The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology
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Maudslay retained an artist, Annie Hunter, to prepare lithographic plates of the photographs and casts he had made of the monuments and inscriptions of the Maya ruins. His work was the first to depict accurate, large-scale details of Maya script. Maudslay published his work as an appendix to the multi-volume work Biologia Centrali-Americana (Central American Biology). Previously, the only available works for the monuments were the prejudiced and amateurish illustrations of Almendáriz and Waldeck. For the first time, Maya epigraphers had concise and accurate representations of Maya hieroglyphics to study and decipher. The total of Maudslay’s work was available by 1902. Maudslay moved back to London in 1907, and became the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He died in 1931 and is buried in Hereford Cathedral.
Augustus Le Plongeon was a highly eccentric amateur archaeologist of the late 19th century. Camera technology and lightweight casting techniques had made further advances by his time, and Le Plongeon carried out studies, made molds of art and architecture, and took innovative photographs at Palenque and Chichen Itza. He published several works from 1880 to 1896. Although his published works were failures with the public and with critics, the quality of his molds and photographs was unparalleled by 19th-century standards. He pioneered concise, close-up photography, and established the use of panoramic photography and photography from elevated vantage points. He added to the growing corpus of visual and narrative information on the Maya. Le Plongeon sold his large collection of casts to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. The molds were never used for making replicas and met the destiny of other Maya artifacts: they have disappeared from the museum, and their fate is unknown.
Teobert Maler was born in Rome in 1842 to German diplomat parents, and studied architecture and engineering in Vienna. He took a job as an architect in Vienna. Anxious to see the world, he traveled to Mexico as a soldier in Emperor Maximilian’s army during the French Intervention in Mexico (1862–1867). He quickly rose from private to captain, but then his life took a turn when Mexico won the war. Teobert surrendered his troops to the Mexican Army. Rather than be deported as an exile, he elected to stay in Mexico and became a Mexican citizen. Teobert became Teoberto.
In 1876, he visited Palenque and fell in love with the Maya. He learned the Maya language and set up a photo studio in Ticul, a small town in the Yucatán. Using a large format camera and the wet plate process, Teobert Maler made a huge contribution to the detailed records available to Mayanist scholars. Maler recorded the fine details on monuments at a wide range of Maya sites. He had a unique and clever system of revealing undiscovered sites. He was a pioneer in using chicleros to locate unknown Maya sites buried deep within the rainforest. These wide-ranging chicleros extracted chicle, the basic ingredient in chewing gum, from the chico zapote tree scattered throughout the rainforest. Maler offered a reward to the chicleros if they detected an undiscovered site. This yielded a world of lost cities that went undiscovered by Stephens, Catherwood, and Maudslay. Maler explored a great number of sites and recorded the carvings on the monuments in significant detail. This fine detail added greatly to the graphic corpus of the Maya monuments and, with the published codices, formed the basis for the initial partial decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphics.
Maler’s voluminous work was published by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University until 1912 and later published posthumously in the 1970s and 1990s. In his later years, Teoberto lived a quiet life at his home in Mérida. His money gone, he survived by selling photos to tourists and teaching young archaeologists. He died in Mérida in 1917 at, age 75.
The Beginning of Decipherment
Along with the graphic and narrative images produced by Stephens, Catherwood, Maudslay, Maler, and other recorded collections, the last half of the 19th century saw the discovery and publishing of the lost works produced by Maya scribes, as well the lost works of Bishop Diego de Landa. A treasure trove of original material vital to the decipherment effort was discovered and published during this period.
In 1861, the Popol Vuh, considered to be the greatest work in Native American literature, was discovered by Abbé Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg in a private collection in Guatemala City. Brasseur possessed an amazing trait as an archival “bird dog” that enabled him to sniff out and uncover lost works of the Maya. In 1862, he unearthed the manuscript of de Landa in the Royal Academy of Madrid. The precious work had lain un-catalogued for 300 years until Brasseur discovered the document in a dusty corner of the archives. His astonishing skills of detection continued in 1866. During a visit to Madrid, Brasseur was shown a Maya book, by a descendent of Hernán Cortés. The document was considered to be a family keepsake. Brasseur recognized the work as a Maya codex. Then in 1875, another fragment of a codex turned up. Research by Leon de Rosney, the French orientalist who discovered the Paris Codex, indicated that the two Madrid finds were part of the same Codex. Together they constitute the largest known Maya book and are known as the Madrid Codex. The fourth known Maya codex, the Grolier, was not discovered until the 1976.
With the wealth of new and rediscovered information, why did decipherment of the Maya script not proceed? Why didn’t some modern Champollion of Rosetta Stone fame set up shop and decipher the code with an early Enigma machine? Mayanist Michael Coe correctly hypothesized that the decipherment was hampered by the lack of linguistic training and clarity of vision in early Mayanists, traits that enabled the clever Jean François Champollion to make the leap of consciousness that achieved his monumental breakthrough of deciphering the Rosetta Stone.
Aside from Rafinesque and McCulloh, the first attempts at decipherment that bore fruit were carried out by newspaperman Joseph T. Goodman. Goodman was the classic “crossover” Mayanist, having come from a non-archeological background. Goodman was owner and editor of the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada Territory, the site of the fabulous gold strike known as the Comstock Lode. Goodman became rich on his Comstock Lode investments. Tiring of the desert dust, he moved west to San Francisco, where he took a seat on the Pacific Stock Exchange and became managing editor of the San Francisco Post. He later retired to his raisin ranch and began his Maya studies in the 1880s. Goodman relied on the recordings of Maudslay and Dr. Gustavus Eisen to carry out analysis and decipherment of the Maya Long Count calendar. Goodman announced in the 1897 edition of Biologica Centrali-Americana that he had deciphered the Maya calendar. Controversy immediately raged over the ability of a California raisin grower to achieve such a discovery, but history has proved him to be correct. The calendar tables he published in Biologia Centrali-Americana are still in use by scholars calculating Long Count dates. Furthermore, Goodman discovered the “head variants,” mathematical hieroglyphs that can be substituted for the bar and dot dates in Long Count dates. However, his most significant discovery, announced in 1905, was the correlation between the Maya Long Count calendar and our present-day Julian calendar. With this discovery of correlated dating, the dates on Maya monuments could be deciphered with accuracy and identified with the time period that was concurrent with the history of that site. Goodman’s amazing discovery was scorned by Maya scholars and lay forgotten until 1926, when Juan Martinez Hernandez recovered it and gave proof of its correctness.
The Decipherment of Maya Hieroglyphics
The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics was impeded for nearly a half century by professional jealousy and potential for reprobation by archaeologist Eric Thompson. Eric Thompson dominated Maya studies during the mid-20th century with his overbearing personality, intellectual influence, and force of will. He used his knowledge of Maya calendrics in 1915 to gain a position with the Carnegie Institution in the excavations at Chichen Itza, where his talents were wasted as a field archaeologist. In 1926, he separated himself from the Carnegie Institution and accepted a position with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Thompson attacked Maya scholars who developed concepts that did not agree with his case for Ma
ya script being solely calendric. However, Thompson was an efficient iconographer and developed accurate insights into Maya religion and mythology. His monumental work, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, was not a primer for Maya decipherment but constituted an impediment that retarded the Maya script for a generation of Maya scholars. Young Mayanists were cowed into subscribing to Thompson’s ideas by his imperial arrogance and vicious criticism.
Thompson’s willful determination to misguide Maya scholars has resulted in the tendency of today’s younger Maya scholars to dismiss Thompson’s contributions to the field. It is true that Thompson was wrong about the intent and characteristics of Maya hieroglyphic writing. However, Thompson made certain momentous discoveries in deciphering the Maya glyphs.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff was born in 1909 in Tomsk, Russian Empire. Her father, a chemist, was requested by the tsar to oversee the production of munitions for World War I. His duties involved travel to the United States, and his family were visiting Philadelphia in 1915 when the Russian Revolution changed the character of Mother Russia. The stateless family made Philadelphia their home. Proskouriakoff graduated from Penn State University in 1930 with a degree in architecture. Fate destined that the young architect would not be bound into the peonage of an architectural office but assumed a position as an archaeological artist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Proskouriakoff’s unique talents in detailing archaeological artifacts attracted the attention of Linton Satterthwaite, the director of the museum’s investigation at the Classic Maya city of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, sited along the shore of the mighty Usumacinta River. She toiled at Piedras Negras from 1934 to 1938. Her job was to produce architectural restoration drawings of Structure P-7 and perspective reconstruction drawings of the acropolis as it might have appeared during the height of power of Piedras Negras. Proskouriakoff’s excellent renderings were admired by the Carnegie Institution. She was retained as a Carnegie employee with a mission to prepare architectural reconstructions of significant classic Maya sites.
In 1950, during the time of the “dictatorship” of Eric Thompson, Proskouriakoff discovered a pattern of dates by using comparative observations and logical structural interpretation of glyphs during her work on the monuments at Piedras Negras. She discovered that the inscriptions carved on the stele at Piedras Negras described the history of the rulers and the accomplishments of the city. The glyphs did not relate to astronomy, religion, or similar sacrosanct subjects dictated to be the sole subjects of Maya script by Thompson, though he later agreed with her. The carved figures on the stele and lintels were mortal men and women who had ruled the city. They were not gods, priests, or mythological figures, but represented real people who had led their lives at Piedras Negras. The inscriptions described the history of the rulers of the city-state. Michael Coe, in his book, Breaking the Maya Code, stated that because “this extraordinary woman cut the Gordian Knot of Maya epigraphy...the Maya had become real human beings.” They had actual names with personalities, achievements, and lifestyles.
Proskouriakoff published a paper in American Antiquity relating her discovery of the real content of Maya inscriptions written in stone. Her logic was exactly right when she stated, “In retrospect, the idea that Maya texts record history, naming their rulers or lords of the towns, seems so natural that it is strange that it has not been thoroughly explored before.” She is truly a giant in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics and a perceptive artist in the reconstruction of Maya structures. Her ashes are buried among the ruins of Piedras Negras on the banks of the Usumacinta River.
The academic world was blindsided when the cracking of the Maya code was announced from isolation behind the Iron Curtain. The brilliant work of decipherment was carried out at a university, during the height of the Cold War, deep in the heart of Russia. The university is located 10,000 miles from the tropical rainforest of the Yucatán.
The initial phase of the most brilliant breakthrough in Maya decipherment and the greatest linguistic achievement since the translation of the Rosetta Stone did not come to pass in the hallowed halls of a great museum or in the ivory towers of an Ivy League university, but started in the war-torn streets of Berlin. In May 1945, the Soviet Army had overrun the city and was sacking the capital of the Third Reich. On that night, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, a young Russian artillery spotter, found himself in front of the Prussian National Library, which was being pillaged by the victorious Red Army. That fiery night in front of the library, Knorosov encountered his comrades throwing thousands of rare books into the burning pyre. It was fate that guided his hand to a book lying at the edge of the conflagration. He snagged the book from the inferno and slipped into the darkness. The book that Knorosov collected was a rare 1933 publication containing facsimiles of the Paris, Dresden, and Madrid Codices written by Antonio and Carlos Villacorta. Yuri was a student in ancient languages at Moscow State University when the war interrupted his studies. He knew that the book was unique. He secured his find in his knapsack and transported his trophy back to Russia. This serendipitous retrieval of a precious book changed the course of Maya scholarship.
In autumn 1945, the 23-year-old Knorosov returned to his studies of ancient writing systems at Moscow State University. His main interest was in Egyptology, but he was also interested in the writing systems of China and ancient India, the Arabic language, and Japanese literature. His advisors recommended that he concentrate on Egyptology. However, motivated by the contents of the book that he had recovered in Berlin, Knorosov pursued his interest in archaeology, ethnology, and the decipherment of the Maya script. Sergi Alekandrovich Tokarev, his professor, encouraged Knorosov to crack the Maya writing system, challenging him with an enticing question: If you believe that any writing system produced by humans can be read by humans, why don’t you try to decipher the Maya system?
Knorosov rose to the challenge. He taught himself Spanish in order to undertake a translation of de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán for his research into the decipherment of Maya glyphs. He used the translation and the copies of codices to work on the decipherment of the Maya script. This work became his doctoral dissertation. He completed his studies at Moscow University and then moved to Leningrad, where he assumed a research post in the Institute of Ethnology.
Knorosov, a scholar in various ancient written scripts, was well prepared to decipher the Maya code. His knowledge of the structure and composition of early historic scripts combined with his brilliant mind enabled Knorosov to recognize the stages and evolution that are mutual developments in all early scripts. He categorized the comparative scripts as hieroglyphic and identified the Maya writing as being in this category. In these systems, he identified syllables. He recognized that the phonetic meaning of de Landa’s signs were exactly as de Landa had transcribed in his manuscript. He also recognized that glyphs can sometimes be phonetic or other times can represent a morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning in a language). Knorosov also understood that the order of writing script may be inverted for use in calligraphy as well as other more complex methods to reduce ambiguity in the reading of the scripts. He used the scientific method to establish a logical methodology for decipherment.
Knorosov’s brilliant work became the most significant effort in deciphering the Maya script. In 1952, when he published the paper “Ancient Writing of Central America,” he presented the argument that Bishop de Landa’s manuscript was made of syllabic rather than alphabetic symbols. He further improved his decipherment techniques in his 1963 monograph “The Writing of the Maya Indians” and translation of Maya manuscripts. In 1975, he published “Maya Hieroglyphic Manuscripts.” Knorosov’s methodologies would lead the way to full decipherment. De Landa’s work had turned out to be his Rosetta Stone.
Eric Thompson attacked Knorosov with vigor starting in 1953, claiming, among other things, that the Russian claim to decipherment should be placed with other Soviet boasts of the era, including the invention of the game of baseball, the airplane
, and other “firsts.” The great Mayanist Thompson had decreed that Knorosov’s decipherment was another hoax by the Iron Curtain masters of propaganda.
In 1955, archaeologist Michael Coe came upon an unauthorized Spanish translation of Knorosov’s 1952 seminal work in a bookstore in Mérida, Mexico. This was the first review by a Western scholar of the groundbreaking work. Knorosov’s doctoral thesis on de Landa’s work was published in Russian in 1955. Sophie Coe, Michael’s wife, was bilingual in English and Russian; she translated a new paper by Knorosov in 1958, assuring a wide audience of Mayanists. The 1958 translation describing Knorosov’s methods and decipherments appeared in American Antiquity. Michael Coe states in his seminal book, Breaking the Maya Code, that Thompson was completely off track and Knorosov was right on the point. The decipherment of Maya script accelerated after Knorosov’s 1963 work “The Writing of the Maya Indians,” with the real lift-off taking place after Thompson’s death in 1975; within four years the tide for acceptance of Knorosov’s work had turned and as many as 135 participants attended a conference on Maya hieroglyphic writing in Albany, New York.