Customer Reviews

Dictionary of Maya Hieroglyphs

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Great:
This is one of the best books (I have most of them) in terms of representing the Maya glyphs in an easy to reference format (it is a dictionary after all). It includes a Spanish and English index, and the pronounciation for each glyph is included with meaning, alternate forms, etc. I was planning on using the book for doing some replica Maya pottery and the large glyph images are exactly what I needed. Had the book been published well, I would have given 5 stars.

The Bad:
When the first copy arrived I was awestruck by the quality of the drawings and the orgnaization. But I soon discovered that pages 161-192 had been duplicated and that pages 193-224 were missing! I returned the book to Amazon for a replacement and made a clear message that I did not want a second defective book and that the missing pages be checked for. Unfortunately the second book arrived with exactly the same extra and missing pages. I am returning the second book as well and hope that the publisher can get it right. This is a great book but it looks like the publisher had a binding defect and either did not catch it or chose to ship anyway in the hopes buyers would not notice. Minus two stars and beware potential buyers - check your copy.

To Amazon:
While your return/refund policy is streamlined and efficient, there should be some quality control and checking of the messages - at least in cases where the product may have a defect that effects more than a single unit - that way you can protect the customer from wasted time and effort and can more rapidly get good product to your customers.

Sorry, but this resource simply kicks ass, keeps kicking ass and won't stop kicking ass. There are about 1200 glyphs, glyph compounds and Mayan syllablic symbols in this book, clearly laid out and easy to find. Better yet, there are several indexes in the back of the book that allow you to look up the concept you want in Mayan, in Spanish and in English, as well as by subject matter and by T-Number (for those who know what that is), so you can slice the information any way you want/need it.

There are older glyph dictionaries on the market, all superceded by this powerful work. My only complaint is a minor one and is aesthetic; I thought the glyph drawings were a little crude, and I wanted them to be neater, cleaner, clearer and in short more elegant. Maybe in the next edition. If you want the fun of translating an inscription on a vase or a lintel or a stela, this work will get you going and even allow you to complete a translation. I used it for an illustrated book I was writing, which had pictures with captions in ancient Mayan, and I referenced this work to create the captions. Even if you don't plan to translate a thing and just want to see what those crazy Maya were up to 1000 years ago with the only complete written language in the New World, this is your book.

It is a very well done book. I'm a writer too, and was extremely useful in understanding the actual translate options.
The mayans were a vast empire before the conquest and this book help to really understand their art.


It was sent to me very soon also.

This is a nice book for someone interested in Mayan symbols. It is illustrated wonderfully, and organized in such a way to learn lots relatively fast.

There's very few entries in this dictionary. I've seen word lists in films that contain thousands of entries. This maybe contains a hundred or two.

One benefit to this is that the glyphs are very big- one inch by one inch- huge, really, and you can see all the details necessary for drawing them yourself.

But it's not too terribly scholarly. If a guy wants to be fluent in this language as a careers (as I), very soon (5 years) I'll outgrow this dictionary and need another of greater depth.

Here's the big-picture low-down: ancient languages (Archaic Sumerian, Oracle Bone Script Chinese, even Middle Egyptian!) like this are poorly represented in public-accessable books, despite the number of interested scholars we have devoted to these these languages. This is something I see historically in anthro-archaeological academia: No one pubishes to get the information to the pubic, even in their own country.

I would like to become an expert in all of these languages and others and write many books for the English-speaking market. Until then, we'll have to settle for a limited selection by a labotomized group of knowledge-hogs.

A good dictionary for studying Mayan inscriptions.I hope J.Montgomery will publish new and more comprehensive grammar books and dictionaries to enlighten us.