Customer Reviews

Breaking the Maya Code

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Michael Coe has been involved with Mayan writing for fifty years. The story he tells in "Breaking the Maya Code" involves his friends, his colleagues, and--in a couple of cases--his academic foes. The story is a scientific one, but Coe provides a look at the human history too.

Mayan writing has only really started to give up its secrets in the last twenty five years. Coe's primary thesis (for which he makes a convincing case) is that there are two reason it took so long: first, there was no large, widely available corpus of Mayan writing for epigraphers to work on; second, there was a widely held belief among Mayanists that the writing did not represent spoken language, but instead represented "not Maya words or construction, but universal ideas".

He spends some time on the story of Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian writing in the early nineteenth century, in order to be able to draw parallels with the state of play in Mayanist studies. Then he moves on through the history of the subject, with short biographies of many of the key academic figures, bringing the story up to 1992. There's a short postscript for the 1999 edition.

Coe makes no bones about the academic in-fighting. A couple of the reviews below object to his tone: he is very clear about who he thinks obstructed the field (Eric Thompson, for example), and who he thinks was critical to the successess (Yuri Knorosov). His comments about Thompson, while sometimes affectionate, attribute much of the delay in understanding Mayan writing to the deadening effect of Thompson's influence. Thompson, a well-respected and very influential Mayanist, believed that the glyphs had no relationship to any spoken Mayan language, and poured scorn (Coe quotes some reviews) on those who disagreed.

In the end, I think Coe gets the balance about right. There really is in-fighting in academe, and what he shows of it doesn't obscure the excitement of the decipherment. Coe tells a whole story: it's his personal view, but it's a view from the inside. He's enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and he writes well. Recommended.

One reviewer wrote "There is some interesting information here, but the snide tone in which it's presented gets to be pretty hard to take." Another complains the book didn't enlighten her on the Maya. Both miss the point.

This is not a general history of the Maya. Coe, himself, has written an excellent book of that type, one he keeps current with frequent updates. What this book is a chronicle of a great intellectual endeavor that resulted on a remarkable breakthrough. It does a fine job of explaining the process to laymen. And it offers a unique, unvarnished insight into the process itself. This is not the Hollywood version that glosses over the real events. No one reading this will perpetuate the sort of mistake about what happened while learning to read Mayan glyphs that other reviews here make about the decipherment of Egyptian writing, for example... that Champollion did it unaided.

It is a book about a group effort that stalled for decades then took off in the right direction which explains how that happened and why, written by an man whose basic balance and fairness caused him to know and be friends with all of the parties involved at a time when, for example, knowing or even espousing the Russian scholar's views could get you, at the very least, trashed by the powers then in charge. [I know; I know Dr. Coe and knew some of the early players]. Dr. Coe's position and unique personality protected him from the consequences lesser scholars, like me, would have suffered had we taken his balanced view.

The book is not gossip, it is a remarkably fair chronicle of a great discovery which weaves in the stories of the people who both made the discovery and also delayed it. True science isn't done the way 30's Hollywood films portray it.

I cannot recommend it more highly.

It took a long time before Maya script could be read in a coherent way. Up to the 1950s, no one was able to decipher the inscriptions chiselled into the Maya temples and palaces in the jungles of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. Although many attempts at decipherment had been undertaken in the 19th and early 20th century by a number of - in some cases rather quixotic - Maya enthusiasts, they all lacked the linguistic training and the touch of genius that might have led them to a breakthrough. Thus, by the middle of the 20th century the generally accepted view among Maya scholars was that those glyphs represented neither words nor syntactical constructions but rather that they were to be interpreted as purely mythological allusions. The undisputed leader of this school of thought was Eric Thompson, Maya expert at Washington's Carnegie Institution.

Opposing views of the Thompson school had occasionally been heard before, but only in 1952 did there arise an opponent formidable enough to effectively challenge the established opinion on the Maya glyphs. That year, Yuri V. Knorosov, a researcher at then Leningrad's Institute of Ethnology published his view that the Maya script was logographic, meaning that it consisted of a. logograms that express the meaning of words and b. phonetic-syllable signs (comparable to modern Japanese). Although the ensuing dispute between followers of Thompson and supporters of Knorosov continued for many years, today it is the Knorosov apporach that is being recognized as having given the decisive impetus that led to the decipherment of most Maya glyphs. Over the years, Knorosov's method was refined by generation after generation of gifted Maya scholars, among them Michael Coe, the author of this book and now professor emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University. Having favoured the Knorosov approach from the outset, Mr Coe understandably is critical of the Thompson school, but his verdict on his former rival is always fair, never degrading.

The story of expert dispute over the meaning of the glyphs, however, takes up only about half of the book - after all, factional fighting is a frequently observed phenomenon in all fields of academia. The other half is dedicated to the history of discoveries that took place once the Knorosov approach had been accepted as the signpost to follow. Here, Mr Coe excels in depicting the various people who got hooked on the Maya glyphs and who dedicated their working life to the continuing decipherment of the Maya script. All in all, "Breaking the Maya Code" proved to be a delightful read and, this being the mark of every good book, it made me want to read more on the subject. I am now in the mood to pick up a book on how to read Maya glyphs or to have a closer look at one of the four codices, the surviving Maya books. Highly recommended!

This book is as much about the obstacles in deciphering the Maya script as it is about the language itself. For those without their fingers on the pulse of the scientific community, this book is a real eye opener, illustrating that even in the scientific or academic community where no theory should be accepted as truth without critical testing and proof, politics and emotions can have strong influence on progress. Coe demonstrates that with time and the courage to think independently, mysteries can be solved.

There have been a number of "Gods, Graves and Scholars"-type popularizations of the story of how various ancient scripts and languages have been decoded over the years, whether we're talking about Ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform, Tocharian or Linear B. And with good reason - after all, everybody enjoys an occasional spot of armchair detective work. The story of the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphs is especially interesting since there are a couple of unexpected turns. Now that the decipherment is a reality, if not yet a completed task, the whole slightly sordid story can be told.

"Slightly sordid" because the decipherment was the subject of an academic battle that raged for some thirty years in the middle of the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Mayan hieroglyphs were the subject of some highly imaginative interpretations, rather like the Egyptian hieroglyphs before Champollion. The first fruits came with the decipherment of Mayan numbers at the end of the nineteenth century.

However, the real breakthrough was the work separately done by Knorosov and Proskouriakoff in the 1950's. The serendipitous origin of Knorosov's interest in the matter is one of the most interesting stories in the history of epigraphy, regardless of what language you're talking about. The problem was that by that point, the controlling interests in the Mayanist community, led by Eric Thompson, had given up on the idea of decipherment and to some extent apparently even doubted that there was anything decipherable. The very idea that some Stalinist academic like Knorozov could actually contribute something of value to the matter was unthinkable, and in his position as doyen of the field Thompson managed to stonewall research in the matter for some time. After Thompson's death in the 1970's the decipherment project moved more apace, but there came to be a rift between the anthropologists and epigraphers as to what provided more important clues to Mayan history, a situation which apparently still exists today.

The atmosphere of polemic still hangs over this book. At present, it appears that Thompson is a difficult figure for Mayanists to come to terms with, and we may have to wait another generation before a sanguine approach to his legacy will be possible. As for the ditch diggers vs. the puzzle fans, I think everybody realizes that the field has need for both. Allow me to give my personal opinion as a frustrated linguist and say that my interest lies with the epigraphers, which is one reason why I liked the book so much. It is more than a history of decipherment, it is a history of the Mayanist field, and as such it is for the most part a thrilling story.

With lively and repeatedly witty prose, Michael Coe has written an excellently readable history of the decipherment of the Maya glyphs. As a process advanced by a multitude of people, there of course have been many mistakes made along the road, and the author is quite outspoken about these; however, criticizing this as bias as some other reviewers have done is unfair, as Coe always remains integral to the subject. Not content with a dry story of scientific advancement, he takes the reader right to the core of the story, painting an exciting picture of real people with real weaknesses. I don't think there ever was a time in which any field of science wasn't dominated by battles of strong opinions, some right, some wrong; but in the end, conflict is the source of progress, and as such an unerasable part of the whole endeavour, which if left out would take both credibility and definity from a book trying to chronicle it. Both of these things "Breaking the Maya Code" achieves, and therefore it can only be called a complete success. For an exciting tale of one of the major epigraphic breakthroughs of the century, look no further.

No matter how fine its archeological record, any ancient civilization must remain something of a mystery until its language is made comprehensible. This book tells the story of the long, twisting path that led to the decipherment of the script of the great Maya civilization, which flourished over a thousand years ago in present-day Mexico and Guatemala.

The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was largely the work of one man: Champollion. In contrast, the cracking of the Maya code was the result of two centuries of work by a number of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, each with their own prejudices, conceits, and hypotheses. In general, the debate centered on whether the Maya script was "ideographic" (i.e., each symbol representing an idea) or hieroglyphic (a combination of logographic and phonetic elements). These two poles were represented by the intellectual rivalry between the archeologist Eric Thompson (who supported the former claim) and the Russian linguist and ethnologist Yuri Knorosov (who supported the latter). Coe dwells on the role of personality in this story and the way history and culture impinged on the protagonists; the degree of irrationality, egoism, and political wrangling may surprise those expecting a tale of detached, truth-seeking scholars. A key part was played by luck and coincidence. My favorite example concerns Knorosov's introduction to Mayan studies: as a soldier in the Red Army during the final battle of Berlin in 1945, he entered the burning National Library and snatched a book at random out of the flames. It turned out to be a one-volume edition of ancient Mayan writings (the Paris, Dresden and Madrid codices).

If you're looking for a hero, says Coe, Knorosov comes closest to being it; but the decipherment was really a collaborative, long-term effort: a project in which "linguistics and art history joined hands with epigraphy." A fascinating story, and well-written too.

A well-illustrated history of the decipherment of Maya script by a noted Mayan scholar. Coe provides a fine introduction to the decoding of ancient languages and to what is known of Mayan history, but he focuses on the strange and fascinating story of how Mayan characters came to be understood. Ironically, that decipherment transformed the Maya, once thought to be unusually peace-loving, into one the most vicious and violent of all ancient cultures, one delighting in torture and human sacrifice. Echoing this transformation of the Maya, Coe does not romanticize the scholars who worked at the decipherment. He notes their genius and stupidity, generosity and arrogance, and he bestows praise and settles scores in the process. As a historian who is sometimes questioned by undergraduates about the study of anthropology and archaeology, I now have a book to recommend. "Ask yourself," I will say, "whether you're ready to commit your life to this sort of intellectual environment, with all the intellectual excitement and pettiness displayed here." After reading this book, those students who are willing will know.

This is the fascinating story of the scholars who struggled to crack the notoriously difficult Maya hieroglyphic writing. In focusing on the individuals involved and their interaction, Coe not only weaves an intellectual detective story, he touches the central nerve that makes this discipline so controversial. Full of the clashing personalities and bruised egos that kept decipherment in an eipraphic dark ages, the book reveals the true nature of the problem--and in so doing exposes one of the great scholarly disasters--and ultimate triumphs--of modern research. This is an absolute must-have for any Precolumbian-related library. Those interested in Precolumbian civilizations ignore it at their peril.

As the chief illustrator of this book and an epigrapher in my own right, I highly recommend Coe's approach and his even handling of so difficult a subject. Few scholars in this field know how to convey effectively their subject. In this regard, Coe is outstandingly readable!

When I first saw Mayan characters I couldn't even formulate a clue on how to look at them. I could pick out some faces, dots, and a vast array of images I could not make anything of. This book takes us on the long trail of decipherment that began centuries ago, but the breakthrough came in 1952 in the Soviet Union. The thirty year old Yuri Knorosov took up the research because it was a safe topic in the USSR and the story of what he accomplished is stunning.

This fascinating book begins with the story of how ancient scripts have been decoded throughout history. Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and even Chinese and Japanese have all presented challenges that have been solved. Several scripts remain unreadable. Michael D. Coe shows us how the early discoverers of the Maya worked on trying to read the characters they saw on the monuments and buildings the dug out the jungles of Central America. Their guesses and surmises about the writing actually held up decipherment because the fundamentally misunderstood how the script worked.

The author also shows us how to read the writing. It is a fascinating process. Of course, what we read is still Mayan, but he provides translations for us. It is also interesting to note how the same character varies in appearance in different places and at different times. After a bit of practice, you can pick up the knack of seeing the similarities and recognizing what you are seeing.

There are many helpful photos, drawings, and tables as well as an index.

Simply cool.