Submitted by tyrannosauru t3_yzy4v5 in history
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Pale_Chapter t1_ix5gx7p wrote
I'd say it's worse--remember, the Library of Alexandria actually got partially (and usually accidentally) burned down several times throughout antiquity, and by the time it was destroyed on the Pope's orders, it was largely in ruins already. The destruction of Mayan codices was purposeful and malicious, and happened all at once at the hands of Christian fanatics out to destroy civilization--in other words, it actually was the kind of crime against humanity that popular history imagines the burning of the Museion was.
Mediocre_Ferret8423 t1_ix6hii6 wrote
"Library" is a stretch. And, remind me which Pope was Islamic?
Pale_Chapter t1_ix6itgc wrote
None. Theophilus was a Copt.
Bentresh t1_ix4to90 wrote
>Also, his transcription was fundamentaly flawed so it didn't work when later scholars tried to use it for translation that's why it was ignored for decades until Knorozov's work
As the article points out, Eric Thompson’s stranglehold on Maya studies is another reason it was Knorozov who made the breakthrough. American and European scholars were aware of the de Landa alphabet; it just wasn’t utilized to its maximum potential because there was so much resistance to the idea of Maya glyphs representing phonemes.
To quote Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code,
>Until his death in 1975, only a few months after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, John Eric Sidney Thompson dominated modern Maya studies by sheer force of intellect and personality. Thompson never held a university post and never had any students; he never wielded power as a member of a grantgiving committee, or as an editor of a national journal; and within the organization that he served for so many years, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he made no executive decisions. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, it was a brave or foolhardy Mayanist who dared go against his opinion…
>Thompson made some tremendous discoveries and should be given credit for them. Nevertheless, his role in cracking the Maya script was an entirely negative one, as stultifying and wrong as had been Athanasius Kircher’s in holding back decipherment of ancient Egyptian for almost two centuries…
>As might be expected, Thompson’s views on the Landa “alphabet” were distinctly ambivalent, but he was the first to see that Landa’s ti sign which ends his sample sentence ma in kati (“I don’t want to”) functions as the Yucatec locative preposition ti’, “at,” “on”; that it could also have functioned as a purely phonetic-syllabic sign, as the bishop implied, was something that Eric simply could not allow…
>These decipherments were all major advances, but Thompson failed to follow them up. Why? The answer is that Thompson was a captive of that same mindset that had led in the first century before Christ to the absurd interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Diodorus Siculus, to the equally absurd fourth-century AD Neoplatonist nonsense of Horapollon, and to the sixteenth-century fantasies of Athanasius Kircher. Eric had ignored the lesson of Champollion.
>In a chapter entitled “Glances Backward and a Look Ahead,” Thompson sums up his views on Maya hieroglyphic writing. “The glyphs are anagogical,” he says… The glyphs are not expressing something as mundane and down-to-earth as language, but something much deeper, according to Thompson.
Every decipherment has drawn upon earlier work — Thomas Young on Egyptian, Alice Kober on Linear B, Ignace Gelb and Piero Meriggi on Anatolian hieroglyphs, etc. — and that does not at all diminish Knorozov’s remarkable accomplishment.
GullibleAntelope t1_ix7cxih wrote
>...burnt hundreds if not thousands of Mayan codices, in a tragedy for the study of history that's comparable to the fire at the libary of Alexanderia.
Some overstatement here? Was this Mayan language capable of informing on their way of life? Could it reference law, history, philosophy, important historical figures, as historical western languages could? Or did the destruction you speak of eradicate our ability to answer that Q?
>A source discussing a second way of Mayan communication:
>The Incas did not have a written language. Nonetheless, they adopted a unique system of recording information from their predecessors. This ancient “operating system,” called quipus, dates back to 2600 BCE. “They were like early computers, early counting machines,” says author and four-time Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker Kim MacQuarrie...
>A quipu, also spelled khipu, qipu or kipu, is an intricate system of knotted strings of various colors that store and convey information. Quipu literally translates to “knot” in Quechua. Many ancient Andean cultures used this knot system, including the Inca. Sometimes referred to as “talking knots,” they served as a writing system. This was crucial since there was no formal written language. Though just strings and knots, the arrangement was extremely precise and sophisticated, communicating everything from accounting to genealogy. Made from cotton or camelid fibers, quipus were portable making it easy to transfer information over distances and store over time.
Weren't quipu primarily used for accounting by taxation purposes by officials, and perhaps census information, and similarly could not convey information on law, history, customs....? Or is that wrong also?
FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix8etdz wrote
Quipu have nothing to do with Maya.
Maya glyphs are a full language, capable of replicating the sound of any word in the language phonetically. Those thousands of codices were almost certainly similar to the written records of every other civilization: myths, histories, genealogies, administrative records.
FuckingVeet t1_ix8czth wrote
We know full well that Maya Codices went well beyond purely administrative records, with the handful of surviving pieces offering tantalising glimpses into otherwise entirely lost traditions of literature. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't have written their own treatises on Law, History, Philosophy and the like: the written language they had developed was fully capable of transmitting such information.
Quipu did primarily record numerical data for administrative purposes as you say, but even though they continued to be used after the Spanish Conquest (indeed, the Spanish promoted their use at several points) they aren't an entirely deciphered system, and compelling arguments have been made that, at least at one point, they represented a hybrid system that was being adapted to include other information. It is perhaps notable that, if Quipu had for their entire history of use remained a purely numerical device, they would be by far the longest-lived writing system to have done so, having been in continuous use for as much as 4000 years.
FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix3dv63 wrote
He was brilliant and made a huge breakthrough, but the narrative that he did this "single handedly" really minimizes the work of the generation of epigraphers who took his insights and actually figured out how to read Maya.
thatcantb t1_ix3ifeo wrote
And ignores the Spanish priest who wrote down the syllables in the first place.
Givemeurhats t1_ix3j0ib wrote
This. Almost all we know about the Mayan language came from his book
FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix3k456 wrote
Various Mayan languages are spoken by millions of people today.
As far as reading Mayan, it started the process of figuring it out. It was a first step, not the whole.
thatcantb t1_ix3i1i0 wrote
Wow - so a 16th century Spanish priest literally wrote out the Mayan alphabet with drawings of the syllabic glyphs aided by Mayan scribes and translated them Latin alphabetic characters but modern academics decided to ignore that in favor of the idea that the writing was indecipherable. Well it would be if you ignore the 'rosetta stone' book. Russian scholar looks at book and uses it to decipher the writing. Genius!
FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix3jurz wrote
There were reasons that made it a lot trickier than that. Among other things, written Maya uses multiple symbols to represent the same sound (think soft c and s in English, but many more variations) and scribes would freely substitute as they wrote. There was also very few texts to work from: most of them are on stones in the middle of jungles, and reproductions and photographs often left out details that were critical. And they thought it was written by people who spoke a form of Yucatec Maya, and it was a form of Ch'olti', which is a different language.
Deciphering Maya was a hell of an achievement. Truly astounding. Ot wasn't just a bunch of people being stupid until one dude was like "hey, what about this?"
thatcantb t1_ix3kqt9 wrote
Yah, I get it's all complicated. Actually it was exactly one guy saying hey what about this. By completely ignoring the contemporaneous linguistics recorded by the Spanish priest, academics hamstrung themselves for centuries in understanding a native American culture and essentially they gave up. Kudos to Knorozov for ignoring the conventional wisdom and starting from that base, which had been previously dismissed. And subsequently his work generated interest in working on the language again.
FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix3mrlb wrote
Honestly, what Landa left was pretty rudimentary, and early attempts to use it ended in disaster. It didn't seem to work. It was less ignored and more prematurely dismissed.
I mean, language decipherment is always a study in cognitive biases, and Maya is no exception. If anything, the tendency to ignore Knorosov because of Cold War political issues seems more frustrating in retrospect.
hillo538 t1_ix49x5w wrote
I think knorozov had personally saved the majority of the writing left from the Mayans before deciphering it from (according to some) a library fire
FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix4rfd2 wrote
What? No. He was working off photographs. I don't think he ever saw a glyph in person until after he published his research.
He almost lost his own work in a fire, iirc.
hillo538 t1_ix4sbzm wrote
I’m talking about the Berlin affair, where research pertaining to the Mayan codices (a good amount under fascist hands at this point) were retained and sent to the ussr by this guy, not that he went to Mexico himself or anything
I remember this anecdote well, because most of the written text in this language had been previously systematically destroyed by European powers
[deleted] t1_ix7oc0k wrote
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littlebitsofspider t1_ix3gtjf wrote
And he loved his cat.
ikindalold t1_ix5j4hz wrote
This man single-handedly laid the blueprint for Bond villains
birdsandsnakes t1_ix5617l wrote
The thing about de Landa was, despite writing down "a whole alphabet," he was so fundamentally wrong about how Mayan writing worked that his "alphabet" was basically useless.
The problem was that Mayan writing wasn't an alphabet, like English and Spanish have, where each individual sound has its own letter. It was like modern Japanese writing. Letters stood for combinations of sounds — either whole syllables (like Japanese hiragana and katakana) or words (like Japanese kanji).
De Landa didn't get this. He only knew about alphabets, so he assumed Mayan had one. We're pretty sure what happened is, he asked Maya speakers questions like "What's your letter B?" and they picked a syllable that sounded like "B" and showed him how to write it.
It was as if you said to a Japanese speaker "What's your letter B?" and they said "Oh, we write the syllable bi as び." And then you said, "What's your letter G?" and they said, "Oh, we write the syllable ji as じ." And then you said "What's your letter U?" and they said "Oh, we write the syllable yu as ゆ." And then if you were like, "Great, so びゆじ spells bug?" they'd be like "WTF? No, びゆじ spells biyuji."
That's the level de Landa was operating at, except he never figured out he'd made a mistake.
THAT SAID, he understood that Mayan writing represented sounds, which a lot of later scholars didn't. There are so many different ways to be wrong, and so few ways to be right.
Aloha_Mister_Hand t1_ix5mf22 wrote
Love this guy and his cat, but can't resist shouting out Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who expanded on his work to actually read the stelae inscriptions . . . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatiana_Proskouriakoff "Her greatest contribution was considered the breakthrough for Maya hieroglyphic decipherment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While researching the chronology of changing styles of Maya sculpture, she discovered that the dates shown on the monumental stelae were actually historical, the birth, accession, and death dates for Maya rulers.[6] Analyzing the pattern of dates and hieroglyphs, she was able to demonstrate a sequence of seven rulers who ruled over a span of two hundred years. Knowing the context of the inscriptions, Maya epigraphers were then able to decipher the hieroglyphs."
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EndofGods t1_ix3bxgb wrote
Dude was mad as a hatter, a brilliant hatter.
chakkka t1_ix4a9oc wrote
There's a great documentary about him, English subs available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4MRWuTebRE
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Desh282 t1_ix6kw2k wrote
Thank you so much for this post
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Rear-gunner t1_ix8jfqy wrote
Does anyone know of any articles or books that translate some of these Maya writings, I would like to read some please.
kingofcanada1 t1_ix48y6d wrote
Everyone here crawling to uphold the honour of Bishop de Landa seem to be forgetting that he burnt hundreds if not thousands of Mayan codices, in a tragedy for the study of history that's comparable to the fire at the libary of Alexanderia.
Also, his transcription was fundamentaly flawed so it didn't work when later scholars tried to use it for translation that's why it was ignored for decades until Knorozov's work