Breaking the Maya Code

Michael D. Coe

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780500770603
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The inside story of one of the major intellectual breakthroughs of our time - the last great decipherment of an ancient script. It will fascinate anyone interested in decipherment and puzzles as well as scholars of Maya civilization. The book has been revised and updated with the latest discoveries.

1 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

Writing is speech put in visible form, in such a way that any reader instructed in its conventions can reconstruct the vocal message. All linguists are agreed on this, and have been for a long time, but it hasn’t always been this way. In the Early Renaissance, when scholars began to take an interest in these matters, very different ideas were proposed, most of them erroneous and some of them based on quite fantastic reasoning, however ingenious. It has taken a very long time in the history of decipherment to clear away some of these notions: ingrained preconceptions can be as ferociously guarded by scholars and scientists as a very old bone by a dog.

Writing as “visible speech” was first invented about five thousand years ago, by the Sumerians in lower Mesopotamia, and almost simultaneously by the ancient Egyptians. Being totally dependent upon writing ourselves, we would say that this was one of the greatest human discoveries of all time; Sir Edward Tylor, who virtually invented modern anthropology in the mid-Victorian age, claimed that the evolution of mankind from “barbarism” to “civilization” was the result of literacy.¹ Yet a few of the thinkers of the Classical world were not so sure that writing was all that great a boon.

Plato, for example, definitely felt the written word was inferior to the spoken. In his Phaedrus,² he makes Socrates recite an old myth about the Egyptian god Theuth (i.e., Thoth) inventing writing, along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, not to mention “various kinds of draughts and dice.” Theuth came with his innovations to the king of the country, one Thamus, claiming that they should be made known to all Egyptians. Thamus examined each in turn. As for writing, Theuth declared, “Here is an accomplishment, my lord the king, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.” Thamus was skeptical: “you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory.” People will receive a quantity of information from script, but without proper instruction: they will look knowledgeable, when in fact they will be ignorant.

Socrates makes the point in Plato’s dialogue that writing will not help in the search for truth. He compares writing to painting – paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question, they are mute. If you ask written words a question, you get the same answer over and over. Writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers: it can be ill-treated or unfairly abused, but it cannot defend itself. In contrast, truths found in the art of dialectic can defend themselves. Thus, the spoken is superior to the written word!

Socrates was undoubtedly right – nonliterate peoples are capable of astonishing feats of memory, as ethnologists can testify. Immense tribal histories have been committed to memory by bards and other specialists; one has only to think of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were recited with line-for-line accuracy by Greek bards in that Dark Age when Mycenaean (Linear B) script had been forgotten, and before the alphabet had appeared. I myself can bear witness to such feats of memory. Late one chilly afternoon during the great Shalako ritual of Zuñi pueblo, in New Mexico, my friend Vincent Scully and I were in the Council House of the Gods; seated around the walls were the impassive priests, chanting the immensely long Zuñi Creation Myth, hour upon hour of deep, unison droning, in which not one word or syllable could be gotten wrong. And all that without benefit of written text. One mistake in recitation would have meant disaster for the tribe.

And my late wife Sophie reminded me that by the time our own children (all five of them) had reached First Grade and knew how to read and write, they had lost the incredible capacity for remembering things that they had when younger. So William Blake’s optimistic lines in Jerusalem,

… God … in mysterious Sinai’s awful cave
To Man the wond’rous art of writing gave …

may not be entirely justified.

After Plato and the Classical Age, the first to think seriously about writing systems were the humanists of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, it is on them that the blame must fall for perpetuating misconceptions that have dogged the subject ever since those glorious days.

Visitors to the historic center of Rome may have run across a very curious yet charming monument in the Piazza della Minerva, standing before the ancient church of Santa Maria. This monument, designed by the great Bernini himself, consists of an inscribed Egyptian obelisk, sustained by the back of a somewhat baroque little elephant with a twisted trunk. On the pedestal supporting this strange combination is a Latin inscription, which says in translation:

The learning of Egypt
carved in figures on this obelisk
and carried by an elephant
the mightiest of beasts
may afford to those who look on it
an example
of how strength of mind
should support weight of wisdom.³

Now in the mid-seventeenth century, when the pope Alexander VII ordered this odd amalgam of ancient Egyptian and Italian Baroque (the obelisk is actually a sixth-century BC monument of the pharaoh Psammetichus) to be placed in the square, there was not one person in the world who could actually read the strange signs carved on the four facets of the obelisk. Then how did the composer of the inscription know that the obelisk dealt with “wisdom”?

For the answer to this, we must go back to Classical antiquity, the memory of which was being actively revived among European humanists. Thanks to the work of the decipherers of the early nineteenth century, in particular Champollion, the Egyptian script can now be read pretty much in its totality. The principles on which it operates are a complex combination of phonetic and semantic (“meaning”) signs – as in all ancient writing systems, as we shall see. Due to the Macedonian and Roman conquests of Egypt, and eventual Christianization, after having flourished for over three millennia, Egyptian civilization gradually died out, as did knowledge of its marvelous writing system (the last inscription in the system dates to shortly before AD 400).

The Greeks, with their insatiable curiosity, were fascinated by the civilization of the Nile. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus, father of anthropology as well as history, visited Egypt and questioned its priests about many things; he flatly – and rightly – stated that the script was mainly used for the writing of historical records, especially royal achievements, and was written from right to left. As Egyptian culture dwindled under the onslaught of the Classical world, information transmitted by the Greeks about Egyptian writing made less and less sense. Perhaps they were deliberately misled by the native priesthood. Consider the influential Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in the first century BC that “their script does not work by putting syllables together to render an underlying sense, but by drawing objects whose metaphorical meaning is impressed on the memory.” For example, a picture of a falcon stood for “anything that happens suddenly,” a crocodile meant “evil,” and an eye symbolized both “body’s watchman” and “guardian of justice.”⁴ We are a long way from Herodotus.

It was Horapollon (Horus Apollus or Horapollo), in the fourth century AD, who gave us the word hieroglyphic for Egyptian writing; in fact, he penned two books on the subject, claiming that the symbols carved on the walls, obelisks, and other monuments of the Nile were “sacred carvings,” which is what “hieroglyph” means in Greek. If it were not that Horapollon’s nonsensical explanations were to be echoed among twentieth-century Maya epigraphers, they would be laughable. Two examples will suffice. According to him, the hieroglyph baboon can indicate the moon, the inhabited world, writing, a priest, anger, and swimming. “To indicate a man who has never traveled they paint a man with a donkey’s head. For he never knows or listens to accounts of what happens abroad.”⁵

Horapollon’s Hieroglyphics was published in two editions in sixteenth-century Italy, and was enthusiastically read by humanists such as Athanasius Kircher. Even more influential on Renaissance thinking was the Egyptian-born religious philosopher Plotinus, the inventor of Neoplatonism in the third century AD. Plotinus greatly admired the Egyptians, because they could express thoughts directly in their script, with out the intervention of “letters, words, and sentences.” “Each separate sign is in itself a piece of knowledge, a piece of wisdom, a piece of reality, immediately present.”⁶ Published in Florence in the year that Columbus discovered the New World, such notions were to give rise to the Renaissance view of Egypt as the spring of wisdom: here was a people who could express their thoughts to others in visual form, without the intervention of language. Here was truly ideographic writing.

Now Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) must make a proper entrance onstage, proclaiming his doctrine of hieroglyphic wisdom.⁷ Today, this German Jesuit priest hardly rates a paragraph in any encyclopedia, but he was the most extraordinary polymath of his age, revered by princes and popes alike. There was hardly a subject on which he did not write, hardly a science in which he had not experimented. Among his various inventions was the magic lantern, precursor of the cinema, and if one needed a fountain that played music, Kircher was your man. Rome, where he taught mathematics and Hebrew, was his home for much of his life. The sixteenth-century Eternal City under popes like Sixtus V had obelisk fever: as part of a massive reordering of the capital, obelisks were strategically placed at the nodal points of a new network of avenues, as well as in the center of Bernini’s great arcade at St. Peter’s. All of these obelisks had been removed by the ancient Romans from Egypt, and most, like the Minervan Obelisk, were covered with Horapollon’s supposed “hieroglyphs.”

Kircher claimed to be able to read them, and he devoted an enormous effort to their study and publication. He had read the Greek sources with great care: obviously, these hieroglyphic signs transmitted thought directly. He completely accepted the Neoplatonic nonsense of Plotinus. Here is his “reading” of a royal cartouche on the Minervan Obelisk, now known to contain the name and titles of Psamtjik (Psammetichus), a Saite pharaoh of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty:

The protection of Osiris against the violence of Typho must be elicited according to the proper rites and ceremonies by sacrifices and by appeal to the tutelary Genii of the triple world in order to ensure the enjoyment of the prosperity customarily given by the Nile against the violence of the enemy Typho.⁸

Kircher’s fantasies of decipherment were to go down in history as a reductio ad absurdum of scholasticism, the equal in futility to Archbishop Ussher’s calculations of the date of Creation. As the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner once put it, they “exceed all bounds in their imaginative folly.”⁹

Yet the notion that non-alphabetic writing systems mainly consisted of ideographs – signs conveying metaphysical ideas but not their sounds in a particular language – was to have a long life, in the New World as well as the Old.

We are told that even a stopped clock is right every twelve hours, and not all of our polymath’s endeavors were wasted. Kircher was also a polyglot, and fascinated by languages. One of these was Coptic, an Egyptian tongue, as “dead” as Latin, but which remained in use for the liturgy of the Christian Coptic Church in Egypt. It had been the language of the peoples of the Nile before Greek began to replace it, and before the Arab invasion of the seventh century AD. Kircher was one of the first serious students of Coptic, and one of the first to insist that it was descended from the ancient language of the pharaohs. Thus, while on the one hand he paved the way for the decipherment that was made much later by Champollion, on the other, by his stubbornly mentalist attitude towards the hieroglyphs, he impeded their decipherment for almost two centuries.

It would be a mistake to condemn Kircher for his irrationalities: he was a man of his time. Other Jesuits were returning from China, and they described a kind of writing which contained tens of thousands of different “characters” directly expressing ideas (in hindsight we now know this to be wildly off target). This merely confirmed what intelligent scholars knew to be true. So did the sketchy accounts of “Mexican” hieroglyphic writings which were being brought to Europe by missionaries such as the Jesuit Joseph de Acosta.

Is it at all possible, as Kircher believed, to construct a writing system out of symbols that have no necessary connection with language, or with any particular language? and that express thoughts directly? The British linguist Geoffrey Sampson evidently thinks so: in his book Writing Systems,¹⁰ he divides all possible scripts into semasiographic ones, in which symbols are unrelated to utterances, and glottograþhic ones, in which writing reflects a particular language, such as English or Chinese. He is just about alone among members of his profession in making such claims for semasiographic “writing” as a complete system, since he can only propose it as a theoretical possibility, without being able to point to an actual example of such a script.

Yet, admittedly, some degree of semasiography plays a part in all known writing, even in alphabetic ones. Consider written English, and the electric typewriter on which I composed the first edition of this book. The Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, and so forth are mathematical constructs which are read “one, two, three” in English, but “uno, due, tre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• About the author
• Other titles of interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1 The Word Made Visible
• 2 Lords of the Forest
• 3 A Jungle Civilization Rediscovered
• 4 Forefathers: The Dawn of Decipherment
• 5 The Age of Thompson
• 6 A New Wind from the East
• 7 The Age of Proskouriakoff: The Maya Enter History
• 8 Pakal’s People
• 9 Down into Xibalbá
• 10 A New Dawn
• 11 A Look Backward, A View Forward
• Envoi
• Appendix A: Proskouriakoff’s “Suggested Order of Discussion”
• Appendix B: The Maya Syllabic Chart
• Plates
• Notes
• Glossary
• Sources of Illustrations
• Further Reading and Bibliography
• Copyright