STRAIGHT FROM THE MOUTH OF A DIRECT WITNESS
Sir Eric (Thompson) was knighted by the Queen of England in 1975, just before his passing away, to thank him for all he had done in the field of Maya research. But what on earth had he done?
He had blocked for at least forty years all research about Maya writing because for him all these signs and carvings and paintings and decorations in stone, in paint, on walls, on pots, on plates, on bark-paper, all those monuments in the jungle were not writing, were not the written form of an oral language that had been in existence for thousands of years, but was the aesthetic beautiful artistic expression of no scribes but visionary shamans of some kind able to see beyond the surface of things and able to express directly the depth and beauty of the soul of the shamans, of the artists, of the Maya people. It was decreed by this Sir Eric (Thompson) that apart from the mathematical glyphs with numbers and long count, short count or whatever, all the rest was in no way linguistic and the dates and mathematical symbols were only the sign of the absolute addiction of the Maya to numbers, mathematics, time, and other figments of their somewhat troubled imagination during the long bouts of absolute drunkenness (drunken coma?) they enjoyed by enematic injections. They might even be astrologers, you know, these people who are predicting your future from the stars, telling you your horoscope in two sentences for the day, the week, the month, the years to come, even your life, though then they need a crystal ball or a pack of tarots cards. And mind you for them the planet Venus is supreme, male and vindictive in HIS request for blood. In other words, they were – and still are – barbarians according to these intellectuals who must be attracted to the subject by the scent of blood.
The damage was so deep that it took twenty years for the epigraphers, ethnographers, archaeologists, and linguists, plus a myriad of other scientists or undergraduate and graduate students to finally recognize the truth that was first said and published in 1952 by a Soviet linguist in Leningrad, Yuri Knorozov, the truth that Maya writing was comparable to Egyptian hieroglyphs: on the basis of some logographs (glyphs that represented an object, an animal, a person or a god, and at times something more abstract, like the sun, the moon, sunrise and sunset) that have kept their recognizable forms, the writing system developed as a phonetic system whose architecture was that of a syllabary. And that had been suggested in the 16th century by Landa, the monk and later on a bishop who had thousands of Maya books burnt up in an autodafe.
We are luckily far beyond this sorry phase of the forty years of feudal and aristocratic dictatorship from one single man, Sir Eric (Thompson). Kukulkan, please, bless the child! If that had not happened the Maya might have been able to resist against the last episode of genocide and ethnocide they had to suffer in Guatemala at the end of the 20th century, not to mention the systematic segregation they are the victims of everywhere in Mesoamerica since they pretend to speak Maya languages, they consider Spanish as a second language, and they identify to Christianity because in a way Jesus Christ is Quetzalcoatl, aka Kukulkan. D.H. Lawrence said that in the 1920s with his famous novel The Plumed Serpent, (1926). Let’s hope this resurrection, restoration, renascence of an ethnocided, genocided and ecocided culture will bring La Malinche back into the light, the interpreter of Hernán Cortés who has been diabolized and Satanized by the Mexicans.
You will find here the long study on Michael D. Coe’s essential book on the saga of how Maya script was finally deciphered, and Coe knows what he is speaking of since he was a direct witness of the whole dys-adventure because he managed to get a modest position in academia in Thompson’s time and he remained modest in his suggestions that could not, had not to appear like a challenge. He informed the “Master” about Yuri Knorozov, he did his own thing under the table, and he let the “Master” exorcize the communist devil from Leningrad. And that lasted from 1952 to 1975. That was the Cold War in academia. That was, plain and simple, intellectual academic McCarthyism. Really God, please, Kukulkan, pretty please, Quetzalcoatl, with sugar on top, do bless the child and try to save us from the deeply rooted anti-communistic prejudices that reign in the USA so powerful that it makes everyone blind, like some onanistic sin of the past, according to absolute experts about it, viz. priests of any affiliation and confession, who happened to speak of it between two episodes of child molesting.
Enjoy that descent into hell, the hell of the good fundamentalist and sectarian – we would have said Stalinist in my days – academic totalitarianism of the “intellectual elite” of a nation, of the Western world in days of globalization.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
FROM SIR ERIC (THOMPSON) TO REAL EPIGRAPHY
STRAIGHT FROM THE MOUTH OF A DIRECT WITNESS
Sir Eric (Thompson) was knighted by the Queen of England in 1975, just before his passing away, to thank him for all he had done in the field of Maya research. But what on earth had he done?
He had blocked for at least forty years all research about Maya writing because for him all these signs and carvings and paintings and decorations in stone, in paint, on walls, on pots, on plates, on bark-paper, all those monuments in the jungle were not writing, were not the written form of an oral language that had been in existence for thousands of years, but was the aesthetic beautiful artistic expression of no scribes but visionary shamans of some kind able to see beyond the surface of things and able to express directly the depth and beauty of the soul of the shamans, of the artists, of the Maya people. It was decreed by this Sir Eric (Thompson) that apart from the mathematical glyphs with numbers and long count, short count or whatever, all the rest was in no way linguistic and the dates and mathematical symbols were only the sign of the absolute addiction of the Maya to numbers, mathematics, time, and other figments of their somewhat troubled imagination during the long bouts of absolute drunkenness (drunken coma?) they enjoyed by enematic injections. They might even be astrologers, you know, these people who are predicting your future from the stars, telling you your horoscope in two sentences for the day, the week, the month, the years to come, even your life, though then they need a crystal ball or a pack of tarots cards. And mind you for them the planet Venus is supreme, male and vindictive in HIS request for blood. In other words, they were – and still are – barbarians according to these intellectuals who must be attracted to the subject by the scent of blood.
The damage was so deep that it took twenty years for the epigraphers, ethnographers, archaeologists, and linguists, plus a myriad of other scientists or undergraduate and graduate students to finally recognize the truth that was first said and published in 1952 by a Soviet linguist in Leningrad, Yuri Knorozov, the truth that Maya writing was comparable to Egyptian hieroglyphs: on the basis of some logographs (glyphs that represented an object, an animal, a person or a god, and at times something more abstract, like the sun, the moon, sunrise and sunset) that have kept their recognizable forms, the writing system developed as a phonetic system whose architecture was that of a syllabary. And that had been suggested in the 16th century by Landa, the monk and later on a bishop who had thousands of Maya books burnt up in an autodafe.
We are luckily far beyond this sorry phase of the forty years of feudal and aristocratic dictatorship from one single man, Sir Eric (Thompson). Kukulkan, please, bless the child! If that had not happened the Maya might have been able to resist against the last episode of genocide and ethnocide they had to suffer in Guatemala at the end of the 20th century, not to mention the systematic segregation they are the victims of everywhere in Mesoamerica since they pretend to speak Maya languages, they consider Spanish as a second language, and they identify to Christianity because in a way Jesus Christ is Quetzalcoatl, aka Kukulkan. D.H. Lawrence said that in the 1920s with his famous novel The Plumed Serpent, (1926). Let’s hope this resurrection, restoration, renascence of an ethnocided, genocided and ecocided culture will bring La Malinche back into the light, the interpreter of Hernán Cortés who has been diabolized and Satanized by the Mexicans.
You will find here the long study on Michael D. Coe’s essential book on the saga of how Maya script was finally deciphered, and Coe knows what he is speaking of since he was a direct witness of the whole dys-adventure because he managed to get a modest position in academia in Thompson’s time and he remained modest in his suggestions that could not, had not to appear like a challenge. He informed the “Master” about Yuri Knorozov, he did his own thing under the table, and he let the “Master” exorcize the communist devil from Leningrad. And that lasted from 1952 to 1975. That was the Cold War in academia. That was, plain and simple, intellectual academic McCarthyism. Really God, please, Kukulkan, pretty please, Quetzalcoatl, with sugar on top, do bless the child and try to save us from the deeply rooted anti-communistic prejudices that reign in the USA so powerful that it makes everyone blind, like some onanistic sin of the past, according to absolute experts about it, viz. priests of any affiliation and confession, who happened to speak of it between two episodes of child molesting.
Enjoy that descent into hell, the hell of the good fundamentalist and sectarian – we would have said Stalinist in my days – academic totalitarianism of the “intellectual elite” of a nation, of the Western world in days of globalization.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
December 21, 2021
Unlike the other reviewers, I found the gossip to be the most interesting part of this story. The decipherment process itself was too technical for me to follow. In any case, this is much worse written than the other two decipherment books that I have read recently, Dolnick's "The Writing of the Gods," and Fox's "The Riddle of the Labyrinth."
> by the young British architect Michael Ventris in a radio broadcast of 1952. In June of the next year, a leader in The Times, which brought this discovery to the attention of the world, significantly coincided with the conquest of Everest by Hillary and Tensing. Ventris’ achievement was the cracking of Linear B, a kind of Everest of the mind, if there ever was one, and made even more poignant by the brilliant decipherer’s untimely death at the age of thirty-four in a car accident
> tenses: they really don’t exist in Mayan languages like Yucatec, or at least there are no past, present, and future of the kind familiar to us. In their place are aspect words or particles, and inflections; these indicate whether an action has been completed or not, whether it is just beginning or ending, or has been in progress for a while. As adverbs, they stand in front of verbs, and govern them. To talk of events in the past, you must differentiate the remote past from the more recent past; and to deal with the future, the particular aspect word which you must use depends on how certain it is that something will happen – there are the indefinite “I will walk,” the definite “I am going to walk,” and the very certain statement “I will walk.”
> is just not possible in Mayan to use an imperfective verb (referring to actions or events in the past, present, or future that have not been completed) without sticking a date or a temporal aspect adverb in front of it. The Maya are, and have always been, very, very particular about time
> As English-speakers, we take it for granted that one can speak of, say “four birds” or “twenty-five books,” but this kind of numerical construction is impossible in the Mayan languages – between the number and the thing counted there has to be a numerical classifier, describing the class to which the object, animal, plant, or thing belongs. We have a glimmering of this sort of construction when we talk of “two flocks of geese” or “a pride of lions,” but this is pale stuff compared to the richness of Mayan classifiers. Colonial Yucatec dictionaries list dozens of these, but only a handful are still in use in today’s Yucatán, yet even these have to be interposed even when the number itself might be in Spanish. If I see three horses in a pasture, I would count them as ox-tul tzimin (ox, “three”; -tul, classifier for animate things; tzimin, “horse” or “tapir”). However, if there were three stones lying in the same pasture, I would have to say ox-p’el tunich (ox, “three”; -p’el, classifier for inanimate things; tunich, “stone”).
> Mayan is fairly gender-blind: there really are no masculine, feminine, or neuter constructions in most of the grammar. One and the same pronoun is used for “he,” “she,” and “it.” Nonetheless, male and female personal names and occupational titles are often prefixed by special particles indicating sex. In Yucatec, these are aj for men, and ix for women. Thus, we have in our early Colonial sources aj tz’ib, “scribe” (= “he of the writing”), and lx Cheel, the mother goddess (= “Lady Rainbow”).
> For the ancient Egyptians, the order of a sentence with a transitive verb would have been verb-subject-object, or VSO, so that to express a sentence which in English would be “The scribe knows the counsel,” a denizen of the Nile would have had to say “knows the scribe the counsel.” We would use the SVO construction for this. But the Mayan languages generally use the order verb-object-subject or VOS (“knows the counsel the scribe”); moreover, with intransitive verbs which take no object, such as “the lord is seated,” the verb still precedes the subject.
> by the young British architect Michael Ventris in a radio broadcast of 1952. In June of the next year, a leader in The Times, which brought this discovery to the attention of the world, significantly coincided with the conquest of Everest by Hillary and Tensing. Ventris’ achievement was the cracking of Linear B, a kind of Everest of the mind, if there ever was one, and made even more poignant by the brilliant decipherer’s untimely death at the age of thirty-four in a car accident
> tenses: they really don’t exist in Mayan languages like Yucatec, or at least there are no past, present, and future of the kind familiar to us. In their place are aspect words or particles, and inflections; these indicate whether an action has been completed or not, whether it is just beginning or ending, or has been in progress for a while. As adverbs, they stand in front of verbs, and govern them. To talk of events in the past, you must differentiate the remote past from the more recent past; and to deal with the future, the particular aspect word which you must use depends on how certain it is that something will happen – there are the indefinite “I will walk,” the definite “I am going to walk,” and the very certain statement “I will walk.”
> is just not possible in Mayan to use an imperfective verb (referring to actions or events in the past, present, or future that have not been completed) without sticking a date or a temporal aspect adverb in front of it. The Maya are, and have always been, very, very particular about time
> As English-speakers, we take it for granted that one can speak of, say “four birds” or “twenty-five books,” but this kind of numerical construction is impossible in the Mayan languages – between the number and the thing counted there has to be a numerical classifier, describing the class to which the object, animal, plant, or thing belongs. We have a glimmering of this sort of construction when we talk of “two flocks of geese” or “a pride of lions,” but this is pale stuff compared to the richness of Mayan classifiers. Colonial Yucatec dictionaries list dozens of these, but only a handful are still in use in today’s Yucatán, yet even these have to be interposed even when the number itself might be in Spanish. If I see three horses in a pasture, I would count them as ox-tul tzimin (ox, “three”; -tul, classifier for animate things; tzimin, “horse” or “tapir”). However, if there were three stones lying in the same pasture, I would have to say ox-p’el tunich (ox, “three”; -p’el, classifier for inanimate things; tunich, “stone”).
> Mayan is fairly gender-blind: there really are no masculine, feminine, or neuter constructions in most of the grammar. One and the same pronoun is used for “he,” “she,” and “it.” Nonetheless, male and female personal names and occupational titles are often prefixed by special particles indicating sex. In Yucatec, these are aj for men, and ix for women. Thus, we have in our early Colonial sources aj tz’ib, “scribe” (= “he of the writing”), and lx Cheel, the mother goddess (= “Lady Rainbow”).
> For the ancient Egyptians, the order of a sentence with a transitive verb would have been verb-subject-object, or VSO, so that to express a sentence which in English would be “The scribe knows the counsel,” a denizen of the Nile would have had to say “knows the scribe the counsel.” We would use the SVO construction for this. But the Mayan languages generally use the order verb-object-subject or VOS (“knows the counsel the scribe”); moreover, with intransitive verbs which take no object, such as “the lord is seated,” the verb still precedes the subject.
April 24, 2017
Well, this certainly had a lot of content. I sought this out after reading the recent book about the Stephens and Catherwood expeditions.
Overall, I enjoyed it, although my impression of it perhaps suffered a little because it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.
Roughly the first half covers the major personalities in Mayan studies and the history of the field. It was interesting, and it set the stage, and it went into more detail than I was prepared for. Some of it had a ... weird? ... tone because the author himself is a Mayan scholar, and knows (or knew) the more recent folks working in this area, and it felt like he was trying to say nice things about the individuals but for me, seeing as I don't know these people and don't care what they think of me, it felt wedged in. Or maybe an editor told him "oh, for human interest, you should add some tidbits that show the personalities of these people" and then he randomly stuck in odd descriptors that ended up feeling really out of context (and in addition to the nice things, some of them were rather salty, which seemed even stranger). The main takeaway from this section is important, however, which is that there were a lot of incorrect assumptions about the Mayan writing that shifted the focus away from avenues of inquiry that might have produced better results sooner -- namely that Mayan civilization wasn't advanced enough to develop a truly coherent writing system (wrong), that the written language was entirely symbolic and not related to spoken Mayan, variations of which are still spoken by actual people (wrong), and that the writing was only used to express dates and calendar calculations (there are a lot of dates, but still wrong).
The second part of the book got more into what was actually happening as researchers started to make more progress with the Mayan writing. The book was impressively successful at broad-stroking the general idea of the thing -- how you (if you are a linguist) can suss out the relationship between sounds and symbols. For the curious, the signs can act as either outright symbols of a thing (a picture of a jaguar is a jaguar) but they can also be used as phonetic markers so you can use them to spell out any word. Or any word that a Mayan person wanted to carve into a lintel or paint on ceramics.
As interesting as all of that was, I suspect it's the kind of thing where Coe isn't that used to explaining it to beginners, and this stuff probably seems very obvious to him. What was really missing, for me, and again, this might not have been his goal at all, was a deep explanation of how the glyphs work visually. They're incredibly hard to suss out for a person outside of that tradition. It was extremely challenging to match up the Mayan images with the explanations. And of course, you have a body of writing that spanned centuries, ranging over a large geographic area, and so there are a lot of differences from example to example and it was utterly unclear which threads of commonality I was supposed to be looking at. What I wanted was more of a visual history of the writing itself. (As an example, one of them is supposedly the image of a frog, and I'm staring at this thing and I can't see a frog -- is it a frog in profile? A birds-eye view? Is that squiggle a leg? A hat? WHAT IS THIS?)
But it definitely succeeded in showing the complexity of understanding Mayan writing and makes a real impression of how dedicated and smart and determined folks had to be to make progress.
Overall, I enjoyed it, although my impression of it perhaps suffered a little because it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.
Roughly the first half covers the major personalities in Mayan studies and the history of the field. It was interesting, and it set the stage, and it went into more detail than I was prepared for. Some of it had a ... weird? ... tone because the author himself is a Mayan scholar, and knows (or knew) the more recent folks working in this area, and it felt like he was trying to say nice things about the individuals but for me, seeing as I don't know these people and don't care what they think of me, it felt wedged in. Or maybe an editor told him "oh, for human interest, you should add some tidbits that show the personalities of these people" and then he randomly stuck in odd descriptors that ended up feeling really out of context (and in addition to the nice things, some of them were rather salty, which seemed even stranger). The main takeaway from this section is important, however, which is that there were a lot of incorrect assumptions about the Mayan writing that shifted the focus away from avenues of inquiry that might have produced better results sooner -- namely that Mayan civilization wasn't advanced enough to develop a truly coherent writing system (wrong), that the written language was entirely symbolic and not related to spoken Mayan, variations of which are still spoken by actual people (wrong), and that the writing was only used to express dates and calendar calculations (there are a lot of dates, but still wrong).
The second part of the book got more into what was actually happening as researchers started to make more progress with the Mayan writing. The book was impressively successful at broad-stroking the general idea of the thing -- how you (if you are a linguist) can suss out the relationship between sounds and symbols. For the curious, the signs can act as either outright symbols of a thing (a picture of a jaguar is a jaguar) but they can also be used as phonetic markers so you can use them to spell out any word. Or any word that a Mayan person wanted to carve into a lintel or paint on ceramics.
As interesting as all of that was, I suspect it's the kind of thing where Coe isn't that used to explaining it to beginners, and this stuff probably seems very obvious to him. What was really missing, for me, and again, this might not have been his goal at all, was a deep explanation of how the glyphs work visually. They're incredibly hard to suss out for a person outside of that tradition. It was extremely challenging to match up the Mayan images with the explanations. And of course, you have a body of writing that spanned centuries, ranging over a large geographic area, and so there are a lot of differences from example to example and it was utterly unclear which threads of commonality I was supposed to be looking at. What I wanted was more of a visual history of the writing itself. (As an example, one of them is supposedly the image of a frog, and I'm staring at this thing and I can't see a frog -- is it a frog in profile? A birds-eye view? Is that squiggle a leg? A hat? WHAT IS THIS?)
But it definitely succeeded in showing the complexity of understanding Mayan writing and makes a real impression of how dedicated and smart and determined folks had to be to make progress.
July 16, 2020
There are really two independent works tucked away in this book: one is actually on solving the Maya hieroglyphic system, and the other is a case study presenting pretty much everything I hate about academia.
I've been casually tinkering with pre-Columbian archeology since my big sister left me wandering in a library at the age of about 10 - which, for reference, was a long time ago -, and so I had drawn this idealistic, candy-coloured image to myself that (a) Mayas are great, (b) archeology is great, so (c) scientific research involving Mayas, perforce, has to be this grand adventure that everyone feels honoured participating in, and so archeologists, as a society, work towards solving the mysteries of the past selflessly, unified, possibly riding unicorns during the process. Yeah, I was that young. Then academia happened, and by the time I got my own dirt-digging license, I had been through a few Eric Thompsons of my own field, so I have no illusions about academics anymore. But this book, this was still sort of a kick in the teeth, because it makes me think that if we, geologists, are bad, archeologists are truly the worst. What I've learned is that having clashing schools of thoughts within one area (i.e., Maya epigraphy) is one thing, but then, reportedly, field archeologists completely disregard and/or dismiss(ed? I am hopeful and naive enough to give past tense a chance...) the historic events unraveled by epigraphy. On the other hand, those working on the inscriptions don't seem to give enough credit to the people who actually find them by digging in the jungle amongst mosquitoes and the heat and spiders, without, I have come to learn, the aid of unicorns. Coe himself falls into this trap, and I was slightly uncomfortable reading his tone, because he very openly and unmistakably takes sides and indulges in sarcastic little remarks about sour grapes and embarrassing misinterpretations of glyphs at almost every chance. This is a popular science book, so I guess the author may use whatever tone he wants, but I, personally, don't like bashing in a science book, may it be ever so mild and possibly justified.
Apart from the off-putting clinical picture of what academia has been and probably always will be like, it's an enjoyable read for the one so inclined. The glyph illustrations are pretty neat and informative (and made me realize I likely will never be able to read them...), and it gives a handy walkthrough at the beginning about how languages, writing systems and decrypting texts work, which I found myself fascinated by. So much so that I actually bought Coe's other book on reading the Maya glyphs about one-quarter in.
(Also, don't miss the Nova documentary that was based on the book. It has a more sensationalist tone, of course, but as far as I remember it leaves out the trash-talking and focuses on the story. It's on YouTube; totally worth it.)
I've been casually tinkering with pre-Columbian archeology since my big sister left me wandering in a library at the age of about 10 - which, for reference, was a long time ago -, and so I had drawn this idealistic, candy-coloured image to myself that (a) Mayas are great, (b) archeology is great, so (c) scientific research involving Mayas, perforce, has to be this grand adventure that everyone feels honoured participating in, and so archeologists, as a society, work towards solving the mysteries of the past selflessly, unified, possibly riding unicorns during the process. Yeah, I was that young. Then academia happened, and by the time I got my own dirt-digging license, I had been through a few Eric Thompsons of my own field, so I have no illusions about academics anymore. But this book, this was still sort of a kick in the teeth, because it makes me think that if we, geologists, are bad, archeologists are truly the worst. What I've learned is that having clashing schools of thoughts within one area (i.e., Maya epigraphy) is one thing, but then, reportedly, field archeologists completely disregard and/or dismiss(ed? I am hopeful and naive enough to give past tense a chance...) the historic events unraveled by epigraphy. On the other hand, those working on the inscriptions don't seem to give enough credit to the people who actually find them by digging in the jungle amongst mosquitoes and the heat and spiders, without, I have come to learn, the aid of unicorns. Coe himself falls into this trap, and I was slightly uncomfortable reading his tone, because he very openly and unmistakably takes sides and indulges in sarcastic little remarks about sour grapes and embarrassing misinterpretations of glyphs at almost every chance. This is a popular science book, so I guess the author may use whatever tone he wants, but I, personally, don't like bashing in a science book, may it be ever so mild and possibly justified.
Apart from the off-putting clinical picture of what academia has been and probably always will be like, it's an enjoyable read for the one so inclined. The glyph illustrations are pretty neat and informative (and made me realize I likely will never be able to read them...), and it gives a handy walkthrough at the beginning about how languages, writing systems and decrypting texts work, which I found myself fascinated by. So much so that I actually bought Coe's other book on reading the Maya glyphs about one-quarter in.
(Also, don't miss the Nova documentary that was based on the book. It has a more sensationalist tone, of course, but as far as I remember it leaves out the trash-talking and focuses on the story. It's on YouTube; totally worth it.)
July 25, 2016
Aus den Memoiren des Forschers Coe
Die süd- und mittelamerikanischen präkolumbischen Kulturen haben mich schon als Kind fasziniert; ich malte gern Maya-Schriftzeichen ab, war ein Azteken-Fan und träumte von versunkenen Dschungelstädten voller geheimnisvoller Stelen. Vielen ging es wohl so, und Leute wie wir werden dann natürlich von einem Buch, das einen so vielversprechenden Namen trägt, magisch angezogen.
Und wie das dann sehr oft so ist: Die Magie ist schnell verflogen. Coe beschreibt in seinem Buch zu gefühlten 90% die Lebensläufe der wichtigsten Forscher auf dem Gebiet der Schriftentschlüsselung. Ist diese biografische Komponente zu Beginn noch einigermaßen erträglich, so übersprang ich ab der Mitte bis zum Ende ganze Passagen - mich interessiert, wenn ich so ein Buch beginne, doch nicht die Kindheit von amerikanischen Ethnologen, sondern die Maya und ihre Schrift! Davon finde ich persönlich viel zu wenig in diesem Buch. Ein paar Kapitel sind für mich als studierten Linguisten sehr interessant, wenn es um Morphologie, Phonetik und andere Sprachstrukturen geht; doch das fühlt sich mehr wie Randnotizen an in einem geschichtlichen Abriss der Maya-Forschung, nicht der Maya selbst.
Coe spart nicht mit Vorwürfen und Kritik an anderen Forschungsrichtungen, sein Lieblingsbiss geht gegen die Archäologen, die die Maya erforschen, ohne eine Maya-Sprache zu sprechen. Diesen Biss kann man leicht zurückgeben - Coe schreibt hier ein Buch über die Maya, ohne sie wirklich vorzustellen. Dazu kommt eine etwas sehr prosaische Übersetzung, in der man oft erkennt, was der Autor originalsprachlich eigentlich sagen wollte, bevor der Übersetzer es verwurstet hat.
Viel zu wenige Illustrationen, keine zusammenhängende Erklärung, wie die Maya-Schriftsymbole nun aufgebaut sind, wenig Einblick in die Kultur selbst. Kann man lesen, muss man nicht. Ich halte weiter Ausschau nach interessanteren Büchern zu den Maya.
Die süd- und mittelamerikanischen präkolumbischen Kulturen haben mich schon als Kind fasziniert; ich malte gern Maya-Schriftzeichen ab, war ein Azteken-Fan und träumte von versunkenen Dschungelstädten voller geheimnisvoller Stelen. Vielen ging es wohl so, und Leute wie wir werden dann natürlich von einem Buch, das einen so vielversprechenden Namen trägt, magisch angezogen.
Und wie das dann sehr oft so ist: Die Magie ist schnell verflogen. Coe beschreibt in seinem Buch zu gefühlten 90% die Lebensläufe der wichtigsten Forscher auf dem Gebiet der Schriftentschlüsselung. Ist diese biografische Komponente zu Beginn noch einigermaßen erträglich, so übersprang ich ab der Mitte bis zum Ende ganze Passagen - mich interessiert, wenn ich so ein Buch beginne, doch nicht die Kindheit von amerikanischen Ethnologen, sondern die Maya und ihre Schrift! Davon finde ich persönlich viel zu wenig in diesem Buch. Ein paar Kapitel sind für mich als studierten Linguisten sehr interessant, wenn es um Morphologie, Phonetik und andere Sprachstrukturen geht; doch das fühlt sich mehr wie Randnotizen an in einem geschichtlichen Abriss der Maya-Forschung, nicht der Maya selbst.
Coe spart nicht mit Vorwürfen und Kritik an anderen Forschungsrichtungen, sein Lieblingsbiss geht gegen die Archäologen, die die Maya erforschen, ohne eine Maya-Sprache zu sprechen. Diesen Biss kann man leicht zurückgeben - Coe schreibt hier ein Buch über die Maya, ohne sie wirklich vorzustellen. Dazu kommt eine etwas sehr prosaische Übersetzung, in der man oft erkennt, was der Autor originalsprachlich eigentlich sagen wollte, bevor der Übersetzer es verwurstet hat.
Viel zu wenige Illustrationen, keine zusammenhängende Erklärung, wie die Maya-Schriftsymbole nun aufgebaut sind, wenig Einblick in die Kultur selbst. Kann man lesen, muss man nicht. Ich halte weiter Ausschau nach interessanteren Büchern zu den Maya.
May 21, 2023
Many of my predecessors have dissed this. I liked it, but then, I've always harbored a liking for Whorf's theory. By enlivening the checkered and contentious careers of scholars, adventurers, and, sadly, a glimpse of despoilers, Michael Coe invites a seriously committed reader into the protracted struggle to make sense of Mayan glyphs. It takes attention, but his narrative provides what an absolute neophyte like myself needs to grasp to follow Coe's long march. He shows wit, admits his own prejudices and missteps, and keeps in mind that he's combining a challenging topic with a popular tone, no easy feat for this difficult series of puzzles that have deluded and eluded some of the smartest minds for centuries. In summing up the breakthrough, Coe compares the inscribed messages to billboards...imagine trying to comprehend our own culture if those were all that remained for archeologists a millennium and a half from now. Patience is needed, but you'll be rewarded in time.
February 4, 2023
This book focuses on such a fascinating subject and the first few pages really grabbed me, so I decided to read it. Unfortunately the middle and latter part get a bit bogged down in details of who’s who and who studied where and who relates to whom as regards the people who played a part, when I’d have liked a bit more focus on the actual decipherment. It was also sometimes a bit confusing in the way it jumped between different people and time periods, and in how some sections seemed to end on odd sentences without coming to a proper conclusion. But the writer was an academic no doubt used to another style of writing so that probably explains this. Ultimately the subject matter was still very fascinating, and it was nice to read about it from someone who was involved and knew many of the key Maya researchers personally.
Also the whole decipherment story was an Interesting lesson in how one very powerful, influential and stubborn expert on a subject (not the author, someone else he mentions) can hold up progress for decades if they dig their heels in and vigorously defend a position that turns out to be wrong.
Also the whole decipherment story was an Interesting lesson in how one very powerful, influential and stubborn expert on a subject (not the author, someone else he mentions) can hold up progress for decades if they dig their heels in and vigorously defend a position that turns out to be wrong.
September 23, 2019
I don't quite know what to say about this one. Would I recommend it? Probably not, but not because it's poorly written or defective in some way. It's just written for a very narrow audience, of which I'm clearly not a part. And yet I was interested enough to read the whole book. Of course it's not Dr. Coe's fault I misjudged what this book might cover. I was hoping to learn more about the Maya in general, while this book is devoted to one specific story: the history of the modern effort to read Mayan script. Fortunately the story is well told, it's authoritative and interesting. Overall, reading this felt a bit like stumbling into an academic conference I have no business attending but then staying anyway.
July 25, 2017
I really like that the book is dedicated to Knorosov:
"TO THE MEMORY OF YURI VALENTINOVICH KNOROSOV aj bobat, aj miatz, etail".
Coe's book is a very interesting one about the story of the decipherment of Mayan script. I did not even know that the Mayas had a system of writing that represented their spoken language. And due to Knorosov work now we can read Mayan stelas, inscriptions, pottery, codices.
"TO THE MEMORY OF YURI VALENTINOVICH KNOROSOV aj bobat, aj miatz, etail".
Coe's book is a very interesting one about the story of the decipherment of Mayan script. I did not even know that the Mayas had a system of writing that represented their spoken language. And due to Knorosov work now we can read Mayan stelas, inscriptions, pottery, codices.
November 22, 2018
Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code: Third Edition is about a conflict between the diggers and the linguists. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he had his scholar Champollion with him. It was not too many years after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone during that expedition that Champollion had figured out how to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs.
There was a Rosetta Stone for Mayan hieroglyphs as well -- one dating all the way back to 1566. It was Bishop Diego de Landa's book Relacion de los cosas de Yucatan, which included the bishop's own study of the language. (Darn nice of him, since he was the man responsible for burning so many of the Maya condexes at Mani years earlier.)
What prevented the glyphs from being translated was that the diggers -- the archaeologists, rather than the linguists -- were in control. One man, Sir J. Eric S. Thompson had, for four decades, insisted that the glyphs didn't mean anything. It was not until Thompson died in 1975 that the glyphs yielded up their meaning. Oddly, the impetus came not from America, but from two Russians, Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov.
When I first visited Yucatan in 1975, I believed Thompson that the thousands of glyphs were not important. (For all his renown, Thompson never learned any dialect of Mayan.) It was the linguists who gave the Maya a history, complete with names, dates, and events.
Coe's book is actually exciting. It is a detective story about how to overcome stodgy entrenched interests.
There was a Rosetta Stone for Mayan hieroglyphs as well -- one dating all the way back to 1566. It was Bishop Diego de Landa's book Relacion de los cosas de Yucatan, which included the bishop's own study of the language. (Darn nice of him, since he was the man responsible for burning so many of the Maya condexes at Mani years earlier.)
What prevented the glyphs from being translated was that the diggers -- the archaeologists, rather than the linguists -- were in control. One man, Sir J. Eric S. Thompson had, for four decades, insisted that the glyphs didn't mean anything. It was not until Thompson died in 1975 that the glyphs yielded up their meaning. Oddly, the impetus came not from America, but from two Russians, Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov.
When I first visited Yucatan in 1975, I believed Thompson that the thousands of glyphs were not important. (For all his renown, Thompson never learned any dialect of Mayan.) It was the linguists who gave the Maya a history, complete with names, dates, and events.
Coe's book is actually exciting. It is a detective story about how to overcome stodgy entrenched interests.
March 5, 2019
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
This book is, I’ll warn people right up front, also a history of how the Mayan specialists in the West failed to break the “Maya code” for far too long, due to petty jealousies and larger than life characters. Quite often Coe sketches a mini-biography of someone who was involved in the decipherment (or more often, the failure of decipherment); sometimes the biography isn’t so mini.
Still, I think it’s better written than his other book on the Mayans, which I read not that long ago — it certainly worked better for me, anyhow. Perhaps because there are glimpses of the scholars and larger than life characters who put in the work, erroneous though it often was.
The book is illustrated, both with full reproductions and sketches. For me, the full-page spreads of Mayan characters were meaningless, but I’m sure it would appeal a lot to some people to be able to have a crack at it themselves. I know I’m not visually inclined enough, so I tended to skip the examples and such, but they are there and I’m sure more visually inclined people could pick out some of the features Coe discusses.
This book is, I’ll warn people right up front, also a history of how the Mayan specialists in the West failed to break the “Maya code” for far too long, due to petty jealousies and larger than life characters. Quite often Coe sketches a mini-biography of someone who was involved in the decipherment (or more often, the failure of decipherment); sometimes the biography isn’t so mini.
Still, I think it’s better written than his other book on the Mayans, which I read not that long ago — it certainly worked better for me, anyhow. Perhaps because there are glimpses of the scholars and larger than life characters who put in the work, erroneous though it often was.
The book is illustrated, both with full reproductions and sketches. For me, the full-page spreads of Mayan characters were meaningless, but I’m sure it would appeal a lot to some people to be able to have a crack at it themselves. I know I’m not visually inclined enough, so I tended to skip the examples and such, but they are there and I’m sure more visually inclined people could pick out some of the features Coe discusses.
April 9, 2022
I am normally a fast reader, but this was a lot more tedious than I expected, so I waded my way through it with a painful slowness.
I wanted to enjoy it, but there should be a disclaimer on the cover mentioning that if you know absolutely nothing about the Maya script, this is not the book for you. The reader must have at least a basic knowledge of the subject to be able to enjoy page after page of gossipy mentions of so-and-so who fought with so-and-so, who disagreed with him because of such and such.
I did manage to understand that, although it looks very different, the script is similar to Japanese in the sense that it uses drawings to illustrate sounds but also uses more complex drawings to illustrate concepts, just like Japanese uses hiragana / katakana and kanji. At least I got that out of this, so it wasn’t a complete waste.
I wanted to enjoy it, but there should be a disclaimer on the cover mentioning that if you know absolutely nothing about the Maya script, this is not the book for you. The reader must have at least a basic knowledge of the subject to be able to enjoy page after page of gossipy mentions of so-and-so who fought with so-and-so, who disagreed with him because of such and such.
I did manage to understand that, although it looks very different, the script is similar to Japanese in the sense that it uses drawings to illustrate sounds but also uses more complex drawings to illustrate concepts, just like Japanese uses hiragana / katakana and kanji. At least I got that out of this, so it wasn’t a complete waste.
July 11, 2017
A wonderful book about the history of decipherment of the Mayan glyphs. It is also a cautionary tale of how the strength of personality of a single scientist can stymie an entire field of study. I enjoyed learning about the late Linda Schele, a native Tennessean and an artist by trade, was a key member of the group that cracked open the barrier to understanding these ancient people as human beings.
It is a challenging book and one I will have to read again to better grasp the content. Still, it is well worth the effort!
It is a challenging book and one I will have to read again to better grasp the content. Still, it is well worth the effort!
September 27, 2015
Excellent and interesting. At the time I read this, I was all set to learn Mayan hieroglyphs. Then I realized that I would have to learn Mayan. Eesh. Chan Balam - Sky Jaguar. That's about as far as I got in my notebook I was keeping. Then I adopted an iguana and suddenly got very, very busy. The book however - it was great. Love reading about ancient languages and translations of ancient scripts.
July 12, 2025
Éste es un libro sobre historia, antropología y lingüística. Es sobre los antiguos mayas, pero también sobre los antiguos egipcios y los micénicos. Es sobre la lengua maya, pero también sobre la china y la japonesa. Es sobre la pérdida del conocimiento y su recuperación gracias a los aportes de muchas personas a través de la geografía y las décadas. Es sobre acre competencia entre profesionistas y rivalidad entre campos de estudios, sobre dramas personales y mala leche. Es sobre osadas propuestas y callejones sin salida intelectuales. Es también sobre colonialismo, racismo y despojo.
Para comprender la historia de cómo el sistema de escritura maya llegó a descifrarse, hemos de entender cómo funcionan las lenguas habladas y cómo hemos creado diferentes formas de representarla. Tenemos que entender cómo se clasifican las lenguas y los sistenas de escritura. Tenemos que comprender cómo las ideas de Platón influyeron en una interpretación errónea de los jeroglíficos egipcios y cómo la exotización de los antiguos mayas llevó por falsos caminos que se alejaron de su correcta lectura.
Los primeros exploradores europeos que, en los siglos XVIII y XIX, llegaron hasta las ruinas de ciudades mayas en la selva centroamericana, se negaron a creer que sus constructores pudiesen tener relación con las personas de piel cobriza que habitaban los pueblos circundantes. Así, se inventaron imagianrias conexiones entre Mesoamérica y Mesopotamia, Egipto o China.
Posteriores eruditos imaginaban a los antiguos mayas como una sociedad de pacíficos sacerdotes-filósofos, concentrados en el estudio de los astros y las matemáticas, y que su escritura debía representar conceptos abstractos platónicos, y no el lenguaje hablado. Dudaban que hubiera más en la escritura que cuentas sagradas y ritos calendáricos, ¡nada de historia, nombres, dinastías, ni ninguna de esas cosas mundanas! Y jugzaban innecesario aprender las lenguas mayas modernas para interpretar los glifos antiguos.
Este consenso tuvo que ser minado poco a poco por distintos estudiosos, algunos de los cuales fueron severamente ninguneados en su momento. Fue el científico soviético Yuri Knorosov quien dio el primer golpe capaz de resquebrajar las románticas interpretaciones de los europeos occidentales y aportar las primeras pruebas fehacientes de que el sistema de escritura maya era logográfico: algunos signos representan sílabas o fonemas, otros son morfemas, y ocasionalmente son palabras completas. Y los mayas lo usaban para escribir de todo, no sólo solemnes rituales religiosos y astronómicos.
Fue un proceso que tomó más de dos siglos, pero hoy en día se puede decir que ya sabemos leer los glifos mayas. Aquí está esa increíble historia.
Para comprender la historia de cómo el sistema de escritura maya llegó a descifrarse, hemos de entender cómo funcionan las lenguas habladas y cómo hemos creado diferentes formas de representarla. Tenemos que entender cómo se clasifican las lenguas y los sistenas de escritura. Tenemos que comprender cómo las ideas de Platón influyeron en una interpretación errónea de los jeroglíficos egipcios y cómo la exotización de los antiguos mayas llevó por falsos caminos que se alejaron de su correcta lectura.
Los primeros exploradores europeos que, en los siglos XVIII y XIX, llegaron hasta las ruinas de ciudades mayas en la selva centroamericana, se negaron a creer que sus constructores pudiesen tener relación con las personas de piel cobriza que habitaban los pueblos circundantes. Así, se inventaron imagianrias conexiones entre Mesoamérica y Mesopotamia, Egipto o China.
Posteriores eruditos imaginaban a los antiguos mayas como una sociedad de pacíficos sacerdotes-filósofos, concentrados en el estudio de los astros y las matemáticas, y que su escritura debía representar conceptos abstractos platónicos, y no el lenguaje hablado. Dudaban que hubiera más en la escritura que cuentas sagradas y ritos calendáricos, ¡nada de historia, nombres, dinastías, ni ninguna de esas cosas mundanas! Y jugzaban innecesario aprender las lenguas mayas modernas para interpretar los glifos antiguos.
Este consenso tuvo que ser minado poco a poco por distintos estudiosos, algunos de los cuales fueron severamente ninguneados en su momento. Fue el científico soviético Yuri Knorosov quien dio el primer golpe capaz de resquebrajar las románticas interpretaciones de los europeos occidentales y aportar las primeras pruebas fehacientes de que el sistema de escritura maya era logográfico: algunos signos representan sílabas o fonemas, otros son morfemas, y ocasionalmente son palabras completas. Y los mayas lo usaban para escribir de todo, no sólo solemnes rituales religiosos y astronómicos.
Fue un proceso que tomó más de dos siglos, pero hoy en día se puede decir que ya sabemos leer los glifos mayas. Aquí está esa increíble historia.
February 5, 2022
The story of how Maya writing was deciphered. Lots of twists and turns, several geniuses, and some luck.
I took a class on Maya Glyphs in college under Dr. Stephen Houston. It was the single most interesting class I ever took.
I took a class on Maya Glyphs in college under Dr. Stephen Houston. It was the single most interesting class I ever took.
August 29, 2017
This book fulfils what its title promises: it details how the maya glyphs were deciphered and the struggle it took the many Mayanists to get there. If you are looking for a detailed introduction to a Classical (or living) Maya language, this is not your book. Nor will you find all the glyphs that have been deciphered so far with all their variants. No, what you do get is more to the core and possibly more interesting: an introduction to how the system worked and how it was suited to its needs.
We get a comparative chapter on other ancient writing systems, with special attention to Egyptian hieroglyphs and their decipherment in the 19th century, as well as an introduction to the Maya lifestyle. This is followed by the occasional good ideas and many more bad ideas that hindered decipherment. Many other reviewers seem to think that Coe is too severe on Thompson’s role in playing down inventive ideas in the 20th century, but it seems the reason why Coe is so negative towards him is well grounded. After all, it is not uncommon in different scholarly and scientific branches to have people who are so convinced of their own right that, even in the face of irrefutable proof, they will not give in but instead become more vehement in their self-righteousnesss. An excellent example of another field is for instance how Einstein was against the mere idea of the Big Bang, now well-accepted, because it did not fit in with his own theories. It took him many years to wrap his head around it (all the while discrediting the proponents of that theory) until he adapted his own brain stuff.
So, to be short, this book that had been on my want-to-read list, was a really engaging semi-autobiographical book that was informative, fun, and often very sassy. Also makes me want to become a Mayanist, but I’m already a Sinologist :)
We get a comparative chapter on other ancient writing systems, with special attention to Egyptian hieroglyphs and their decipherment in the 19th century, as well as an introduction to the Maya lifestyle. This is followed by the occasional good ideas and many more bad ideas that hindered decipherment. Many other reviewers seem to think that Coe is too severe on Thompson’s role in playing down inventive ideas in the 20th century, but it seems the reason why Coe is so negative towards him is well grounded. After all, it is not uncommon in different scholarly and scientific branches to have people who are so convinced of their own right that, even in the face of irrefutable proof, they will not give in but instead become more vehement in their self-righteousnesss. An excellent example of another field is for instance how Einstein was against the mere idea of the Big Bang, now well-accepted, because it did not fit in with his own theories. It took him many years to wrap his head around it (all the while discrediting the proponents of that theory) until he adapted his own brain stuff.
So, to be short, this book that had been on my want-to-read list, was a really engaging semi-autobiographical book that was informative, fun, and often very sassy. Also makes me want to become a Mayanist, but I’m already a Sinologist :)
August 7, 2019
3.5 stars.
I'm so torn on this book. Breaking the Maya Code presents itself as the real story of how linguists and epigraphers, over several centuries, eventually came to decipher Maya script. And when Coe actually gets around to telling this story, it's so fascinating! Coe is unquestionably an expert Mayanist and epigrapher; but not so great a storyteller.
My main complaint is that this book sorely needs a harsher editor. Coe gets sidetracked so often on delving into the biographies and drama and gossip of nearly every Mayanist he mentions. The problem is that many of the big names in Maya script decipherment were friends and colleagues of his, and he understandably wants to talk all about them as humans. But, frankly, most of it is just not interesting or relevant to the thesis of the book. So often I found myself just starting to get excited about him finally getting into the details of Mayan decipherment, only for some new figure to enter the scene, and I'd groan as Coe launches into another mini-biography of said figure. The middle section in particular felt like such a chore to get through, without the payoff of feeling like I even learned much pertaining to Mayan script.
That being said, I can't deny that I did - eventually - learn a lot from this book. Coe discusses some interesting history around the Mayans and the study of them, and his explanations on the cracking of ancient scripts (Mayan in particular, but he touches on others too while covering general decipherment concepts) were so fascinating to the big linguistics nerd that I am. Unfortunately, it just got overshadowed by the irrelevant self-indulgent personal stories scattered throughout.
TL;DR - While I will say that I did enjoy this book and I learned a lot from it, it desperately needed some editing to tighten up its focus onto the actual subject it purports to teach.
I'm so torn on this book. Breaking the Maya Code presents itself as the real story of how linguists and epigraphers, over several centuries, eventually came to decipher Maya script. And when Coe actually gets around to telling this story, it's so fascinating! Coe is unquestionably an expert Mayanist and epigrapher; but not so great a storyteller.
My main complaint is that this book sorely needs a harsher editor. Coe gets sidetracked so often on delving into the biographies and drama and gossip of nearly every Mayanist he mentions. The problem is that many of the big names in Maya script decipherment were friends and colleagues of his, and he understandably wants to talk all about them as humans. But, frankly, most of it is just not interesting or relevant to the thesis of the book. So often I found myself just starting to get excited about him finally getting into the details of Mayan decipherment, only for some new figure to enter the scene, and I'd groan as Coe launches into another mini-biography of said figure. The middle section in particular felt like such a chore to get through, without the payoff of feeling like I even learned much pertaining to Mayan script.
That being said, I can't deny that I did - eventually - learn a lot from this book. Coe discusses some interesting history around the Mayans and the study of them, and his explanations on the cracking of ancient scripts (Mayan in particular, but he touches on others too while covering general decipherment concepts) were so fascinating to the big linguistics nerd that I am. Unfortunately, it just got overshadowed by the irrelevant self-indulgent personal stories scattered throughout.
TL;DR - While I will say that I did enjoy this book and I learned a lot from it, it desperately needed some editing to tighten up its focus onto the actual subject it purports to teach.
April 24, 2021
This mostly a tedious history of all the wrong ideas about the Mayan language. Since Coe himself is one of the protagonists, it includes squabbles at Mayanist conferences and even personal letters between him and the primary antagonist, Eric Thompson. Coe's main argument--that the assumption that Mayan was ideographic prevented serious treatment of it as phonetic for a long time--is plausible, but this does not make for interesting reading. It turns out that the decipherment of Mayan happened slowly and incrementally--like most science--not suddenly and brilliantly.
I most enjoyed the first chapter, which is a primer on linguistics. I did not know that there are no ideographic languages and didn't understand how syllabic languages like Japanese or Cherokee worked. According to Coe at least, ancient languages start with the rebus principle, where the name of a sign shows how it is pronounced (an eye means we should say 'i'), and these are eventually consolidated into a smaller set of purely syllabic signs. The older signs are still used, so there are many ways to write the same phoneme, and the same sign can be interpreted in multiple ways (as a phoneme or logogram). My prior knowledge of linguistics came from Derrida, who is surely an unreliable narrator.
Update: I've run Coe's argument by Chinese-speaking friends, at it appears that the linguistics primer in Chapter 1 is bogus as well. Coe ignores tones and the pictographic nature of many core written Chinese words in his steamrolling simplification that all written languages are phonetic, ergo the bad Mayanists who thought otherwise were idiots. Downgrading to 1 star.
I most enjoyed the first chapter, which is a primer on linguistics. I did not know that there are no ideographic languages and didn't understand how syllabic languages like Japanese or Cherokee worked. According to Coe at least, ancient languages start with the rebus principle, where the name of a sign shows how it is pronounced (an eye means we should say 'i'), and these are eventually consolidated into a smaller set of purely syllabic signs. The older signs are still used, so there are many ways to write the same phoneme, and the same sign can be interpreted in multiple ways (as a phoneme or logogram). My prior knowledge of linguistics came from Derrida, who is surely an unreliable narrator.
Update: I've run Coe's argument by Chinese-speaking friends, at it appears that the linguistics primer in Chapter 1 is bogus as well. Coe ignores tones and the pictographic nature of many core written Chinese words in his steamrolling simplification that all written languages are phonetic, ergo the bad Mayanists who thought otherwise were idiots. Downgrading to 1 star.
August 13, 2025
To me, the most interesting through-line of this book is how the actions of petty academics served to hinder, stall, and otherwise thwart the translation of the Maya glyphs for decades. I have some small experience with petty academics who care WAY more about their self-proclaimed role of thought police and their self-imposed mission to maintain the status quo of their field than they do actually progressing knowledge, and I am always on the lookout for others willing to spill the tea on that same topic. And dude, does Coe spill the tea! You need to get yourself some popcorn to munch while you read about Thompson’s career-long power play that served absolutely nothing but his own sense of self-worth. I wouldn’t have found this book nearly as interesting without that play-by-play of who tried to ruin whose career for personal reasons, who wouldn’t admit that someone else was right and kept bitching about it endlessly, who was low-key racist and who was high-key racist, etc.
Do you want to know how to call someone racist without calling them racist? Coe shows us how via his thoughts about another academic:
There was also a Nazi sympathizer, a German-born, Louisiana-based researcher named Hermann Beyer who had to be forbidden to wear a swastika at work, who was later sent to the Stringtown Concentration Camp in Oklahoma at the start of WWII and who subsequently died there.
Coe is also VERY (and undeservedly!) snarky about archaeologists--or, sorry, about “dirt-archaeologists,” as he puts it. I kind of got the idea that he thinks they’re stupid. What’s up with that? The digs and the exploration of the jungle and the finding bits of stela with carvings on them are the best part!
Seriously, though--Thompson was such a jerk! He was so convinced that the Maya were illiterate magical shaman ignoramuses that he wouldn’t believe that they had a proper written language, and kept making every peon under him say that the glyphs were, like, pretty pictures that spoke to your heart or something. And he did this for upwards of forty years! And when people started finally actually translating the glyphs anyway (thank goodness for Knorosov!), he did his best to ruin all their careers and talk shit about them and keep them from getting hired, etc. Imagine if you were trying to translate the glyphs and some of his peons were on your hiring committee. Or your tenure committee. Or were peer-reviewing your article. Or in the audience at the conference where you’re reading your paper. Or on your PhD committee. Or your grad school application committee…
There’s another villain in this story, though: that absolute asshole De Landa! I hate that guy. Like, yay I guess that he wrote down a sort of syllabary that researchers finally figured out they needed to use to connect the written glyphs to the spoken language, but we wouldn’t have needed that second-hand source if De Landa hadn’t, you know, BURNED 99.9% OF THE MAYAS’ BOOKS! He even wrote about it in his diary, being all, “Jeez those guys screamed and cried when I burned every book they’ve ever written. What a bunch of dumbasses.” Racism has clearly been holding back our understanding of the Maya and their language ever since we first met them.
Our cast of heroes is charmingly eclectic, including the previously-mentioned Knorosov, much of his work done while trapped in the USSR, as well as a female artist from Tennessee, and a homeschooled child. All of them, I think, illustrate the importance of different perspectives when trying to solve a tricky problem. All of them, notably as well, exhibited grace and the spirit of collaboration and absolutely zero ego.
As far as actually translating the glyphs, I was interested to see that, from what I understand after reading another book on how Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated, they work sort of similarly to those hieroglyphs. With 20/20 hindsight, one would think that the Maya researchers would have leaned more heavily on the example of hieroglyphs, but I guess that everyone has to hobble their own way towards truth. Except for Thompson--he’ll just try to kneecap you and then when you fall down he’ll step on your neck.
I’d been hoping for an explanation or a reasoning for why Maya glyphs are so decorative, but Coe, perhaps because he’s studied them for his entire career and thus no longer sees them as so extraordinary, didn’t ever point out their structure as notable, even though they very, very, very much ARE. They’re so beautiful and fancy, and every glyph has its own writer’s interpretation of how it’s drawn. I LOVE it.
I did, however, learn a lot of interesting facts about how the Maya language reflects its people’s obsession with time. I was already interested in the Maya calendar and the Long Count way of dating, and now I know that precision of time is also inherent in their language. No imperfect tenses for you in the Mayan language--you have to know exactly when every action was, is, or will be completed!
I also thought that the focus on classification was interesting. Not only do you have to know what time something happened, but if there’s a group of something you want to talk about, you can’t just name it--you also have to classify it. Considering how much variety there can be in the construction of a single glyph, the language the glyphs are expressing is SO precise!
One more interesting tidbit: Coe writes about Naj Tunich, a cave containing glyphs and art that was being investigated, that “[t]he cavern walls, lit by their flashlights and photographic equipment, had many other surprises, not the least of which were realistic homoerotic encounters.”
Realistic homoerotic encounters, you say? Tell me more! I looked them up, and they're very much worth a Google Image search.
Happily, some of what Coe writes in this third edition of his book is now out of date. Coe writes, for instance, that “Mexican law forbids the teaching in schools of the Yucatec Maya tongue.” That is no longer the case. I’d be very interested in learning Maya, as well, but I don’t know where I’d even begin--I already checked DuoLingo, sigh. I’m also very interested in the four extant Mayan codices that De Landa didn’t manage to get his hands on. Trying to see all four will let me travel the world, although it’s shameful that only one gets to still live in Mexico.
Do you want to know how to call someone racist without calling them racist? Coe shows us how via his thoughts about another academic:
“Having met Gelb but once, many years ago [...], I cannot really call him a racist. His book, however, is very definitely infected with that sinister virus of our time.”
There was also a Nazi sympathizer, a German-born, Louisiana-based researcher named Hermann Beyer who had to be forbidden to wear a swastika at work, who was later sent to the Stringtown Concentration Camp in Oklahoma at the start of WWII and who subsequently died there.
Coe is also VERY (and undeservedly!) snarky about archaeologists--or, sorry, about “dirt-archaeologists,” as he puts it. I kind of got the idea that he thinks they’re stupid. What’s up with that? The digs and the exploration of the jungle and the finding bits of stela with carvings on them are the best part!
Seriously, though--Thompson was such a jerk! He was so convinced that the Maya were illiterate magical shaman ignoramuses that he wouldn’t believe that they had a proper written language, and kept making every peon under him say that the glyphs were, like, pretty pictures that spoke to your heart or something. And he did this for upwards of forty years! And when people started finally actually translating the glyphs anyway (thank goodness for Knorosov!), he did his best to ruin all their careers and talk shit about them and keep them from getting hired, etc. Imagine if you were trying to translate the glyphs and some of his peons were on your hiring committee. Or your tenure committee. Or were peer-reviewing your article. Or in the audience at the conference where you’re reading your paper. Or on your PhD committee. Or your grad school application committee…
There’s another villain in this story, though: that absolute asshole De Landa! I hate that guy. Like, yay I guess that he wrote down a sort of syllabary that researchers finally figured out they needed to use to connect the written glyphs to the spoken language, but we wouldn’t have needed that second-hand source if De Landa hadn’t, you know, BURNED 99.9% OF THE MAYAS’ BOOKS! He even wrote about it in his diary, being all, “Jeez those guys screamed and cried when I burned every book they’ve ever written. What a bunch of dumbasses.” Racism has clearly been holding back our understanding of the Maya and their language ever since we first met them.
Our cast of heroes is charmingly eclectic, including the previously-mentioned Knorosov, much of his work done while trapped in the USSR, as well as a female artist from Tennessee, and a homeschooled child. All of them, I think, illustrate the importance of different perspectives when trying to solve a tricky problem. All of them, notably as well, exhibited grace and the spirit of collaboration and absolutely zero ego.
As far as actually translating the glyphs, I was interested to see that, from what I understand after reading another book on how Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated, they work sort of similarly to those hieroglyphs. With 20/20 hindsight, one would think that the Maya researchers would have leaned more heavily on the example of hieroglyphs, but I guess that everyone has to hobble their own way towards truth. Except for Thompson--he’ll just try to kneecap you and then when you fall down he’ll step on your neck.
I’d been hoping for an explanation or a reasoning for why Maya glyphs are so decorative, but Coe, perhaps because he’s studied them for his entire career and thus no longer sees them as so extraordinary, didn’t ever point out their structure as notable, even though they very, very, very much ARE. They’re so beautiful and fancy, and every glyph has its own writer’s interpretation of how it’s drawn. I LOVE it.
I did, however, learn a lot of interesting facts about how the Maya language reflects its people’s obsession with time. I was already interested in the Maya calendar and the Long Count way of dating, and now I know that precision of time is also inherent in their language. No imperfect tenses for you in the Mayan language--you have to know exactly when every action was, is, or will be completed!
I also thought that the focus on classification was interesting. Not only do you have to know what time something happened, but if there’s a group of something you want to talk about, you can’t just name it--you also have to classify it. Considering how much variety there can be in the construction of a single glyph, the language the glyphs are expressing is SO precise!
One more interesting tidbit: Coe writes about Naj Tunich, a cave containing glyphs and art that was being investigated, that “[t]he cavern walls, lit by their flashlights and photographic equipment, had many other surprises, not the least of which were realistic homoerotic encounters.”
Realistic homoerotic encounters, you say? Tell me more! I looked them up, and they're very much worth a Google Image search.
Happily, some of what Coe writes in this third edition of his book is now out of date. Coe writes, for instance, that “Mexican law forbids the teaching in schools of the Yucatec Maya tongue.” That is no longer the case. I’d be very interested in learning Maya, as well, but I don’t know where I’d even begin--I already checked DuoLingo, sigh. I’m also very interested in the four extant Mayan codices that De Landa didn’t manage to get his hands on. Trying to see all four will let me travel the world, although it’s shameful that only one gets to still live in Mexico.
May 11, 2017
This is a very interesting book. If I was the sort of person who needs to classify everything I would have a hard time classifying this book. It's a bit autobiographical, it is, of course, the story of the decipherment of Mayan script, also included are stories about about other great decipherments, especially the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics , and it's a bit of Hollywood tell-all tale. Dr. Coe rarely passes an opportunity to rip into the influential archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigrapher Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson, known throughout the book simply as Eric Thompson.
If you are wondering, as I did when I started this book, what is an epigrapher, I can direct you to the excellent glossary at the back of the book. If your knowledge of archaeology, epigraphy, and linguistics is casual, as is mine, then you will find the glossary to be of great value.
If you are wondering, as I did when I started this book, what is an epigrapher, I can direct you to the excellent glossary at the back of the book. If your knowledge of archaeology, epigraphy, and linguistics is casual, as is mine, then you will find the glossary to be of great value.
July 11, 2009
This book is great. The Mayan glyphs are so mysterious, so artistic. The author walks through the history of the attempts to decipher Mayan glyphs, spanning 150 years. It is a no holds barred, in your face primer on the basics of written language, yet not so technical that you lose interest. The storyline is interesting as Michael Coe introduces the reader to the great minds (and not so great minds) and their contributions to the decipherment. All along the way, the ancient Maya are brought to life as their written statements shed light into their philosophy, astronomy, calendrics, aggressions and rituals.
January 6, 2015
This book has some interesting information on writing systems and Maya languages in general, and then goes in laborious detail describing, it seems, each and every person who has ever worked on Maya inscriptions. The personal details are nearly always uninteresting and tedious. And sadly, after reading for a dozen or so hours, I find that I still need to simply wikipedia the subject if I want a clear understanding of the script. The whole thing seems quite amateurish.
July 23, 2017
Halfway through and after yes, reading on and off for three years, I finally gave up. This book is much more gossip about Mayanists (especially starting with the Thompson chapter) than actually about deciphering anything. I would have loved to know how the written language was finally figured out, but I couldn't take the slog through minor biographical details and opinions about personalities any longer.
April 20, 2019
This one is filled with facts, fluid truths and supposition about the Mayans. I have to admit this took me awhile to read because I went back and forth, re-reading parts I had read before. There is history here and deep digging into the ancient lives and possible joinings and breakings of familial lineage. Overall it was a good book but beware, it will cause you to think and research. Scary....... LOL
Danny
Danny
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