Customer Reviews

Maya Script: A civilization and its writing

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This is up against a lot of competition. Maya civilization has attracted some excellent writers. For an enthralling acount of the decipherment I best liked Michael Coe's "Breaking the Maya Code." For a heavy duty textbook if you have time and dedication go to "Understanding Maya Inscriptions" by John F Harris and Stephen K Stearns, published by the University Museum of Archeology of the University of Pennsylvania. Longhena's book has the advantage of being short and straightforward. Even such a neophyte as myself noticed innacuracies. On page 14 the number thirteen is mislabelled as twenty-three.

This book is certainly well illlustrated, but I found a number of errors. Most were simply captions which had been switched between adjacent glyph illustrations. Therefore do not rely on the glyph identifications in this book. On the other hand, if you do not intend to try find any of the glyphs in real inscriptions, this may not be such a problem.

Maria Longherna's Maya Script reviews the symbolic written characters of the ancient Maya of Mexico, providing a history of the script and about 200 glyphs and symbols taken from Maya artifacts. A fascinating linguistic tour.

As noted in other reviews, there are some errors in this book, but the pictures are fantastic. I looked through most of the Mayan script books in my university library to find nice large images for use as a reference for paintings, and this book was the best I found pictures-wise. I had it checked out consistently during my time at school.