The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing

by Stephen Houston (Editor), Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos (Editor), David Stuart (Editor)

The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing is an important story of intellectual discovery and a tale of code breaking comparable to the interpreting of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the decoding of cuneiform. Using classic articles taken from publications unavailable to most readers, accounts by Spaniards who witnessed the writing of the glyphs and research by twentieth-century scholars--from Tatiana Proskouriakoff to Michael Coe--this book provides a history of the interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs. Introductory essays offer the historical context and describe the personalities and theories of the many authors who contributed to the understanding of these ancient glyphs.

More than two hundred line drawings illustrate the text and serve as an introduction to decipherment. This landmark work in Maya studies is the first book to examine the centuries of thought behind the decoding of Maya hieroglyphs.

572 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2001

Reviews

[Konstantin Ivanovitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very unique book, organized in a manner that I have never encountered before. It contains excerpts from classic texts in the saga of decipherment, spanning centuries. These selections are chosen by the editor and are meant to convey the various trends, dead ends, triumphs, and discoveries made about Maya writing. Each chapter has a few paragraphs of background about the author and their contribution. It is a neat portrait of the field. ​

It is probably written for a graduate student that is studying ancient Mesoamerican languages. As a layman I found many of the excepts quite challenging to follow and to understand. There were many technical terms from linguistics or cryptography that I didn't know, so the meaning of the discussions were lost to me. I understood the general idea that early colonizers were not in the business of carefully documenting the writing, but exploited the carvings to teach Maya people an alphabet, that the calendar was understood first, and that there was a long debate about how exactly to unpack each of the glyphs or stone carvings. At some point around the middle of the 20th century, very large strides were made in decipherment. This is really all I could confidently communicate about the book, because much of it was simply over my head.

The figure reproductions of the glyphs and carvings were beautiful to look at. At the same time, when trying to follow along with the logic of the various authors to describe the carving, I struggled to really see what they were describing. This was partly due to my ignorance, but also to the surprisingly poor quality of the reproductions of the figures. The book is quite handsome and of very good quality, but I was constantly frustrated by the figures and diagrams. In addition, their organization and arrangement relative to the text required much page flipping, back and forth. Combined with the frustration of not being able to follow the concepts (as a layman) it was frustrating and resulted in my just skipping the chapter all together.

There are probably better books out there to learn the history of this fascinating field. 3 stars just for accessibility and the quality of the figures.

[Ramiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful overview about Maya writing and the key people that helped doing it, using mainly the original papers. It is not as boring as it sounds for a complete neophyte like me, I really enjoyed it.