Breaking the Maya Code

by Michael D. Coe

Book Overview

The inside story of one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of our time--the last great decipherment of an ancient script--now revised and updated Book jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500050619
• ISBN13: 9780500050613
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Michael Coe Magic

Michael Coe is my favorite archaeology author and Maya is my favorite ancient civilization topic and hieroglyphics is my favorite Maya subject. So I'll be forgiven if I point out that five stars is not enough! Readable, entertaining, engrossing, educating. Worth every dime and every minute invested.

Great quality and very informative

The illustrations helped me understand the information the text conveyed, and even though the book is probably on a higher level than my own understanding, I still enjoyed the read.

A Riviting History of the Decipherment of Maya Writing!

Note: I made some immature Mormon angry because of my negative reviews of books that attempted to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews almost as fast as they are posted. They don't want you to read Coe's book, and for good reason. So your "helpful" votes are appreciated. It is astonishing how little known one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century is! If asked to list the ten most important achievements of the 20th century, most people would not know that one of them was the decipherment of Maya writing. The decipherment of Maya writing was help up by religious and political prejudice. A Russian man in the height of the cold war held the key. "Dr. Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, the man who, against all odds, has made possible the modern decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing." The great Maya scholar Dr. J. Eric S. Thompson simply could not see the forest for the trees. He was so fixated on the peaceful-kingdom illusion of ancient Maya society that he dismissed the "Marxist-Leninist" approach. Thompson should not have worried about communists so much and concentrated on what they were saying. Tatiana Proskouriakoff was another Russian who played a crucial role in the decipherment of Maya writing. Coe's book should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the Maya. Oddly, Mormon writers who have so many pictures of Maya ruins in their books seldom mention the decipherment of Maya writing. Can it be that it says nothing about the themes and subject matter of the Book of Mormon? This is a very curious omission. See my one-star reviews of Mormon books. Click on the following links, the scroll down to my reviews. Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon See my five-star review of "The Ancient Maya," by Robert Sharer. The Ancient Maya, 6th Edition. Read the following: Sharer writes: "After more than a century of gathering and analyzing archaeological evidence, we have discovered nothing to support the idea of intervention by people from the Old World." "This is not to say that accidental contacts between the Old and New World peoples could not have occurred before the age of European exploration" (p. 6). "On the basis of the available evidence, then, the courses of cultural development in the New and Old Worlds seem clearly independent of each other and devoid of significant contact until 1492" (intro., p. 7). The ancient Maya civilization, Sharer continues, "are to be `explained' not as a product of transplanted Old World civilization, but as the result of the processes that underlie the growth of any culture, including those that develop the kind of complexity we call civilization." "The idea, which either explicitly or implicitly asserts that the peoples of the New World were incapable of shaping their own destiny or developing sophisticated cultures independently of Old World influence, is still popular in quarters." "But this is but one more popular myth devoid of fact, for the evidence

The story of an incredible intellectual quest

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!

A Great Read on a Controversial Subject

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.

Some of these reviews miss the point

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.

The behind-the-scenes story of an intellectual triumph.

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!