“One of the great stories of 20th-century scientific discovery .

*
— New York Times

Michael D. Coe
BREAKING
— THE —
MAYA CODE
 MICHAEL D. COE

BREAKING
_ jjjr _
MAYA CODE
with 112 illustrations

THAMES AND HUDSON

 To Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov
ah bobat, ah miatz, etail

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is

sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published, and without a
similar condition including these words being imposed on a
subsequent purchaser.

© 1992 Michael D. Coe

First published in the United States of America in 1992

by Thames and Hudson Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110
Reprinted 1993

First paperback edition 1993

Reprinted 1994

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-65312

ISBN 0-500-27721-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
other information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Preface
7

Prologue
9

1 The Word Made Visible

13

2 Lords of the Forest

47

3 A Jungle Civilization Rediscovered

73

4 Forefathers: The Dawn of Decipherment

99

5 The Age of Thompson

123

6 A New Wind from the East

145

7 The Age of Proskouriakoff:

The Maya Enter History
167

8 Pacal’s People
193

9 Down into Xibalba

218

10 A New Dawn
231

11 A Look Backward, A View Forward

259

Epilogue
275
 APPENDIX A
ProskouriakofFs “Suggested Order of Discussion”
278

APPENDIX B
The Maya Syllabic Chart
280

Notes
282

Glossary
288

Sources of Illustrations
290

Further Reading and Bibliography

292

Index
301
 Preface

The history of the American continent does not begin with Christopher
Columbus, or even with Leif the Lucky, but with those Maya scribes in
the Central American jungles who first began to record the deeds of their
rulers some two thousand years ago. Of all the peoples of the pre-
Columbian New World, only the ancient Maya had a complete script:
they could write down anything they wanted to, in their own language.
In the last century, following the discovery of the ruined Maya cities,
almost none of these records could be read by Western scholars. Except
for the Maya calendar, which has been understood for over a hundred
years, the situation was not much better than this when I was a student at
Harvard in the 1950s. Today, thanks to some remarkable advances made
by epigraphers on both sides of the Atlantic, we can now read most of
what those long-dead scribes carved on their stone monuments.
I believe that this decipherment is one of the most exciting intellectual
adventures of our age, on a par with the exploration of space and the
discovery of the genetic code. This is the story that I wish to tell in these
pages. I have been lucky enough to have known personally many of the
protagonists in the more recent part of my tale; it will soon become
apparent to the reader, as it has to me, that the course of this
decipherment has involved not just theoretical and scholarly issues, but
flesh-and-blood individuals with strongly marked characters.
If one wants, one can find both heroes and villains in my history, yet
let me say here that there are really no “bad guys” in these pages, just
well-meaning and determined scholars who have sometimes been
impelled by false assumptions to take wrong turns, and had their
posthumous reputations suffer as a consequence. And if you must find a
villain, remember that even John Milton’s fallen angel, Satan himself,
had his heroic side.
I have had help from many quarters in writing this book, but it must
be emphasized that its facts and interpretations, for better or for worse,
are my own. Deserving of special thanks is George Stuart, whose
unpublished manuscript on the history of the decipherment has often
guided me to new clues and insights. I owe a heavy debt to Linda Scheie,
Elizabeth Benson, David Stuart, Floyd Lounsbury, and David Kelley for
their patience and forbearance during lengthy taped interviews, often by
long-distance telephone. With her usual ebullient generosity, Linda

7
8 PREFACE

provided me with copies of the voluminous correspondence which had

passed between the “Young Turks” described in Chapter 10.
I wish to thank Y.V. Knorosov and his colleagues of the Institute of
Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, for their warm hospitality
during the visit of my wife and myself to St. Petersburg (then Leningrad)
in 1989, and especially the young Mayanists Galina Yershova and Anna
Alexandrovna Borodatova.
The early chapters of the book were written while I was on triennial
leave from Yale, in the neoclassical splendor of the British School at
Rome; I am grateful to the School’s Director, Richard Hodges, and to
Valerie Scott, the Librarian, for making this a most rewarding
experience. For valuable editorial comments, I would also like to express
my appreciation to James Mallory, Andrew Robinson, and the staff of
Thames and Hudson. Lastly, my thanks go to all those former Yale
students, particularly Steve Houston, Karl Taube, and Peter Mathews,
who have kept me in touch with much that is old and new in the world of
Maya decipherment.

In this book, I have followed the transcription first devised in Colonial

times by Spanish friars for writing the Yucatec Maya language, and
revised in modern times. It should be noted that this differs somewhat
from the more linguistically-oriented orthography used by many
epigraphers, but it conforms to the way place-names and the names of
archaeological sites appear on modern maps.
The vowels are generally pronounced as they are in Spanish.
However, u preceding another vowel is pronounced like English w; thus,
ui sounds like English we. Most of the consonants have the same values
as in Spanish. An exception is c, which is always hard (like English k),
even before e and i. As it had in sixteenth-century Spain, x has the sound
of English sh. In addition, the Mayan languages make an important
distinction between glottalized and non-glottalized consonants; the
former are pronounced fortis, with constricted throat. In the orthogra¬
phy followed here, these would be as follows:

Non-glottalized Qlottalized
c k
ch ch'
tz dz
„ /

P P
t t'

The glottal stop (') is also a consonant, and is similar to the way a
Cockney Englishman might pronounce the tt in little.
Stress in Mayan words is almost always on the final syllable.
 Prologue

It was 12 cycles, 18 katuns, 16 tuns, 0 uinals, and 16 kins since the

beginning of the Great Cycle. The day was 12 Cib 14 Uo, and was ruled
by the seventh Lord of the Night. The moon was nine days old. Precisely
5,101 of our years and 235 days had passed since the creation of this
universe, and only 23 years and 22 days yet remained until the final
cataclysm that would destroy it. So the ancient Maya scribes and
astronomers would have calculated, for the day was 14 May 1989, and
we were in Leningrad.
“Gostini Dvor!” As the disembodied voice announced the Metro
station, the car doors opened, and my wife and I were swept along with
thousands of morning passengers up the escalator, and into the bright
sunshine of Nevsky Prospekt, the great avenue and artery of Tsarist St.
Petersburg and post-Revolutionary Leningrad. Crossing the bridges
over the Griboyedov and Moika Canals — Peter the Great had built his
capital along the lines of his beloved Amsterdam - we turned right
through the huge structure of the General Staff building and emerged
onto Palace Square. Beyond the granite column commemorating
Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon lay the immense, green-and-white,
baroque facade of the Winter Palace, the whole vast space conjuring up
the terrific events which led to the 1917 revolution and the overthrow of
the tsars. To the left, gleaming gold in the morning light, rose the needle-
like spire of the Admiralty, celebrated in Pushkin’s poetry.
Passing between the Winter Palace and the neoclassical splendor of
the Admiralty, we stood on the embankment, as the main branch of the
Neva with its tumbling waters flowed southwest towards the Baltic.
Leningrad/St. Petersburg is one of the very few great European cities that
has maintained a low skyline, not disfigured by the hideous skyscrapers
and glass boxes that have destroyed the beauty of such capitals as
London and Paris, and wherever we looked stood buildings that Pushkin
himself would have recognized. Directly opposite us was Vasilievski
Island, with the old (capitalist!) Stock Exchange at its point and the brick-
red Rostral Column. It was on the Neva embankment of the island that
Peter built his great university: this was where Russian science had
flourished in all its glory.
Right on the waterfront itself, the great reforming tsar had established
his Kunstkammer, at what is now Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya 4, a

9
10 PROLOGUE

somewhat silly, blue-green baroque structure with white trim and a bell
tower: an early eighteenth-century fantasy designed by Italian architects
to house his somewhat sinister collection of monsters, oddities, and
other disjuncta from the world of nature. His curiosities are still there on
display, but the principal function of the Kunstkammer today is to
house the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences.
This was our destination today, for I was a Visiting Scholar from the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences to the Institute. After a short walk
across the Palace Bridge, dodging the electric trams, we were at the
entrance door. The Kunstkammer has three floors, mostly devoted to
archaic exhibits containing astonishing ethnographic collections from
all over the world, but it was the offices on the first floor that drew us, for
in one of these worked our principal host, Dr. Yuri Valentinovich
Knorosov, the man who, against all odds, has made possible the modern
decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing.
Our friend Yuri Valentinovich, along with four other colleagues, is
affiliated with the American (New World) branch of the Institute, and all
five scholars are housed in an astonishingly cramped room near the end
of the first-floor hallway. Inside the room, there is a clutter of desks,
books, papers, along with paraphernalia to concoct the endless teas
which make up a vital part of Russian life and conversation. Privacy, as
elsewhere here, is at a minimum. When we first entered this sanctum, on
a private visit twenty years ago, it was January, and in the dim winter
light, from the two tall windows of the room, could be seen the frozen
Neva, although at that time the ever-active samovar had so steamed up
the glass that very little was visible.
Over the decades that he has occupied this veritable warren of
ethnologists, linguists, and assistants, Knorosov has managed to
establish a very cozy corner, near the window on the far left. Here we
gathered every day, along with his scientific protegees Galina Yershova
(“Galya”) and Anna Alexandrovna Borodatova, for long, wide-ranging
talks about Maya hieroglyphs and a host of other matters.
Let me now describe Yuri Knorosov, for even among his compatriots
he is considered something of an original. Short and lean, a trim man in
his late sixties, I suppose the most striking thing about him is his
extraordinary eyes: they are a deep sapphire blue, set beneath beetling
eyebrows. If I were a nineteenth-century physiognomist, I would say that
they express a penetrating intelligence. Above his brow his iron-grey hair
is brushed straight back, although when we first met him in 1969, it was
parted in the middle and much darker. In spite of what seems to be an
almost perpetual scowl on his face, Yuri Valentinovich has an ironic,
almost impish sense of humor, and allows fleeting smiles to cross his
face, like proverbial rays of sunshine breaking out from dark clouds.
 PROLOGUE 11

Like many Russians, Knorosov is a chain smoker, and his fingers are
deeply stained with nicotine; this is a habit which he shares with that
other great Russian (albeit American) pioneer of Maya decipherment,
the late Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Unlike most tobacco addicts in my own
country, he is a very considerate man, and always steps outside the door
to indulge in his favorite weed.
Altogether, Yuri Valentinovich, always conservatively dressed in a
brown double-breasted suit, a white shirt, and dark tie, is a very
impressive figure; even more so to foreigners like ourselves, with his war
medals pinned to his jacket (he leaves one of them at home, since it bears
the likeness of Stalin, not exactly a popular subject in today’s Russia).
What is not apparent to those who know him only through his writings
is that Knorosov has an encyclopedic knowledge of a host of subjects,
above all of the history and architecture of St. Petersburg. According to
our friend, just about everything that goes on today in the city, for better
or worse, can be ascribed to Peter I and his corrupt henchman
Menshikov, whose splendid palace still rises above the embankment
further downstream. One day, while we were as usual drinking tea and
eating biscuits from one of the innumerable caches which he keeps in his
nook, the subject was brought up of Captain Bligh and his amazing open-
boat journey after the famous mutiny. Knorosov turned out to be an
expert on the subject! But, with his innate sense of what is right, he wears
his learning lightly, in both speech and writing.
What is truly astonishing is that until the recent Gorbachev
revolution this man never once saw a Maya ruin, or stood in the plazas
and courts of Copan, Tikal, Palenque, or Chichen Itza; or even touched a
real Maya inscription. Only once had he ever been outside the borders
of his own country, and that was briefly in the summer of 1956, when he
was permitted to attend the Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen. In
the history of decipherment, Knorosov ranks with the great Jean-
Fran?ois Champollion, the French genius who “cracked” the Egyptian
script in the early nineteenth century. The conditions under which Yuri
Valentinovich and his colleagues work have to be seen to be appreciated,
and those of us who enjoy such benefits as free access to any part of the
world, to foreign meetings and institutes, and even to personal
computers and copy machines (modern glyphic research is almost
inconceivable without xerographic copiers, which are practically
nonexistent in Russia) should count our blessings.
This man, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, clearly has a mind inured to
adversity: a veteran of the terrible battles of the World War II, his first
pioneering article on the decipherment appeared the year before Stalin
died, and much of his subsequent research was carried out during the
grim, Cold War period under Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev - the “years of
12 PROLOGUE

stagnation,” to use current, terminology. To me it represents the

triumph of the human spirit that one determined, dedicated scholar was
able through sheer brain power to penetrate the mental world of an alien
people who had lived over one millennium before, in the tropical forests
of a distant land.
To those far-off Maya, writing was of divine origin: it was the gift of
Itzamna, the great creator divinity whom the people of Yucatan on the
eve of the Conquest considered to be the first priest. Each year in the
month Uo - the same month in which we found ourselves on the Neva
embankment - the priests invoked him by bringing out their precious
books and spreading them out on fresh boughs in the house of the local
lord. Sacred pom incense was burned to the god, and the wooden boards
which formed the covers of the books were anointed with “Maya blue”
pigment and virgin water. Let us now take leave of the Neva and Peter’s
city, and of the man who helped disclose the secret of those books and
Itzamna’s gift. It is time, before the Maya Great Cycle runs its inexorable
course, to see how these ancient writings have finally been read by
modern mortals.
 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

13
14 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

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 Zuni 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 Zuni 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 wife reminds 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
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 15

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 human¬
ists. 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
16 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

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,
without 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 seventeenth-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
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 17

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”
18 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

hieroglyphic writings which were being brought to Europe by missionar¬

ies 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 glottographic 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 electronic typewriter on which I am composing 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” in Italian, and
“ce, ome, yei” in Nahuatl (Aztec). The bar-and-dot numbers that were in
use among the ancient Maya, Zapotec, and other peoples of Mexico and
Central America before the Spaniards are likewise semasiographic (or
ideographic, to use the old, confusing terminology). But how divorced
are they in reality from spoken language? I challenge any native English
speaker to avoid thinking of the word ‘ ‘twelve’ ’ when looking at “ 12, ” or
an Italian to avoid the utterance “dodici” when going through the same
performance.

pedestrian crossing

1 The international road sign system.

 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 19

A linguist, Archibald Hill, tells us that “all writing represents speech,

either audible or silent, and can never represent ideas which have not yet
been embodied in speech.’’11 In books on writing, the international
road-sign conventions are often pointed to as a “languageless’’ system
that communicates with drivers no matter what their native tongue, but
the driver still “says” something mentally, such as “No!” when
confronted by a red circle with a diagonal slash by the side of the road.
On my typewriter, the symbols $ and € are just as related to language as
the letter sequences “dollars” and “pounds.” In every culture in which
such purportedly “languageless” symbols or even pictures have been
used for communication, their meaning still has to be learned through
the medium of spoken or written language. Thus, semasiography,
“writing” by such signs, has little or nothing to do with the origin of
writing, or even its evolution. That major step in the development of
human culture has to do with the representation of the actual sounds of a
particular language.
Nevertheless, some very curious and interesting semasiographic
systems have existed in history, apart from the above-mentioned road
signs. All of them are codes, dependent upon a specific set of visual
marks which have previously been agreed upon by encoder and decoder.
Paul Revere’s semimythical “one if by land, two if by sea” lantern signal
to warn of the coming of the Redcoats is a very simplified example of this
sort of arrangement. Some systems have been very complex, imparting
across space and time a great deal of information; the trouble is that
without a key to the code it is impossible for us to decipher such a
system. Even the best cryptographer could not do it.
Consider the famous quipu of Inca Peru (fig. 2), on which the
administration of the Inca Empire depended.12 This kind of knot record
was crucial to the Inca bureaucracy, for the mighty Inca state was almost
unique in the history of the world in having no true writing. Each quipu is
made up of a number of connected, color-coded cords on which various
kinds of knots are tied at intervals. Internal, structural evidence led
twentieth-century scholars to conclude that the knots and cords were in
a decimal system of counting. Frustratingly, nothing further has been
discovered about them, in spite of the statements by early Spanish and
native sources that they recorded not only census and economic data,
but also history, mythology, astronomy, and the like. Quite probably,
like Plato’s Egyptians before writing was invented, the memories of
specialists trained to remember everything of importance were called
into play at crucial moments. In other words, as in other semasiographic
systems that we know about, the visual signs were mnemonic records -
aides'memoires to jog the recollections of the quipu-keepers.
Even more complexity can be found in a remarkable script invented in
20 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

Silas John.13 To transmit prayers received by him in a dream, he devised

a series of signs which were painted on buckskins and “read” by his
followers; needless to say, they were “read” in Apache, but they
transmit no phonetic data. However, encoded into the system are
detailed instructions for ritual behavior during the performances,
suggesting that other semasiographic systems which are known to
archaeologists and ethnologists may not be as primitive as some have
made out.
Now, what about “picture writing”? Don’t pictures speak to us
“directly”? Doesn’t the old saw say, “one picture is worth a thousand
words”? Kircher, his fellow Jesuits, and the whole intellectual world of
Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were enormously
impressed by the pictorial symbols on those wise obelisks, and even by
the animals, plants, and other objects which they saw delineated in the
exotic screenfold books from Mexico which had been deposited in the
Vatican Library. This was the world of the Counter-Reformation,
reeling from the attacks being made by Protestant theologians on
religious iconography, and anxious to fight back. “Picture writing,” or
“pictography,” took on a life of its own, not to die out even in our own
day. To these Jesuit thinkers, pictures were a great and good thing.
It is true that representations of objects in the natural world do enter
into some writing systems: even our own alphabet, derived from the
Phoenicians, is based on pictures, for example the letter A began as an ox
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 21

head, and N as a snake. And a very small percentage of Chinese

characters are derived from the “real” world, such as the character shan,
“mountain,” which began as a representation of a three-peaked
mountain. Pictures have been used by scribes in many ways to form
scripts, but there is not now, nor has there ever been, a real pictographic
writing system. Why not? Because as the linguist George Trager has put
it,14 pictures alone cannot pass the test of being able to depict all possible
utterances of a language (try to write in pictures an English sentence like
“I find metaphysics impossibly dull”); and there is no way to be sure a
picture will be interpreted in the same way (in the same words) by two
successive observers.

We cannot really talk about writing until we talk about spoken language.
To understand how a writing system can be put together so as to make
possible the writing of any utterance of the language, and the reading of it
without too much ambiguity, we must see how spoken languages work.
One of the very few honors that has ever come my way was when I was
a student in a church school, and actually won a prize for Sacred Studies.
It was a book which I still treasure to this day, called The Book of a
Thousand Tongues, put out by the American Bible Society.15 It not only
named and described all the spoken languages into which the King James
Bible has been translated, but gave facsimile examples of the first verses
of the Gospel According to St. Mark, in the appropriate printed
orthography. It was probably my first approach to anything resembling a
subject of anthropological interest, and it kindled in me a lifelong
interest in foreign languages and scripts.
There are many more than a thousand languages in the world: not
counting dialects, the usual estimate is between 2,500 and 4,000. The
Tower of Babel was a very large place! To a linguist, languages are
mutually unintelligible communication systems. Each language is made
up of dialects which are mutually intelligible, although sometimes with
difficulty. Now, this word “dialect” has been badly manhandled in the
public press and in popular usage. The worst example of this relates to
the various tongues spoken in China, such as Mandarin, Shanghai, and
Cantonese: these are quite mistakenly called “dialects.” Although
closely related tongues, spoken Mandarin is quite as incomprehensible
to a Cantonese-speaking taxi driver in Hong Kong as Dutch would be to
his counterpart in New York. One more example: for years, the New
York Times insisted that the native peoples of the New World, whether
Hopi, Aztec, or Inca, spoke only “dialects.” Presumably, the editors felt
that American Indians were incapable of communicating in languages as
mature as those of Europe.
22 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

Some sort of order was imposed on the Tower of Babel by eighteenth-

and nineteenth-century scholars when they discovered that certain
groups of languages had descended from a common ancestor. An
example commonly given is the English word father. In Greek this is
pater, in Latin pater, in French pere, in German Vater, all clearly
“cognates” or related words. We have known from philologists for over
two centuries that most of the languages of Europe go back to a single,
ancestral tongue; other descendants of the same ancient progenitor,
called “Proto-Indo-European,” are Sanskrit in India, and Persian. It was
not long before American scholars such as the amazing John Wesley
Powell, one-armed hero of Shiloh and founder of the U.S. Bureau of
American Ethnology, were finding that native American languages could
be similarly combined into families. Aztec or Nahuatl, to give just one
example, was discovered to be part of the widespread Uto-Aztecan
family, spread all the way from Oregon to Panama in pre-contact times.
While the philologists were busy classifying languages into larger
groupings, the linguists were pulling them apart to see how they worked.
On the lowest level of analysis, a language consists of a set of sounds;
the study of these is called “phonetics” or “phonology” — as fans of
Shaw’s Pygmalion will recall. The phoneme is defined as the smallest unit
of distinctive sound in spoken language. To illustrate this, let us take the
hackneyed example of the three English words pin, bin, and spin. The
bilabial stop or consonant at the beginning of pin is clearly different from
that of bin - one is unvoiced and the other is voiced, and the meaning
changes depending on which is used. Thus p and b are separate
phonemes. On the other hand, the p in spin and the p in pin actually
sound somewhat different to a trained phonetician; but it is clear from
their distribution that they vary according to their environment (that is,
to the neighboring sounds), and are thus members of one and the same
phoneme.
Languages vary widely in the number of phonemes they contain.
Professor DeFrancis tells us that English has about 40, in the middle
range.16 At the lower end of the range are Hawaiian and Japanese, with 20
each, while at the upper end are some minority languages of Southeast
Asia such as White Meo, with 80 phonemes (57 consonants, 15 vowels,
and 8 tones).
As anyone who has had to learn Latin or French can testify, languages
not only consist of meaningful sound patterns, or pronunciation, they
also have a grammar: the rules by which words and sentences are put
together. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words, and
syntax with relations between words in a sentence structure. The smallest
meaningful unit of speech is the morpheme, consisting of one or more
phonemes. Consider the English word incredible: in-, -cred-, and able are
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 23

the morphemes of which it is made up. Or the word trees, which can be
morphologically analyzed into the basic noun tree and the plural -s.
Back in the days when linguists mistakenly thought that the spoken
languages of the world could be arranged in some sort of developmental
order, from “primitive” to “civilized,” they started to classify them
according to their morphology and syntax. Although the idea that
languages could be put on an evolutionary scale is tommyrot on a par
with the discredited “science” of phrenology, the classification is still
useful. Here are the categories, for better or for worse:
Isolating or analytic languages are those in which words are morpholo¬
gically unanalyzable, and in which sentence structure is expressed by
word order, word grouping, and use of specific grammatical words or
particles. The Chinese languages are isolating, and so is Vietnamese.
Agglutinative languages string together, or agglutinate, successive
morphemes, each with a single grammatical function, into the body of
single words. Turkish is a fine example of this, with ever more complex
words being built up like a train in a railroad yard from a root (the
locomotive) followed by a string of suffixes (the carriages). For instance,
the word evlerda, meaning “to the houses,” can be broken down into ev,
“house”; -ler, the plural suffix; and -da, the dative suffix. Nahuatl, the
lingua franca of the Aztec Empire, is another such: take the word
sentence nimitztlazohtla, constructed from ni-, “I,” mitz, “you” (object),
tlazohtla, unpluralized verb root “to love” - “I love you!” Sumerian, for
which the earliest writing in the world was devised, was agglutinative.
Inflectional languages change the form of a word to mark all kinds of
grammatical distinctions, such as tense, person (singular, plural, and so
forth), gender, mood, voice, and case. The Indo-European languages
tend to be highly inflectional, as anyone who has studied Latin can
testify, with its cases, declensions, and conjugations. Indo-European is
unusual among the language families of the world in the prominent place
it gives to gender distinctions; languages that insist not only on giving the
sex of those referred to in pronouns, but also on jamming all nouns into
such unreal categories as masculine, feminine, and even neuter are rare
or unheard-of elsewhere. Sexism of this kind is unknown in Aztec and
the Mayan languages.
Few languages fit perfectly into any one of these categories. In English,
all three are represented. English can be isolating in its use of word order
alone to express grammatical differences (for instance, John loves Mary
vs. Mary loves John); it shows agglutination in words like manliness (man,
basic noun, plus -li-, adjectival formative, plus -ness, abstract noun
formative); and it is inflectional (as in forming the plurals man/men,
goose I geese). Although the Mayan languages are predominantly aggluti¬
native, they show a similar potpourri of linguistic types.
24 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

Cultures borrow from each other, and so do languages, for a variety of

reasons, some of which are compelling in their own right: conquest is the
best of all. Who can forget the discussion in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe of
the influx of French words that were added to Anglo-Saxon after 1066 to
form the basic English tongue? Words can be borrowed through
emulation as well as outright conquest; a glance at the business, science,
and entertainment pages of any Italian newspaper will find a host of
words taken lock, stock, and barrel from English, such as manager,
personal computer, stress, and lifestyle, all absorbed into perfectly good
Italian syntactical structures. English itself through the centuries has
been remarkably open to this kind of borrowing, even from the “dead”
languages of antiquity. Other languages are highly impervious to lexical
borrowing, above all Chinese, which prefers to concoct new words from
old ones for unfamiliar, introduced items; when the steam railroad
appeared in China, it was dubbed huo-che, or “fire-cart.”
The study of borrowings is a science in its own right, and an extremely
interesting one, for it can describe culture contacts which took place in
the past, and linguists can even reconstruct something of the cultures
and societies that impinged upon each other in remote periods. If the
languages have been recorded in visible form, so much the better. But
sometimes this produces mysteries as well as solutions — in the oldest
script of all, Sumerian writing on clay tablets, the names of their cities
(including “Ur of the Chaldees”), and of most of the important
professions practiced almost thirty centuries ago in southern Mesopota¬
mia, are not in the Sumerian language or in any of the rival Semitic
languages, but in an unknown tongue. This suggests that the Sumerians
were not really native to that region, but had moved in and borrowed
these words from some shadowy people who had been truly autoch¬
thonous to the Land Between the Rivers.17

The serious study of writing systems, as opposed, say, to the study of

particular kinds of writing or of calligraphy, is relatively recent, a kind of
step-child to linguistics. I suppose that this is because in the last century
there were just not enough different scripts known, or at least
understood, to make sensible comparisons. One would have thought
that linguists would have become interested in writing early on, but an
entire generation of them, especially in the United States, adopted the
view that it was spoken, rather than written, language that was
important; scripts were really unworthy of their attention. Perhaps the
acknowledged lack of “fit” between modern spoken and written English
played a part. Luckily, things have changed.
But there was another roadblock to understanding much about
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 25

writing: evolutionism. The Darwinian view of nature which gradually

triumphed in Western science following the publication of The Origin of
Species in 1859 had its repercussions in the nascent field of anthropology,
dominated by Sir Edward Tylor and the American lawyer Lewis Henry
Morgan, scientific titans of the nineteenth century. Morgan and Tylor
thought that all societies and cultures had to pass, like the creatures and
plants of the natural world, through a rigidly ordered sequence of stages.
These began with “savagery” (read “hunting and gathering”), through
“barbarism” (read “agriculture and animal husbandry, with clan
organization”), to “civilization” (ourselves, naturally, with state or
territorial organization). Some peoples, like the Aborigines of Australia,
are still bogged down in “savagery,” and others, like the Pueblos of the
American Southwest, in “barbarism,” but given enough time all will
eventually emerge into our enlightened world. What a pleasantly smug,
Victorian view!
Unhappily, this hyperevolutionism has fettered with theoretical
chains all sorts of scholars who have written about writing, in spite of the
fact that linguists themselves long ago discarded the hoary notion of
“primitive” versus “civilized” languages. The Mayanist Sylvanus
Morley, under Tylorian influence, proposed three evolutionary stages
for the supposed development of writing.18 Stage 1: writing is
pictographic, the object or idea being given by a drawing, painting, or
some such; nothing is meant by the picture itself except what is depicted.
Stage 2: ideographic writing appears, in which the idea or object is given
by a sign having no resemblance or only a distant similarity to it; Chinese
script is the example given by Morley - the worst possible one that he
could have picked. Stage 3: phonetic writing appears, in which signs lose
all resemblance to the original images of objects and denote only sounds;
syllabic signs appear first (Morley invoked another wrong example,
Egyptian), with alphabetic ones appearing later (Phoenician, Greek). So
said Morley.
Onward and upward! Long live progress! We have phonetic writing
and the alphabet and they (all those savages, barbarians, and Chinese)
don’t. A comforting idea, and one that continues to grip the twentieth-
century mind. Now, there are so many things wrong with this scheme, it
is hard to know where to begin. In the first place, we have already seen
that there is no such thing as a purely pictographic writing system, nor
has there ever been, even though pictures of real objects, and parts of
them, are used in some scripts. Point two, there is no such thing as an
ideographic script, either. And finally, all known writing systems are partly
or wholly phonetic, and express the sounds of a particular language.
A far more sophisticated and linguistically informed scheme has come
from the pen of Ignace Gelb, whose book A Study of Writing19 was for
26 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

long the only detailed work on the subject. Gelb, a specialist in the
languages and scripts of the Near East at the University of Chicago s
Oriental Institute, was one of the decipherers of Anatolian ( Hittite )
Hieroglyphic, which would entitle him to a place in any Epigraphic Hall
of Fame. But he had his intellectual blind side, too. Just as hyper¬
evolutionist as many others, Gelb’s scheme, like Morley’s, begins with
that will-o’-the-wisp “picture writing,’’ and proceeds from that through
systems like Sumerian and Chinese (more about these later), to syllabic
writing, to the alphabet. “The alphabet’s conquest of the world” is how
Gelb introduces this subject — even the Chinese, with their old-fashioned
and clumsy script, are going to have to bow to the inevitable some day
and write alphabetically.
Having met Gelb but once, many years ago in the halls of the Oriental
Institute, I cannot really call him a racist. His book, however, is very
definitely infected with that sinister virus of our century. It appears to
have been inconceivable to him that a non-White people could ever have
invented on their own any kind of script with phonetic content. On one
side, he refuses to allow the Chinese the invention of their own writing,
claiming on totally non-existent grounds that it was derived from his
beloved Near East (i.e., from the Sumerians); and on the other, he insists
that no New World peoples, including the Maya, had the intellectual
capacity for writing phonetically, except on rare occasions to express
names (like the place-names of the Aztec manuscripts). The Maya are, in
effect, suspended from the lowest branches of the evolutionary tree.
Such attitudes held up the decipherment of Maya script for almost a
century.

What kinds of writing systems have been devised, and how do they
work? Setting aside semasiography, which we have seen cannot by itself
constitute a workable script, we are left with systems which really do
express the utterances of a spoken language, be it Chinese or Greek.
These writing systems may be categorized as logographic, syllabic, and
alphabetic, as we shall shortly see.
Jane Austen once wrote a book called Sense and Sensibility; a book on
the true scripts of the world might be called Sense and Sound. For
purposes of analysis, every speech-dependent, visual system of commu¬
nication has two dimensions: the semantic, the dimension of “sense” or
meaning, and the phonetic, the dimension of sound. Scripts vary in the
amount of emphasis which they give to one or the other of these
dimensions. Modern alphabetic scripts, for instance, lean heavily
towards the phonetic, but the earliest form of the most ancient script in
the world, the Sumerian of southern Iraq, is strongly semantic.
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 27

gi, “reed” a, “water” ti, “arrow”

gi, “to reimburse” a, “in” ti, “life”

nun
T
p—

ka, "mouth” erne, “tongue”

3 Some principles of Sumerian cuneiform writing: a. Use of the rebus principle

to express abstract concepts; these signs were originally pictographic. b. Use of
phonetic complements to express Sumerian words conceptually related to the
logogram ka, “mouth.”

Sumerian, which was written on clay tablets, is logographic, as are

Chinese and Egyptian. This term indicates that its semantic element is
expressed by logograms, a word derived from the Greek logos, “word,”
and gramma, “something written”; a logogram is a written sign which
stands for a single morpheme, or (rarely) a complete word. If written
sentences consisted only of logograms, which they never do, this would
be pure semasiography, but the would-be reader would never get the
message right. Accordingly, some five thousand years ago a Sumerian
scribe hit upon a way to take out the ambiguity inherent in semasiogra¬
phy: he decided to supplement, or help out, the logograms by means of
signs of a purely phonetic nature.
Now, Sumerian was a strongly monosyllabic language, and thus was
filled with homonyms - words of different meaning but with the same
pronunciation. Once the scribe began to use phonetic signs to write
words, the possibility of misunderstandings lay there, too. To solve this
dilemma, he supplemented such signs with logograms called determina-
tives, which are silent characters indicating or determining the general
class of phenomena to which the thing named belongs; this is
tantamount to saying that out of all the things that have the sound x, this
is the specific one in the meaning-class y. As an example, the names of all
Sumerian deities on the tablets are accompanied by an asterisk or star
sign, telling the reader that such a name is indeed that of a supernatural.
An examination of Sumerian writing shows that logographic systems
are a complex mixture of logograms and phonetic signs. Where did the
scribes get the latter? They did this by discovering the rebus principle.
28 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

What is a rebus? I have discovered in the Oxford English Dictionary

that the word comes to us from France, and that originally it was Latin
for “concerning things.” Once upon a time lawyers clerks in French
Picardy gave satirical performances called, de rebus quae geruntur,
“concerning things that are taking place,” which contained riddles in
picture form. For the last two centuries it has been used in English and
American children’s books as a test of wits. Rebus or puzzle-writing can
be seen in such lines as “I saw Aunt Rose” expressed by pictures of an
eye, a saw, an ant, and a rose-flower. What has happened is that for
something that is hard to picture, such as the female sibling of one’s
parent, a homonymous but easily pictured word from the “real” world
has been expressed visually, in this case, an ant. This is what the early
Sumerian scribes did, and this is what all ancient scribes everywhere
have done.
The second major type of writing system is syllabic. As some of us may
remember when we were asked to “spell our name in syllables” in grade
school, all languages have a syllabic structure. Most common are
consonants followed by vowels (CV, in linguistic shorthand) and
consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) combinations. Consider the English
word syllabary; this may be analyzed into a string of CV syllables, as sy-
lla-ba-ry. The English word pin is an example of a single CVC syllable. In
many parts of the world and in various time-periods, purely syllabic
scripts have been devised, each sign of which stands for a particular
syllable (often for a CV syllable). Until the decipherment of Mycenaean
Linear B, the earliest Greek writing, the best-known example of a
complete syllabary was put together by the Cherokee Indian leader
Sequoyah, in part inspired by the alphabetic literacy of his White
American neighbors. Sequoyah’s system has eighty-five signs, and is
highly praised by linguists for its accurate representation of Cherokee
phonology; it is still in use among the Cherokee for newspapers and
religious texts.
CV-type syllabaries have been invented many times, most recently by
missionaries to write the native tongues of northern North America,
such as Inuit (Eskimo).20 Some languages are amenable to such visual
treatment, some less so, and some not at all. At the upper end of the
amenability scale is Japanese, with its predominantly CV syllabic
structure (sa-shi-mi, Yo-ko-ha-ma, etc.), and such a script was devised by
the Japanese back in our Dark Ages. At the other end are languages like
our own, with dense consonant clusters. For instance, the city of
Scranton in Pennsylvania might have to be written syllabically as Su-cu-
ra'na-to-n(o), with the final o suppressed in speaking.
Let us turn now to the third system of writing, the alphabet.
Theoretically, or ideally, in alphabetic scripts the utterances of the
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 29

a R e
T i
fiS o 0> u X A
x>
i ga
h* ge y gi A go
J gu
E g*

& ha
? he
A hi
V ho r hu
JSr hA
3 ka
le 1a
w la
/ P li
<5 lo M lu
tr hna
ma
Oi me
H mi
3 mo mu
G nah
na ni nu nA
e A
ne
f\ Z no q 0- oD s
T gwa gwe gwi
or gwo 3 gwu
6 gWA
w ta
se si su SA
u sa
4 b 4 so V R ti
u da
f de
a di
A do
s du
0* dA £ tla
A dla L die G dli dlo r dlu
P dlA t;
Q dza V dze ft dzi K dzo J dzu
& dZA

G, wa 03 we © wi V wo © wu G WA

GO ya
43 ye 4 yi R yo cr yu B YA
4 Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary.

language are broken down into phonemes, the individual consonants

and vowels that make up the sounds of the language. Like many other
things important in our civilization, this system was invented by the
Greeks: in the ninth century bc, they took over a Phoenician system
which had been used by those seafaring merchants for representing the
consonants. Being Semites, the Phoenicians had ignored the vowels,
since in Semitic tongues (including Arabic and Hebrew), the consonants
are more important than the vowels in forming words. For the Greeks,
this was not enough — they had to have vowels to make their writing
understandable to the reader as well as to the writer, so they
appropriated some Phoenician letters standing for consonantal sounds
absent in Greek, and had them stand for vowels.21
Thus, the alphabet was born. From the Greeks, alphabetic writing
spread to the Etruscans and Romans of Italy, and then to the rest of
Europe and the Mediterranean. With the rise of European colonialism
in the modern age, it was destined to extend around the globe. But this
was hardly the “conquest” that some scholars have claimed: logographic
writing continues in vigorous use among the Chinese and Japanese, who
represent a major segment of humanity.
A hyperevolutionist like Ignace Gelb saw the alphabet as the acme of
scripts, and could not understand why the Chinese have clung to their
30 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

supposedly cumbersome and outmoded mode of writing. Yet, no script

other than highly technical ones invented by modern professional
linguists is perfect, in the sense that it represents everything important in
the language. ^Vhat is omitted in a script can often be filled in by the
reader from the context. Take written English for example; this generally
ignores stress and intonation, even though they are highly significant in
English speech. Compare “I love you” with I love you (and not
somebody else), or with “I love you” (I’m the one who loves you).
Another feature of English alphabetic writing which some critics and
would-be reformers like George Bernard Shaw have seen as a deficiency
is that one and the same sound is often represented by more than one
letter or letter group. Consider a contrasted group of words with
identical pronunciation, such as wright:u)rite:right:rite. When this kind of
thing occurs in a script, linguists call it polyvalence, ‘‘many values”; it is,
in fact, remarkably common in writing systems around the world, in
logographic, syllabic, and even alphabetic ones like ours.
Logographic, syllabic, alphabetic: these are the three great classes of
writing systems. It is important to keep this typology in mind, because it
was grasped badly or not at all by most of the early scholars who tried to
explain or decipher ancient scripts. By claiming that Egyptian hierog¬
lyphs were “ideographs,” Kircher and his contemporaries confused
logographic writing with semasiography; while a century earlier, Fray
Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, was misled into thinking that Maya
writing was alphabetic rather than logographic. Real decipherment of
these logographic systems came only when the complex intertwining of
the semantic and phonetic elements inherent to them became fully
understood.

If only Athanasius Kircher had received some inkling of the true nature
of the Chinese script from his fellow Jesuits who had been missionaries
in the Celestial Kingdom, he might have avoided the “myth of the
ideograph” that so fettered his inquiring mind. Like the Egyptian
hieroglyphs on which his posthumous reputation has foundered,
written Chinese is logographic, and not “ideographic” or alphabetic.
But Europeans of the Renaissance and Enlightenment persisted in
viewing written Chinese as another marvelous, ideographic system, full
of ancient wisdom, which communicated ideas directly without the
intervention of language.
Because the Chinese script,22 and its Japanese derivative, are living
writing systems, in daily use among hundreds of millions of people, they
provide excellent examples of how the principles of logographic writing
work in actuality. Spoken Chinese is in fact a collection of closely related
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 31

yang,sheep chan, to divine

yang,ocean chan, to moisten

5 The formation of Chinese compound characters. The “water”

determinative has been added to a phonetic.

languages, mistakenly called “dialects.” These languages are isolating,

with a minimum of grammar, and words always consist of one, or at the
most two, single-syllable morphemes, plus morphemic particles which
are sometimes used as suffixes. Matching every individual morpheme in
spoken Chinese is a written sign or “character,” of which there are a
large number. Since tones are phonemic in China - there are four in
Mandarin, the language of three-quarters of the population, and as many
as nine in Cantonese - there are a great many morphemes to be matched.
How many signs are there? The great Kang Hsi dictionary, finished in
ad 1717, has no fewer than forty thousand characters, but thirty-four
thousand of these are “monstrosities and useless doubles, generated by
ingenious scholars.” While larger Chinese dictionaries still have about
fourteen thousand such signs, it is generally agreed that only about four
thousand are in widespread use.
Now, how do millions of Chinese children manage to file away in their
brains so many different signs? After all, alphabet-using English speakers
have only to learn 26 letters. The answer lies in the fact that Chinese, like
all other logographic scripts known to scholarship, is actually highly
phonetic; at the same time, it has a strongly semantic component.
The vast majority of characters are formed by combining a semantic
with a phonetic element. Sinologist John DeFrancis calculates that, by
the eighteenth century, some ninety-seven percent were of this type.23
Let’s take the phonetic element first. These make up a large and
occasionally inconsistent syllabary, each syllabic sign corresponding to a
morpheme. In one modern Chinese-English dictionary, there are 895 of
these elements, usually occupying the right-hand or the bottom two-
thifds of the character. To the left or the top is a silent, semantic
determinative (called “radical” by Sinologists). Whereas the phonetic
gives the general sound of the syllable in spoken Chinese, the
determinative (as in Sumerian and Egyptian) tells one the general class of
phenomena to which the thing named belongs. There is a determinative
which applies to plants in general, one for things connected with water,
32 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

another dealing with things made of wood, and so on. Altogether, there
are 214 determinatives.
The remaining characters are pure logograms, and include those signs
- originally pictorial, if one goes back to the beginning of Chinese history
- from which the phonetics were derived through the rebus principle.
Many such signs are scratched on the “oracle bones of the Shang
Dynasty, at the dawn of Chinese civilization, and because they depict
things in the real world (the sign for “horse” looks like a horse, the sign
for “moon” or “month” like a crescent moon, and so forth), it has been
assumed that the script originated as picture-writing or pictographs.
Quite the contrary: right from the beginning, Chinese scribes were
exploiting these pictorial signs for their sound value.
The system is thus far simpler, and far easier to learn, than it looks at
first glance. Of course, the Chinese languages have changed considerably
over the many centuries that have elapsed since the script was devised
and elaborated, and the phoneticism sometimes presents problems for
the modern reader; but DeFrancis still estimates that if one memorized
the pronunciation of those 895 elements, it is possble in sixty-six percent
of the cases to guess the sound of a given character one is likely to
encounter in reading a modern text.24

For a student of Maya civilization, a study of the logographic Japanese

script25 is even more instructive; I will anticipate by revealing here that
while there is no possible connection between Japanese and Maya
writing, they are remarkably similar in structure.
Chinese influence in Japan began in the fifth century ad, when China
was an empire and Japan a land of tribes and small chiefdoms. The
previously illiterate Japanese began to write all their political and
religious documents in Chinese, using Chinese characters. Since spoken
Japanese is totally unrelated to Chinese - it is a highly polysyllabic,
inflected tongue - the scribes of Japan were faced with a huge problem in
adapting the foreign script to their language.
Their solution was reached about one thousand years ago, when they
selected a few dozen Chinese logograms or characters on the basis of
their sounds, and, in linguist William S.-Y. Wang’s vivid phrase,
“stripped them down graphically.”26 These 46 signs stand for 41 CV
syllables and the five vowels, and so make up a complete syllabary.
Logically, one would have thought that the Japanese would have
abandoned Chinese characters completely, and written everything with
their new syllabary (called kana), but cultural conservatism and the
enormous prestige of Chinese culture overruled this impulse. Chinese
characters which had been used to write Chinese morphemes, some of
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 33

"'■'-^Initials
— k s t n h m y r w g z d b p
Finals

a 2b it 4 * * h t> h
n * fc tf «

i V' %
L K * *
t U V Of
s hi chi i j> j«

0 x> is h C •r *5 &
U < + tsu
Jfc fu 211
£
•
e
b
X. It X to -'n tl &
c if X
•> *
0 x>' Vw * t <D (5 4 X b o
L- * £ He f*

6 The Japanese syllabary.

which had been taken wholesale into the language, were employed to
write Japanese root morphemes of the same meaning but different
sound. It was not long before polyvalence ran wild, which is the case
today: often various Chinese-derived characters are used to represent
the same sound, and sometimes a character will have a Chinese as well as
a native Japanese pronunciation.
The Japanese syllabic signs are used in two ways: firstly, to write out
the sometimes lengthy grammatical endings which follow the word roots
(these given by means of Chinese characters), and secondly, written in
minuscule besides the root-characters, to help the reader in their
pronunciation.
The Japanese thus managed to swallow the Chinese writing system
whole, and reshape it to their language by extracting their own phonetic
syllabary from it. In other words, a syllabary can effectively coexist with
logograms in a complex yet viable writing system. This is exactly what we
are to find inscribed on the monuments of the abandoned cities of the
ancient Maya.

Maurice Pope, who has written the best general book on decipherment,
has said this: “Decipherments are by far the most glamorous achieve¬
ments of scholarship. There is a touch of magic about unknown writing,
especially when it comes from the remote past, and a corresponding
glory is bound to attach itself to the person who first solves its
mystery.”27 But it is not just a mystery solved, it is also a key to further
knowledge, “opening a treasure-vault of history through which for
countless centuries no human mind has wandered” - poetic, but true.
Strange to say, cryptologists - those makers and breakers of codes
from the world of espionage and counter-intelligence - have played little
role in the great decipherments of ancient scripts. In fact, I remember the
34 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

announcements in the American press that the famous husband-and-

wife team of Col. NJthlliam Friedman had received foundation support to
decipher Maya hieroglyphic writing. The Friedmans having achieved
well-deserved fame by cracking the Japanese naval code on the eve of the
war,28 it was a foregone conclusion that the ancient Maya were going to
be a pushover for them. Nothing resulted from this doomed project, and
they went to their graves without having deciphered a single Maya
hieroglyph.
One has only to look at the dictionary definition of cryptology to find
out why these people get low grades as archaeological decipherers. Based
on the Greek words kryptos, “secret,” and logos, “word,” cryptology is
the science dealing with secret communications. In an encrypted
communication, the message is meant to be unintelligible, and ever since
the Italian Renaissance, trained cryptologists have been around to invent
ever more ingenious methods making these messages as unreadable as
possible, except to those with special keys or codebooks. By contrast,
very few secret communications are found in the pre-Renaissance past -
scribes were interested only in making their messages legible and
unambiguous, and if they had to hide them, they took other means to
make their communication channels secure.
Quite another reason why cryptology has been an absent handmaiden
to decipherment is the nature of the raw material on which it
traditionally works. The “plaintext,” to use the appropriate jargon,
which is to be enciphered or encoded, is usually in a language written
alphabetically (see, for instance, the alphabetic transposition cipher used
in Poe’s The Qold Bug, or the substitution cipher solved by Sherlock
Holmes in The Dancing Men), while most really ancient scripts are not
alphabetic, but logographic, such as Egyptian, Sumerian, and Anatolian
Hieroglyphic. In the world of telegraphy and cryptology, the living
logographic scripts of China and Japan, morphemic characters are
turned into four-digit code groups, using conventional Arabic numerals.
I will run ahead of myself by saying that none of these procedures has
worked, or would ever work, on Maya.

We left the writing of the ancient Egyptians still buried in the absurdities
of Athanasius Kircher and his predecessors. This prestigious script was
finally deciphered largely due to the labors of one man, Jean-Franfois
Champollion (1790—1832), who in the space of an incredibly short time
brought the civilization of the Nile from obscurity into history. It would
be instructive to see how this came about, and how this brilliant young
Frenchman overcame intellectual and human obstacles finally to achieve
success. The story is an object lesson in how to go about things the right
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 35

way, when faced with a writing system of some complexity, a lesson that
would-be decipherers of the Maya script ignored (to their detriment) for
over a century.
I will reverse the usual romantic history of Champollion and the
Rosetta Stone by putting the cart before the horse — revealing the
solution before the problem.29
As Kircher had correctly surmised, Coptic is a very late descendant of
the language of the pharaohs, and both are distantly related to the
Semitic languages of the Near East and to Hamitic ones of Africa. Like
Semitic, the consonants carry far more weight in word formation than
the vowels, and it is no cause for surprise that hieroglyphic writing
virtually ignores vowels, as in Hebrew and Arabic scripts. In fact, we
have only the sketchiest idea of how the vowels sounded in any Egyptian
written words.
The invention of hieroglyphic writing took place in the Nile Valley
about 3100 b c, along with the rise of the state, and appears to have been
contemporaneous with the appearance of writing in Mesopotamia. The
system was entirely logographic from the outset, and did not change in
its essential character until it died out early in the Christian era. It thus
lasted for thirty-four centuries, far longer than the alphabet has been in
use, and almost as long as the span covered by the Chinese logographic
system. Exponents of the wonders of alphabetic writing enjoy denigrat¬
ing the hieroglyphs as clumsy, but the Egyptologist John Ray30 reminds
us that the system is far better adapted to the structure of the Egyptian
language than is the alphabet: the Greek alphabet was used to write Egypt¬
ian in Hellenistic and Roman times, but the results are often extremely
difficult to follow. Further, even though the script was pretty much
a monopoly of the scribes, it is far easier to learn than, say, Chinese.
There are three forms of Egyptian writing.31 First of all, there are the
mistakenly-named (and misinterpreted) “hieroglyphs” themselves,
which are most often seen in monumental, public inscriptions.
Developed in parallel with these was a cursive script used chiefly for
everyday purposes, usually in papyrus manuscripts; one of these is
known as hieratic, mainly used in priestly texts, while the other,
developed somewhat later, is demotic, a popular script employed in
business transactions. Apart from general appearance, there is no
essential difference between the three.
There are about 2500 individual signs in the Egyptian corpus, but only
a small percentage of these were in common use. The experts divide
these into phonograms, or signs representing phonemes (or clusters of
them), and semagrams, signs with wholly or partly semantic reference.
Let us now consider the phonograms. Twenty-six of these are
monoconsonantal, giving the sound of a single consonant; we will pick
36 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

these up later in the famous royal cartouches on the Rosetta Stone.

Suffice it to say that this is not an alphabet, since ordinary vowels are
missing; what one gets are a few weak vowels or semiconsonants like y,
but even these are often omitted by the scribe. Although Gelb insisted
that this was a syllabary,32 in line with his theories about the evolution of
writing, I know of no Egyptologist who follows him. Added to this are
eighty-four signs expressing two consonants each, and even some tri- and
quadri-consonantal signs. Now, Egyptian scribes probably could have
managed to write everything using just the monoconsonantal signs (as
they did with outlandish foreign names like “Cleopatra” and “Tiberius
Caesar” in late times); but they didn’t try, any more than literate
Japanese have abandoned Chinese characters for purely syllabic writing
(kana), except to write foreign names and words.
Many of the semagrams (“meaning signs”) are actually logograms,
that is, words are indicated by a picture of the object denoted — a sun
disk, for example, is Re’, “the sun” or “Sun God”; a plan of a house is pr,
“house.” Often placed after phonetic signs are determinatives. There are
about one hundred of these, and they tell one what class of things a word
falls into — so, a seated profile god indicates that the word is a deity name,
a tied-up papyrus scroll that it is an abstract idea, a circle divided into
four quarters that it is a town or country, and so forth. As with their
counterparts in Chinese and in the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia,
the determinatives were silent partners of the spoken phonetic signs.
And finally, there are small vertical bars with important roles to play: a
single bar below the sign means that it is a logogram, two bars indicate
duality, and three that it is in the plural.
There is, as in all such systems, a degree of polyvalence (a sign can be
used both as a phonogram or as a semagram, for instance, the “goose”
sign, which can be biconsonantal z or the determinative “bird”), but the
script is remarkably down-to-earth and free from ambiguity. One big
help along these lines is that multiconsonantal signs are often reinforced
by phonetic complements drawn from the monoconsonantal list - for
instance, the word hetep, “offering,” which consists of the sign for htp
plus t and p.
So, in structure, we once again have a complex duet involving sound
and meaning, as we did with the Far Eastern scripts. But other, extra-
linguistic factors played a role among the scribes of the Nile. Calligraphic
considerations - in other words, concepts of script beauty - often
resulted in words and individual signs being changed from their usual
order (as we learnt from Herodotus, the script was usually written from
right to left, but not invariably so). There was always an intimate relation
between picture and text to a degree that is unique in the Old World.
And public texts, at least those which appear on monuments like granite
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 37

m
^a>~ lr
h
Ik 3 1 f[ w3 it) m

h n
©

^ or W y h
s
_ (1 s
mn d
% S
jr w

A k
j 3
□ P 'er* k

f ® g

t f 1 n

/wm TL *= t A hi

«=> r d

IT] h d & hi
I

7 Egyptian phonograms: 8 Egyptian phonograms: some

monoconsonantal signs. biconsonantal and triconsonantal sigr

obelisks, are remarkably terse in what they say, and often quite
formulaic. The Nile traveler comes across the equivalent of Shelley’s “I
am Ozymandias, king of kings” over and over and over!
Champollion was a virtual Hercules of the intellect.33 It is an amazing
fact that most of his great decipherment was carried out within the short
space of two years. Born at Figeac in southern France, by the age of
seventeen he was already an expert in Oriental languages, especially
Coptic, and went on to Paris to perfect his knowledge of Persian and
Arabic. By 1814, when he was only twenty-four, he had brought out two
volumes on Coptic place-names in the Nile Valley — which, by the way,
he never saw until long after his great decipherment.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the French Abbe J.J. Barthelemy had
guessed (rightly) that the rope-like ovals - the so-called “cartouches” -
on the Egyptian monuments might contain the names of kings, but there
was no proof then extant. Then, in 1798, what must be the most famous
piece of rock in the world, the Rosetta Stone,34 was discovered by the
Napoleonic army which had swept into Egypt accompanied by an
extraordinary group of scientists. On its face were three parallel texts:
one in Greek (stating among other things that the inscription was the
same in all three texts), one in demotic, and a badly damaged one on top
in hieroglyphs. Copies were immediately made and circulated among
38 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

(S2H

(2SS2S3
Zl k l (] e o □ p ^ a t <=> r a

9 Royal cartouches of Ptolemy (top) and Cleopatra (above).

interested scholars, a remarkable example of scientific cooperation

when one considers the turbulent times.
The great race to the decipherment had begun, in some ways
reminiscent of the highly competitive research of the 1950s which led to
the discovery of the double helix of the DNA molecule, or of the race to
the Moon. It was generally considered that the demotic inscription must
be in some kind of alphabet, while the hieroglyphs were surely
“symbolic” only - the dead hand of Kircherian thought once again. By
1802, two first-rate Orientalists, Count Silvestre de Sacy in France, and
the Swedish diplomat Johan Akerblad, had managed to read the names
“Ptolemy” and “Alexander” in the demotic, as well as the remaining
non-Egyptian names and words in the same text. The Ptolemies were
foreigners, Macedonian Greeks left in charge of Egypt by Alexander the
Great, and the decree recorded on the Rosetta Stone as it subsequently
transpired had been put forth in 196 b c by Ptolemy V, who probably did
not even speak Egyptian.
The next to try his hand with the Rosetta Stone was the polymath
Englishman Thomas Young. Physician and physicist, in 1801 he
discovered both the cause of astigmatism and the wave theory of light.
Young’s involvement with Egyptian script is a somewhat depressing
mishmash of correct hits and inexcusable misses, and he himself, as a
human being and scholar, was far from admirable. Nevertheless, Young
realized that the demotic text was full of signs which could not be purely
phonetic or “alphabetic,” and he also grasped that demotic and
hieroglyphic were but two forms of the same writing system. He also
took the reading for “Ptolemy” in the demotic, and found its equivalent
inside Barthelemy’s cartouches; perhaps due to Lady Luck, he got five
out of seven of the monoconsonants right (p, t,m,i, and s). Yet he never
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 39

"beloved of
Amon”

Ramesses

10 Royal cartouches of
Tuthmosis and Ramesses.

advanced much beyond this; until his death in 1829, he stubbornly clung
to the delusion that while the names in the cartouches were beyond
doubt phonetic, this was probably only because this was the way
Egyptians wrote foreign names — the rest of the hieroglyphs were
Kircherian symbols.
Ironically, this is exactly what Champollion himself once believed.
But beginning with the red-letter year of 1822, a real revolution in his
thinking began to take shape. By then, an immense amount of new
material, most of it from the Napoleonic campaign, had been published
in great and accurate detail. And now this happened: in January of that
year, he saw a copy of an obelisk which had been brought to Kingston
Lacy in Dorset, England. The Greek inscription on the pedestal on
which it had once stood showed that it had been dedicated to Ptolemy
and Cleopatra, and he soon found “Cleopatra” spelled out in
monoconsonantal signs in one of the obelisk cartouches as well as on the
Rosetta Stone. Armed with these new readings, Champollion was then
able to read a large number of late names and titles (including those of the
Roman emperors) on other monuments, such as some of the obelisks set
up in the squares of Renaissance Rome.
But what about pharaonic Egypt before its subjugation by the armies
of Greece and Rome? By 14 September 1822, Champollion had
recognized the names of the early rulers Ramesses the Great and
Tuthmosis, both spelled out phonetically. Again, in that year the Abbe
Remusat had brought out the very first study of Chinese writing which
was not hampered by mentalist fantasy, and it showed to our young
Egyptologist that even Chinese script was heavily phonetic in its very
structure, and not a mere string of “ideographs.” With this in mind,
Champollion published his immortal Lettre a M. Dacier, in which he
showed why he had changed his mind about the hieroglyphs outside the
cartouches - phoneticism must be important there, too.
40 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

The intellectual dam erected by his precursors, from Greco-Roman

times on, had burst. Within the following two years, Champollion
cracked Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The product of this towering
intellect came out in 1824: Summary of the Hieroglyphic System of the
Ancient Egyptians. In its approximately 400 pages and 46 plates,
Champollion proved (1) that the script was largely but not entirely
phonetic; (2) that alternative spellings could be used for the same sound
(polyvalence); (3) that based on Coptic grammar, the hieroglyphic forms
of the masculine, feminine, and plural could be read, as well as pronouns
and demonstrative adjectives (such as “my,” “his,” etc.); (4) the
existence of determinatives, including the one for gods; (5) the names of
all the important deities; and (6) how scribes could play around with the
script by giving alternative spellings for the same god’s name —
sometimes written purely morphemically, sometimes phonetically. As
if that were not enough, Champollion demonstrated how royal
cartouches worked (each king had two — take a look at the nearest
obelisk, and you will see that this is so).
Lest anyone doubted the correctness of the decipherment, Champol-
lion produced an Egyptian alabaster vase with a bilingual inscription in
hieroglyphs and in the wedge-shaped cuneiform signs of the Old Persian
syllabary, which had only recently been partially deciphered; both gave
the same name, Xerxes (Khschearscha in Persian).
Acclamation was not long in coming from the scholarly world — and so
were the usual brickbats. The Comte de Sacy and the German linguist
Wilhelm Humboldt, among others, were high in their praise. Thomas
Young, ever the sourpuss wedded to his untenable theory about the
ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs, on the one hand claimed
Champollion’s discoveries as his own, and on the other did all he could
to discredit them. The grumbling among the specialists, most of them
probably with noses bent far out of shape by Champollion’s feat of
intellect, went on for more than four decades following the publication
of the Summary. It was only stifled once and for all by the discovery in
1866 of the Decree of Canopus, another self-serving Ptolemaic decree
conferring honors on Ptolemy III and his queen, Berenice. Cut, like the
Rosetta Stone, in Greek, hieroglyphic, and demotic, it furnished
stunning proof that Champollion had been completely right.
There is bitter truth in the old adage that the good die young. After
having finally had the chance to visit Italy and the ruins of the Nile,
Champollion succumbed to a series of premature strokes in 1832, at the
age of forty-one. Looking out at us in his portrait by Cogniet, he seems
the embodiment of a hero in a tale by his compatriot and contemporary
Stendahl. Champollion’s achievement only leads me to regret that those
eyes never studied a Maya hieroglyphic inscription, for I doubt whether
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 41

under the right circumstances this script would have failed to yield to
him some of its secrets. John Lloyd Stephens, the early nineteenth-
century discoverer of the Maya civilization, on contemplating the fallen
monuments of one of its forest-buried cities, lamented: “No Champol-
lion has yet brought to them the energies of his enquiring mind. Who
shall read them?”35
Champollion opened up the world of ancient logographic writing
systems to eventual decipherment. Of greatest importance to the history
of the Western world was the decipherment of the cuneiform records of
the Near East, for these held the histories, religions, and mythologies of
peoples known to the Old Testament Hebrews. The word cuneiform is
based on the Latin cuneus, “nail,” from the shape of the wedge-like
strokes with which the Mesopotamian scribes impressed their wet clay
tablets. The first step in the decipherment was the cracking of a late
cuneiform syllabary employed by the scribes of the Persian Empire. It
was through a trilingual inscription boasting of the achievements of
Darius and Xerxes that the earlier Babylonian script - logographic like
all other ancient systems known - began to be deciphered, during the
first half of the last century.
Now the Babylonians and Assyrians, who also wrote in cuneiform,
were Semites. In the course of time, even earlier cuneiform tablets were
unearthed which proved to be in another, totally unrelated language,
named “Sumerian” by the Semites; this was in use among the temple-
dominated city-states of southern Mesopotamia from around 3100 bc
on, and many scholars believe that it is the oldest writing in the world.36
Similar to all other ancient scripts with respect to the employment of the
familiar rebus-transfer to invent phonetic signs, these earliest examples
of visual language are also aberrant in another way: while in the rest of
the world’s civilizations writing developed as an aspect of the religious
and political power of the royal persona, here in the irrigated deserts of
the Tigris and Euphrates it was basically a form of bookkeeping — this
was a civilization of accountants.
Decipherers have also laid siege to other logographic scripts,
sometimes coming off with flying colors, sometimes not. In the plus
column, one of the most impressive successes was the decipherment of
so-called Hittite Hieroglyphic (which actually turned out to be in
another Indo-European tongue, Luvian), the script in which the Bronze
Age rulers of what is now central Turkey trumpeted their warlike
deeds.37 Between the two world wars, helped by the discovery of a few
cuneiform/hieroglyphic bilingual seals, and by the identification of
determinants for things like “country,” “god,” and “king,” a remark¬
able collection of scholars from a number of countries (including Gelb in
America) was finally able to read the script. It consisted of about five
42 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

hundred signs of which most were pictorially-derived logograms and

contained a fairly complete syllabary of sixty signs.
Next to Champollion’s triumph with Egyptian, certainly the world’s
best-known decipherment was that announced by the young British
architect Michael Ventris in a radio broadcast of 1952. In June of the
next year, a leader in The Times, which brought this discovery to the
attention of the world, significantly coincided with the conquest of
Everest by Hillary and Tensing.38 Ventris’ achievement was the cracking
of Linear B, a kind of Everest of the mind, if there ever was one, and
made even more poignant by the brilliant decipherer’s untimely death at
the age of thirty-four in a car accident. The script is known only from
economic records incised on clay, and kept in the archives of the Bronze
Age palaces of Mycenaean Greece and Crete.
As Ventris discovered, against the considered judgment of his elders
and betters - and even against his own inclination - Linear B records an
early form of Greek. It is a fairly pure syllabary, primarily CV, of eighty-
seven signs; in addition, there are some pictorial logograms, such as signs
for “horse” (both male and female), “tripod,” “boat,” and other items
of interest to palace accountants. What makes this decipherment of such
immediacy to us is that for the very first time we can read the records
(mundane though they are) of the people and society talked about in the
Homeric epics. These Bronze Age people were our own cultural
ancestors.
How did Ventris do it? It must be kept in mind that this is an almost
completely phonetic script - in fact, a syllabary - so that the
methodology in solving the puzzle is not completely divorced from
cryptography (or for that matter, from crossword puzzles). In a CV
syllabary - and Ventris had every reason to believe that this is what it was
— each sign will share a consonant with other signs, and its vowel with
still others. Ventris thus began to construct experimental grids, with the
possible consonants listed in the lefthand column, and the vowels in the
top horizontal row (we are going to see one for the Maya later on in this
book). Like syllabaries elsewhere — the Japanese kana comes to mind —
there will be five or so signs for the vowels, and Ventris was able to
hazard a guess which of these was most likely to begin a word.
He had two obstacles: the language was unknown, and he had no
bilingual key. But previous work done by others had shown that the
language had to be inflecting (like Latin or Greek); the logograms gave
him the meanings of some of the sign sequences in the syllabary as well as
the masculine and feminine endings for some words; and a few signs
probably had the same values as similar ones in the much later Cypriote
syllabary, a Greek script in use many centuries later on the island of
Cyprus.
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 43

An enlightened guess led Ventris to the solution: that ancient Cretan

place-names would appear on Linear B tablets from the Palace of Minos
at Knossos, including that of Knossos itself. Applying this to his
experimental grid, he found the entire script to be in Greek.
The question might now be asked, how does one know the type of
script with which one is dealing? The answer to this lies in the number of
individual characters or signs in the script. Look at these figures for
deciphered or already known writing systems:39

Writing System No. of Signs

L o go graphic
Sumerian 600 ( + )
Egyptian 2,500
Hittite Hieroglyphic 497
Chinese 5,000 ( + )

“Pure” Syllabic
Persian 40
Linear B 87
Cypriote 56
Cherokee 85

Alphabetic or Consonantal
English 26
Anglo-Saxon 31
Sanskrit 35
Etruscan 20
Russian 36
Hebrew 22
Arabic 28

So, if an unknown script has a sign-list totalling between 20 and 35 signs,

it is probably a system like an alphabet; if between 40 and 90 signs, the
likelihood is that we are dealing with a “pure” syllabary; and if above a
few hundred, the system is surely logographic. The number of phonetic
signs in logographic writing systems is of interest, too: Sumerian has
between 100 and 150, and Egyptian about 100, but since Hittite
Hieroglyphic uses a syllabary for its phoneticism, the phonetic signs
number only 60, within the usual range for “pure” syllabaries. And
although, if DeFrancis is right, the number of phonetic signs standing for
syllables in Chinese is huge, in China only 62 characters are exploited for
their CV sound values to write foreign names in newspapers and the like,
again in the range of “pure” syllabaries.
The fundamental pillars on which all successful decipherments have
rested are five in number:
44 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE

(1) The database must be large enough, with many texts of adequate
length. (2) The language must be known, or at least a reconstructed,
ancestral version, in vocabulary, grammar, and syntax; at the very
minimum, the linguistic family to which the language of the script
belongs should be known. (3) There should be a bilingual inscription of
some sort, one member of which is in a known writing system. (4) The
cultural context of the script should be known, above all traditions and
histories giving place-names, royal names and titles, and so forth. (5) For
logographic scripts, there should be pictorial references, either pictures to
accompany the text, or pictorially-derived logographic signs.

In a few cases, one or two of these criteria may be dispensed with -

Ventris, for example, managed very well without a bilingual inscription
(but Linear B was largely phonetic) - and others not. No script has ever
been broken, that is, actually translated, unless the language itself is
known and understood. A case in point is Etruscan, the script of the
original inhabitants of central Italy before the rise of the Roman state.
There are over 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions, all written in an alphabet
very similar to that of the early Greeks; thus, the pronunciation of every
single word in them is well established. The problem is that no one is
very sure about what these texts say: almost all of them are brief, and
apparently pertain to funerary rites and beliefs, but the language which
they record is utterly unrelated to any other on earth, and has not been
spoken since the dawn of the Christian era. Etruscan can be read, but it
has never been translated.
Bright youngsters who aspire to be second Ventrises and Champol-
lions may be pleased to know that there are still about a half dozen early
scripts still undeciphered. But I remain a pessimist: unless new
information on them is forthcoming, they will stay that way for a long
time to come. Take as an example the famous stamp-seals of the Indus or
Harappan civilization of Bronze Age India.40 There are several thousand
of these seals, each with a lovely depiction of a bull or elephant or some
such, accompanied by a very short inscription. As the sign-list reaches
several hundred in magnitude, it must be a logographic script; but
because no text is of any length, no bilingual inscription (say one in
cuneiform and Harappan) has yet shown up, and the language is
unknown (it has been hazarded to be an early form of the Dravidian
tongues still spoken by millions in southern India, but this is disputed),
the Indus writing system has not been deciphered - all claims to the
contrary notwithstanding. Britons, Indians, Finns, Russians, and
Americans, not to mention computers, have all worked on the problem,
but “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” have been unable to
put together this particular Humpty-Dumpty.
 THE WORD MADE VISIBLE 45

11 Linear B tablet from Pylos

concerning the coastguard.

“Who shall read them?” Stephens’ question was a good one: to him,
the writings on the crumbling monuments and cities which he and his
artist, Frederick Catherwood, had discovered in 1839-40 cried out for a
Champollion to decipher them. As we shall see, a kind of bilingual text
was unearthed in a Spanish library, and was published in 1864, twelve
years after Stephens’ death. In 1880, a facsimile of the greatest pre-
Columbian Maya book had appeared and by the end of the last century,
a very large body of Maya stone inscriptions was available to the
scholarly world, in highly accurate photographs and drawings. In the
early years of the twentieth century, Maya specialists certainly knew as
much about “their” civilization as Champollion had known about
ancient Egypt. And there was hardly a lack of pictures to interpret the
Maya texts.
So why did it take so long to decipher the Maya glyphs? Why were
there so many false starts and wrong turns? Why did would-be Maya
decipherers pay no attention to what had been done along these lines in
the Old World? And who, indeed, did answer Stephens’ plea and finally
read the script of the ancient Maya?
12 Map of Mayan language groups
 2 Lords of the Forest

Having been systematically undercounted by modern governments, no

one precisely knows how many Maya Indians there are, but there are at
least four million in southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and
Honduras. Ever since the Spanish Conquest of the early sixteenth
century, the Maya have been subjected to the physical and cultural
onslaught of the European and Europeanized population of these
countries, to which they have responded in various ways - sometimes,
like the “primitive” Lacandon Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, by flight into
the dense forests. But even the forests themselves are being hacked down
by the forces of progress at a dizzying rate, and bulldozers, modern
roads, hotels, condominiums, and the like are transforming ancient
Maya ways of life at a pace that could not have been predicted a half
century ago. Meanwhile, in the Guatemalan highlands, an even worse
tragedy is being acted out, as the indigenous populations are being
uprooted and demoralized by a systematic program of extermination
carried out by a succession of military regimes.
Creators of one of the most spectacular civilizations the world has
ever known, the Maya today have been reduced to what anthropologists
condescend to call a “folk culture,” with little or no voice in their own
destinies. How many vacationing tourists who visit the glorious ruins of
Yucatan are aware that Mexican law forbids the teaching in schools of
the Yucatec Maya tongue — the tongue of the people who built these
pyramids? The modern world has been transfixed by the new demands
of oppressed nationalities for their place in the sun, but little or nothing
is heard from the millions upon millions of indigenous, “Fourth
World” people in Latin America. How many heads of state in those
countries have any “Indian” blood to speak of? And when has any
Native American language been heard in the halls of the United Nations?
The answer is “none” and “never.’ No imperial conquest has ever been
so total, or a great people so shattered.
But it has not always been this way.

47
 48 LORDS OF THE FOREST

2000 BC 1000 BC BC AD AD 1000 PRESENT

I . . . . l . . . . I , .—. . 1 ■—■ ■ 1

Huastec
Chicomuceltec
Yucatec
Lacand6n
Itza
Mopln
Choi
Chontal
Chorti
Cholti
Tzotzil
Tzeltal
Motozintlec
Jacaltec
Acatec
Kanjobal
Tojolobal
Chuj
Mam
Teco
Aguatepec
Ixil
Kekchi
Uspantec

Pocomchi
Pocoman

Quiche
Sipacapa
Sacapultec
Cakchiquel
Tzutuhil

13 Classification and time depth of the Mayan languages.

When Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by the Pope in St. Peter’s

in Rome, on Christmas Day in the year 800, Maya civilization was at its
height: scattered throughout the jungle-covered lowlands of the Yucatan
Peninsula were more than a dozen brilliant city-states, with huge
populations, towering temple-pyramids and sophisticated royal courts.
The arts, scientific learning, and, above all, writing flourished under
royal patronage. Maya mathematicians and astronomers scanned the
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 49

heavens, and tracked the planets as they moved across the background
of the stars in the tropical night. Royal scribes — devotees of the twin
Monkey-Man Gods - wrote all this down in their bark-paper books, and
inscribed the deeds of their kings, queens, and princes on stone
monuments and walls of their temples and palaces.
Even the mightiest empires have their day and finally crumble,
awaiting resurrection by the archaeologist’s spade. It was not long after
800 that things began to fall apart for the ancient Maya, who had enjoyed
six centuries of prosperity during Europe’s Dark Age, and city after city
was abandoned to the encroaching forest. Then there was a final brief
renaissance of lowland culture in northern Yucatan, to be followed by
the final cataclysm brought about at the hands of the white foreigners
from across the sea.

There are some thirty Mayan languages spoken today, some as closely
related to each other as say, Dutch is to English, and some as far apart
from each other as English is from French.1 Just as languages scattered
from Europe to Persia and India can be traced back to a common Proto-
Indo-European ancestor, so can linguists reach back into the shadowy
past to look for a common parent. Reconstructed as Proto-Mayan, this
was spoken as far back as four thousand years ago, perhaps in the
mountains of northwestern Guatemala, but no one is certain about
exactly where. As time went on, dialects within the ur-language diverged
to become separate languages. One of these was the ancestral form of
Yucatec, still the mother tongue of hundreds of thousands in the
Yucatan Peninsula. Another group included the ancestor of Tzeltal and
Tzotzil (languages which one can yet hear in the markets and plazas of
large Maya towns in the Chiapas highlands of southeastern Mexico), and
of Cholan.
We now know that Cholan is to the inscribed texts of the Classic
Maya cities what Coptic was to the hieroglyphic inscriptions of ancient
Egypt. The three surviving Cholan languages today — Choi, Chontal, and
Chord - are still spoken around the ruins of Classic Maya cities (Choi at
Palenque in the west, and Chorti near Copan in the east), a fact which led
the late Sir Eric Thompson to propose some years ago that the Classic
texts were in a form of Cholan.2 Time has proved him right on this very
important point.
But Yucatec must not be overlooked. Among the great Maya cities of
the Peninsula to the north of the Cholans, probably everyone from
lowly peasant farmers to great princes spoke Yucatec, and three of the
four surviving hieroglyphic books are in that tongue (notwithstanding
the fact that Cholan influence can be detected in the book preserved in
50 LORDS OF THE FOREST

the State Library of Dresden, eastern Germany). As we know from the

complex ethnic situation in Europe, linguistic boundaries are not exactly
impervious; in fact, they leak like sieves, and loan words pass back and
forth. Suffice it to say at this point that there is plenty of evidence for
such interchange of vocabulary going on between Yucatec and Cholan
Maya for at least a millennium before the Spanish Conquest — evidence
coming from the advanced state of the Maya decipherment.3
It should be borne in mind that all the various Mayan languages
spoken today are the modern end products of linguistic evolution, and
have been subject to various degrees of “linguistic imperialism” by the
hispanic culture that has been dominant since the Conquest. In Yucatan,
to give just one sad example, very few Maya can now count in their own
native language beyond the number five — a people who could once count
into the millions in Maya have been reduced to using mostly Spanish
numbers.
We know far more about the Mayan languages than Champollion,
say, could ever have known about Egyptian/Coptic. Indeed, very
sophisticated techniques allow linguists to reconstruct with some
confidence the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the Proto-Cholan
language that was spoken at cities like Tikal, Palenque, and Yaxchilan, a
great help to decipherers.4
Only a born optimist might tell you that the Mayan languages are easy
to learn; they may be so for a Maya toddler, but for those of us who were
brought up with the languages of Europe (including even Russian), these
are tough for foreigners. One has only to listen to the marketwomen of
Merida, capital of Yucatan, or of a town under the volcanoes of
Guatemala, to know that Mayan is very different from what we learned
in school.
In the first place, these languages sound like nothing we have heard
before. They make a very important distinction between glottalized and
unglottalized consonants. The latter are pronounced “normally” as we
do, but when the stop is glottalized, the throat is constricted and the
sound released like a small explosion. We say that glottalization is
phonemic, because it produces changes in the meaning of words.
Compare, for example, the following pairs of words in Yucatec Maya:

Unglottalized Glottalized
pop, “mat” p’op’, “to shell squash seeds”
cutz, “turkey” kutz, “tobacco”
tzul, “to put in order” dzul, “foreigner”
muc, “to bury” muk, “to permit”

Something else which seems unfamiliar to us is the glottal stop,

phonemically significant in Mayan although usually ignored in texts of
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 51

the Colonial period (I suppose because the natives knew when to use it,
and the Spaniards didn’t care). This is just a constriction of the throat or
glottis, which English speakers use at the beginning of a word like apple,
or in the exclamation uh'oh! Linguists write it with an apostrophe or
a dotless question mark. Consider this sentence in Yucatec: b’ey tu
hadzahile’exo’ob’o’, “thus they hit you [pi.]” - the x is pronounced like
our sh - and you will get some idea of the sound of a language which must
have taxed the ability of the early Spanish friars to understand and speak.
As if the phonology weren’t difficult enough, there is the grammar,
which bears not the slightest resemblance to anything we contended with
when we learned ancient Latin, Greek, or any of the modern European
languages. We are in another world altogether, with a different mindset.5
With the Mayan languages, roots are overwhelmingly monosyllabic,
with the CVC (consonantwowebconsonant) pattern dominant, but
these are highly inflected, and there are special particles added to them.
Words therefore tend to be poly synthetic, often expressing in one word
what it would take a whole English sentence to do.
The Mayan languages, along with such utterly unrelated and scattered
tongues as Basque, Eskimo, Tibetan, and Georgian, are ergative, a
specialized linguistic term meaning that the subject of an intransitive verb
(one that has no object; “to sleep” is intransitive) and the object of a
transitive verb (such as “to hit”) have the same case, or in dealing with
pronouns, are the same. In Mayan, there are two sets of pronouns, which
we will call Set A and Set B. In Yucatec Maya these are.

Set A Set B

Sing. Plural Sing. Plural

1st in- C' -en 'o’on
2nd a- a-... ,-e’ex -ech 'e’ex
3rd u- M-. .. ,'o’ob -0 'o’ob

0, by the way, means “nothing.”

Transitive verbs take Set A affixes as subjects and Set B ones as objects.
For intransitive verbs like “to sleep,” a Set B pronoun is used for the
subject. And, just to confuse things for the neophyte learner, Set A
pronouns are used for the possessors of things. I would use the same 3rd
person singular u- for “he” in “he hit him,” and for “his” in “his book”;
we are going to see this later in the Maya glyphs.
If, however, the action described in the sentence hasn’t yet been
finished, a Set A pronoun appears as the subject! This raises the question
of tenses: they really don’t exist in Mayan languages like Yucatec, or at
least there are no past, present, and future of the kind familiar to us. In
their place are aspect words or particles, and inflections; these indicate
52 LORDS OF THE FOREST

whether an action has been completed or not, whether it is just beginning

or ending, or has been in progress for a while. As adverbs, they stand in
front of verbs, and govern them. To talk of events in the past, you must
differentiate the remote past from the more recent past; and to deal with
the future, the particular aspect word which you must use depends on
how certain it is that something will happen - there are the indefinite “I
will walk,” the definite “I am going to walk,” and the very certain
statement “I will walk.”
It is just not possible in Mayan to use an imperfective verb (referring
to actions or events in the past, present, or future that have not been
completed) without sticking a date or a temporal aspect adverb in front
of it. The Maya are, and have always been, very, very particular about
time, far more than we are, and we will see this in the elaborate
chronological skeletons on which all their texts are strung, even those
written down in Spanish letters during Colonial times.
Here are a few examples of some Yucatec sentences, to give an idea of
how these principles are put into verbal action. To begin with, here is a
sentence using a transitive verb:

t u hadz'dh'o’ori'o’ob, “they hit us” (in the past)

t, completive aspect, transitive verb
M'...'o’ob, “they” (Set A)
hadz, “to hit” (note glottalized dz)
'ah, perfective suffix
-o’on, “us” (Set B)
And another:

taan iri'hadz'iC'ech, “I am hitting you”

taan, durative aspect
in-, “I” (Set A)
hadz, “to hit”
4c, imperfective verb suffix
-ech, “you” (object, Set B pronoun)

And finally, a sentence with an intransitive verb:

h ueeri'en, “I slept”
h, completive aspect, intransitive verb
ueen, “to sleep”
'en, “I” (Set B)

Remember the possessive?

in hu’un, “my book”

in, “my” (Set A)
hu’un, “book”
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 53

Not only does time play a critical role in Maya verb constructions, but
there is a whole class of intransitives which describe an object’s or
person’s position and shape in space; there are distinct terms, for
instance, for “lying face down” and “lying face up.” These “position-
als,” as they are called, have their own inflectional suffixes.
As English-speakers, we take it for granted that one can speak of, say
“four birds” or “twenty-five books,” but this kind of numerical
construction is impossible in the Mayan languages — between the
number and the thing counted there has to be a numerical classifier,
describing the class to which the object, animal, plant, or thing belongs.
We have a glimmering of this sort of construction when we talk of “two
flocks of geese” or “a pride of lions,” but this is pale stuff compared to
the richness of Mayan classifiers. Colonial Yucatec dictionaries list
dozens of these, but only a handful are still in use in today’s Yucatan, yet
even these have to be interposed even when the number itself might be in
Spanish.6 If I see three horses in a pasture, I would count them as ox-tul
tzimin (ox, “three”; -tul, classifier for animate things; tzimin, “horse” or
“tapir”). However, if there were three stones lying in the same pasture, I
would have to say ox-p’el tunich (ox, “three”; -p’el, classifier for inanimate
things; tunich, “stone”).
Until this century, when so much of the ancient system was lost, the
Maya counted vigesimally - by base twenty - instead of decimally - by
base ten - as we do (although we retain a trace of this in such archaic
expressions as “three score and ten” for “seventy”). But, after all,
physiologically we have twenty digits, not just ten, so the human
dimension is very much present in the Mayan system. By means of it,
they could count very large numbers - into the millions, if need be.
Compared with the languages of the Indo-European family, Mayan is
fairly gender-blind: there really are no masculine, feminine, or neuter
constructions in most of the grammar. One and the same pronoun is
used for “he,” “she,” and “it.” Nonetheless, male and female personal
names and occupational titles are often prefixed by special particles
indicating sex. In Yucatec, these are ah for men, and ix for women. Thus,
we have in our early Colonial sources ah dzib, “scribe” (=“he of the
writing”), and Ix Cheel, the mother goddess (=“Lady Rainbow”).
It is not just enough for a language to have a grammar, it must have a
syntax, too, so that words may be strung into sentences. Every language
in the world has its own characteristic word order. For the ancient
Egyptians, the order of a sentence with a transitive verb would have been
verb-subject-object, or VSO, so that to express a sentence which in
English would be “The scribe knows the counsel, a denizen of the Nile
would have had to say “knows the scribe the counsel.” We would use
the SVO construction for this. But the Mayan languages generally use
54 LORDS OF THE FOREST

the order verb-object-subject or VOS (“knows the counsel the scribe”);

moreover, with intransitive verbs which take no object, such as “the
lord is seated,” the verb still precedes the subject.
Given the fact that there are grammars and dictionaries for all the
thirty-odd Mayan languages (and for Yucatec, a half-dozen major
dictionaries from all time periods since the Conquest), one would have
expected early would-be decipherers of Maya hieroglyphic writing to
make some effort, as Champollion did with Coptic/Egyptian, to
immerse themselves in one or more of the Mayan tongues. I would like
to say that this was so, but it’s not what happened. Incredible as it may
seem, up until about two decades ago the Maya script was the only
decipherment for which a thorough grounding in the relevant language
was not considered necessary - there are still a few “experts” on the
subject, hidden away in the dusty recesses of anthropology departments,
who have only the foggiest idea of Maya as a spoken language (and not
much of Spanish, for that matter).
We shall see the consequences of this ignorance in due time.

Once memorably described as a “green thumb jutting up into the Gulf of

Mexico,” the Yucatan Peninsula is a low-lying limestone shelf which
emerged in fairly recent geological time from the waters of the
Caribbean. Its northern half is extraordinarily flat, the only topographic
relief being provided by the Puuc range, low hills arranged in a sort of
inverted V across the border between the Mexican states of Yucatan and
Campeche. The peninsula is honeycombed by caves, and by sinkholes
(called cenotes from the Maya dzonot) which once were almost the sole
source of drinking water in the Northern Maya Area.
Further south, the land becomes more elevated and the relief more
pronounced. This is the Central Maya Area (or southern Maya
lowlands), at the heart of which lies the Peten district of northern
Guatemala, the geographic and cultural heart of Classic Maya civiliza¬
tion. To the east of the Peten, in Belize, are the impressive Maya
Mountains, source of the granite used by the ancient Maya of the
Central Area for milling stones to grind corn. In contrast to the northern
reaches of the peninsula, here there are many rivers, above all the mighty
Usumacinta (and its tributaries like the Pasion), which flows past
innumerable ruins of Maya cities on its way to the Gulf of Mexico; and
the Belize and New Rivers, draining into the Caribbean.
A traveler heading south on foot from the Peten would eventually
encounter the incredibly rough karst terrain of the Verapaz country,
with huge caverns - one of which, near the town of Chama, was believed
to be the entrance to Xibalba, the Maya Underworld. Beyond this region
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 55

he would climb sharply up, into the highlands of Guatemala and

neighboring Chiapas: a breathtakingly lovely landscape of volcanic
peaks as perfectly conical as Fujiyama, each sacred to the gods of the
Quiche Maya nation who ruled here on the eve of the Spanish Conquest.
In these relatively cool uplands there are many broad valleys, especially
the one straddling the continental divide, which now contains the
56 LORDS OF THE FOREST

modern capital of Guatemala, and the enormous volcanic caldera which

holds the sapphire-blue waters of Lake Atitlan, its shores dotted with
picturesque Maya villages.
To the south and southwest of the highlands is the Pacific coastal
plain, an oven-hot region of winding rivers, rich, alluvial soils, and a
lagoon-and-mangrove-fringed coastline. This zone (grouped with the
highlands into the Southern Maya Area by archaeologists) was never
very Maya: indeed, the languages once spoken there were largely non-
Maya. But it contributed decisively to the development of nascent Maya
civilization further north and northeast, above all in the genesis of the
sacred calendar, and in religious and civil iconography.
One has only to deplane at the airport of Merida, Yucatan’s major
city, to know that one is in the tropics - coming from the cold north, the
first step outside sometimes feels like opening the door of a sauna.
Because the Maya realm lies entirely to the south of the Tropic of
Cancer, yet considerably to the north of the Equator, there are two
strongly marked seasons (neither of them, of course, with snow!). The
dry season lasts from the end of November until mid or late May, during
which it very seldom rains, especially in the northern half of the
peninsula and in the Southern Maya Area. Then, as the month of May
nears its end, thunderclouds begin massing each afternoon, and
torrential rains begin: the voice of the rain god Chac is heard all across
the land. By midsummer, the downpours taper off somewhat, to begin
again in earnest until they end in November.
It was during those wet six months of the year that all Maya life and
Maya civilization itself was in the hands of the gods, for upon those rains
the Maya corn farmer depended. The Maya people were as much in
thrall to the mighty thunderclouds of summer as the Egyptians were to
the annual rise and fall of the Nile.
A quarter of a century ago, before so much had been mindlessly
leveled by lumbering and for cattle farming, a dense rainforest covered
much of the southern part of the Maya lowlands, where annual rainfall is
heavy. As one moves north over the Yucatan plain, conditions are drier,
and the forest cover becomes low and scrubby, the trees usually
dropping their leaves in the height of the dry season. In the midst of this
tropical forest are extensive patches of grassy savannas, often burned
deliberately by the Maya to encourage game like deer, which come to
nibble on the young shoots pushing up in the ashes. For many centuries,
Maya maize farmers, like farmers throughout the world’s hot lands,
have coped with the forest, paradoxically, by temporarily destroying it.
The Maya peasant will select a forest plot during the dry season and fell it
- using steel tools like the machete today, but in the past employing only
axes of chipped and ground stone. In late April or May, when daytime
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 57

temperatures are at their almost unbearable maximum, he (and they are

invariably men) will fire the now desiccated fallen trees and brush; the
sky turns a dusky yellow with the smoke from thousands of such fires,
and the sun becomes a dull orange ball. Then, just before the rains come,
he takes his digging stick and gourd seed container, and plants his maize,
beans, and other cultigens in holes made through the ash layer. With
luck and according to the benevolence of “Father Chac,” the rains will
come, and the seeds will sprout.
Our farmer can plant again using the same plot, or milpa, but in the
space of only a few years the fertility of the soil begins to decline (maize is
a hard taskmaster), and weeds crowd out the young corn plants. It is time
to abandon this plot, and clear a new one. This kind of shifting
cultivation, or ‘ ‘milpa agriculture, ’ ’ is dominant today wherever lowland
farmers are found, and for over a century archaeologists have thought
that this was the only kind of farming the Maya knew. If so, then lowland
populations could never have been very large, for it requires a great deal
of land to support a farming family.
But thanks to modern aerial reconnaissance and space-age remote
sensing techniques, we now know of a far more intensive use of the land,
practiced even before the beginning of the Christian era.7 Called “raised
field agriculture,” it involved the cultivation of otherwise useless
lowland swamps, by draining them with canals. Along and in back of the
canals, rectangular raised plots were laid out, providing permanent
gardens kept moist year-round by capillary action raising water to the
surface from the adjacent canals. In those areas favorable to such
techniques, crop yields were surely far higher than in the case of milpa
agriculture, and settlement could be very stable as the same plots could
be used indefinitely. All this changes the formula: ancient Maya
population densities were probably not light at all, but very high.
What did they then grow and eat? All lines of evidence point to the
overwhelming importance of maize, which according to fossil pollen
evidence has been in the lowlands at least since 3000 b c, and from which
the Maya on all social levels derived the bulk of their sustenance. This is
what I was taught at Harvard in the 1950s, but about twenty years ago it
became the fashion for bright graduate students to pooh-pooh corn as
the Maya staple, making unsubstantiated claims that the ancient Maya
relied more on breadnuts (eaten today only as a last resort in case of
starvation) and on various root crops. I never accepted this, nor did
some of my more conservative colleagues, and I am delighted that the
very latest in chemical tests - the measurement of stable carbon isotope
ratios in archaeological bones from the small Classic Maya city of Altun
Ha, in Belize - show conclusively that the city’s inhabitants ate mostly
maize.8
58 LORDS OF THE FOREST

Small wonder, then, that the youthful Maize God, along with Chac, is
ubiquitous in Maya iconography, not only in the surviving books, but in
the sculpture of great cities such as Copan and on funerary pottery. No
one has yet come across a god of the breadnut tree, let alone a deity of
root crops.
The Maya diet was rich in plant foods: maize taken in the form of
tamales, and perhaps tortillas (although there is not much evidence for
these from Classic times); beans, squashes and pumpkins; chili peppers;
and tomatoes; along with a host of other cultigens and wild plants. Since
the only domesticated animals were the dog (used for food as well as in
hunting), the turkey, and the stingless bee, game such as deer, pacas,
peccaries, wild birds, and fish played an important role in the cuisine.
Although often visually expressed in the most imaginative and even
weird form, the world of nature in the Maya lowlands enters into almost
every aspect of Maya religious and civil iconography. The jaguar, largest
of the world’s spotted cats, was literally “the king of the jungle,”
dangerous to humans, and yet, like us, at the top of its own particular
food chain. Its pelt was the very symbol of royalty, and Maya dynasts
were proud to claim affinity with that dread carnivore; at the same time,
being a night hunter, the jaguar was intimately associated with Xibalba,
the Maya Underworld.
But a host of other life forms also permeated Maya culture: among
them were the chattering spider monkeys and noisy howler monkeys,
moving in black troops through the canopy layer of the forests; scarlet
macaws in flashing red, blue, and yellow; and the quetzal, an inhabitant
of the cloud forests to the south of the Peten, whose iridescent, green-
gold tailfeathers were prized for royal headdresses and backracks. The
reptile world was omnipresent, represented by crocodiles and caimans,
denizens of the sluggish river systems; by iguanas; and by snakes like the
boa constrictor and the venomous fer-de-lance.

Mayanists, in their enthusiasm for their subject, are apt to forget that the
culture they are studying was part of a more widespread pattern or way
of life that is called “Mesoamerican.” Broadly defined, Mesoamerica
comprises that part of Mexico and adjacent Central America which was
civilized at the time of the Spanish Conquest. It includes most of central,
southern, and southeastern Mexico (and encompasses the Yucatan
Peninsula), Guatemala, Belize, and the westernmost portions of Hon¬
duras and El Salvador. Within its borders, many tongues were and are
spoken, including of course languages of the Mayan family, and just
about every kind of environment can be found: deserts, snow-capped
volcanoes, temperate valleys, tropical lowlands, mangrove swamps, etc.
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 59

Yet within this babble of tongues and varied landscape, certain

cultural traits are held in common. All of these people were farmers,
cultivating corn, beans, squashes, and chili peppers; all lived in villages,
towns, and cities, and traded in large and complex markets; all had books
(although only the Zapotec of Oaxaca, the Maya, and perhaps the people
of Veracruz had true writing). Perhaps most importantly, all had a
pantheistic religion which, while not uniform everywhere, had signifi¬
cant elements in common, such as a sacred calendar based on a cycle of
260 days, and the belief that it was absolutely necessary to shed human
blood - either one’s own or that of captives - in honor of the gods and
ancestors.
At one end of the Mesoamerican time-span stand the Aztec and their
mighty empire, best known of all since their civilization was destroyed -
and recorded - by the Spanish conquistadors. The language of their
empire (which impinged upon, but never included the Maya) was
Nahuatl, an agglutinating tongue blessedly free of the complexities
which make the Mayan languages so difficult; this was the lingua franca
of most of non-Maya Mesoamerica, used by traders and bureaucrats
alike.
So what is at the other end, the earlier part, of the time-span?
Archaeology has gone a long way to answer this question, but it is first
necessary to show how this time-frame has been separated into
manageable segments by archaeologists. Here is the generally accepted
scheme (based in part on radiocarbon dating and in part on the Maya
calendar):

Paleo-lndian Period, 20,000?—8000 bc

In this remote age (the Late Pleistocene or Ice Age), hunters and
gatherers of Siberian origin colonized the New World and
Mesoamerica. Large game animals such as mammoths and wild
horses roamed the continent.

Archaic Period, 8000-2000 bc

Within Mesoamerica, small bands of Indians began to turn to the
planting of plant seeds, rather than their mere collection. Cultural
selection resulted in the domestication of almost all the food
plants, above all maize; and this led to the establishment of the first
permanent villages by the close of the Archaic, along with the arts
of sedentary life such as pottery and loom weaving.

Pre-Classic (or Formative) Period, 2000 bc-ad 250

At one time thought to be a kind of New World “Neolithic” with
the spread everywhere of peasant villages and simple fertility cults
based in female clay figurines, we now know that Mesoamerican
60 LORDS OF THE FOREST

civilization first took root in this time-frame, initially with the

Olmec, and later with the Zapotec and Maya.

Classic Period, ad 250—900

Supposedly the Golden Age of Mesoamerican culture, dominated
by the great city of Teotihuacan in the central Mexican plateau, and
by the Maya cities in the southeast. In fact, it can best be defined as
that period during which the Maya were carving and erecting
monuments dated in their Long Count system.

Post'Classic Period, ad 900—1521

A purportedly militaristic epoch which followed upon the
downfall of Classic Maya civilization, marked by the overlordship
of the Toltec until about 1200, and later by the Aztec Empire,
which covered almost all of extra-Maya Mesoamerica. The Post-
Classic cultures were, of course, extinguished by the Spaniards.

Exactly when the Maya highlands and lowlands were first occupied is
as yet unknown, but small camp sites of early hunters have been found in
the mountain valleys of Guatemala, and Archaic settlements are
scattered across Belize (and probably would be discovered throughout
the lowlands, if one knew what to look for).9 Since chipped-stone tools
don’t talk, there is no way to be sure whether these people were Mayan-
speakers or not, but they may have been. Certainly by 1000 bc, when
burgeoning populations dwelling in sedentary villages and even towns
were spread throughout, some form of ur-Mayan must have extended
throughout the Maya area.
The origins of Classic Maya civilization must be sought in the Pre-
Classic. Since the early part of this century, Maya archaeologists - a
jingoistic lot - have taken a totally Mayacentric view of Mesoamerican
culture history: it was “their” beloved Maya who first domesticated
corn, who invented the Mesoamerican calendar, who gave the light of
civilization to everyone else. One might compare this to the terracentric,
pre-Copernican view of the Solar System. In this case, the iconoclastic
role of Copernicus and Galileo was taken by the pioneers of Olmec
archaeology, such as the Smithsonian Institution’s Matthew Stirling,
and the Mexican artist-archaeologist Miguel Covarrubias. In the 1930s
and 1940s they found, buried in the coastal plain of Veracruz and
Tabasco in Mexico, a far earlier civilization, capable of carving and
moving multi-ton colossal heads (portraits of their rulers), of fashioning
magnificent figurines, masks, and plaques of blue-green jade, and even,
late in the Olmec development, of writing and the “Maya” calendar.10
When the very first reports of this venerable culture were published,
the reaction of the Mayanist community varied from frosty to
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 61

downright hostile. The attack on the claimed antiquity of Olmec culture

was led by Eric Thompson, the formidable British-born “brains” of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Maya program.11 We will be
hearing more about him later.
However, to the consternation of the “Maya buffs” (Matt Stirling’s
phrase), the radiocarbon dates on Olmec sites like La Venta showed that
the Olmec were even older than Stirling and his colleagues had surmised:
at really ancient centers like San Lorenzo, a huge site that I excavated in
the 1960s, Olmec culture, complete with massive stone monuments and
pyramid-building, was in full flower by 1200 bc, about a millennium
before anything that could be called civilization had arisen in the tropical
forests of the Maya lowlands.12 Although the Maya buffs are still fighting
a rearguard action, most Mesoamericanists have little doubt that the
Olmec - with their strange art style, pantheistic religion focussing on
were-jaguars and other composite creatures, and ceremonial building
programs — were the first to put together what we know of as
Mesoamerican culture.
The Olmec (a name, by the way, given them by archaeologists - we
don’t know what they called themselves) were not alone as culture-
builders during the middle part of the Pre-Classic. By about 600 bc, in
and near Monte Alban, a hilltop redoubt-city in the Valley of Oaxaca,
Zapotec rulers began to erect monuments celebrating victories over rival
chiefdoms; these not only showed their unfortunate captives after
torture and sacrifice, but they recorded the name of the dead chief, the
name of his polity, and the date on which the victory (or sacrifice) had
occurred.13 Thus, it was the Zapotec, and not the Maya or Olmec, who
invented writing in Mesoamerica.
A word here about the dating system used at Monte Alban and
subsequently throughout southeastern Mesoamerica. The basis of this
calendar was the sacred count of 260 days, the result of the never-ending
permutation of 13 numbers with a rigid sequence of 20 named days. Bars
and dots are used for the numbers, a dot standing for “one” and a bar for
“five” (thus, the number “six” would be a bar and a dot, “thirteen” two
bars and three dots). There are many speculations about the origin of
such a period (it approximates the nine months of human gestation, for
instance14), but one can visit Maya villages today in the Guatemalan
highlands where the calendar priests can still give one the correct day in
the 260-day count - it has not slipped one day in over twenty-five
centuries. Now, run this count against the 365 days of the solar year, and
one will get the 52-year Calendar Round, the Mesoamerican equivalent
of our century.
Somehow or other, the Calendar Round was diffused down from the
Zapotec-speaking highlands to the late Olmec of the Gulf Coast and
62 LORDS OF THE FOREST

15 The Maya 260-day count, in which 13 numbers intermesh with 20

named days.

among peoples on the western and southwestern fringes of the Maya

realm.15 Within that broad arc, an even more extraordinary develop¬
ment took place in the last century before Christ, near the end of the Pre-
Classic. This was the appearance of that most typical of all Maya traits,
the Long Count calendar, among peoples for whom Maya was probably
(at best) a foreign language. Unlike dates in the Calendar Round, which
are fixed only within a never-ending cycle of 52 years and thus recur once
every 52 years, Long Count dates are given in a day-to-day count, which
began in the year 3114 bc, and which will end (perhaps with a bang!) in
ad 2012.
In the wake of the Olmec civilization, which had declined to the point
of unrecognizability after the fifth century bc, a host of chiefdoms
sprang up on the Pacific coastal plain of Chiapas and Guatemala, and in
the area to the west of Guatemala City, all of which were honoring their
rulers and gods by erecting flat stone monuments (which archaeologists
call stelae) fronted by round or animal-shaped “altars.” The compli¬
cated, narrative art style which appears on these stones is called
“Izapan,” after the huge site of Izapa, lying near the Chiapas-Guatemala
border. What is important is that some of these chiefdoms had a form of
writing (largely unreadable), and some were eventually fixing important
events not only with Calendar Round dates, but with the Long Count.
Eventually, according to our still sketchy archaeological information,
the lowland Maya of the Peten and Yucatan forests adopted this highly
non-egalitarian way of life, so that by the time of Christ there were towns
and even cities ruled by royal dynasties all over the region. In contrast to
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 63

their contemporaries in the highlands and on the Pacific coastal plain,

the early Maya architects had an inexhaustible supply of limestone and
lime mortar to work with, so that stone architecture was the rule: instead
of earthen mounds topped by perishable, thatched superstructures,
great masonry temple-pyramids rose to the sky, supporting upper
temples of limestone containing narrow rooms built on the principle of
the corbel arch.
The full extent of these Late Pre-Classic building programs in the
lowlands will never be known, since in any particular Maya site early
constructions are usually covered over with towering constructions of
the Classic period. Archaeologists have been lucky in finding a few sites
where there is little or no Classic occupation, and luckiest of all in
locating the vast city of El Mirador, in the northernmost Peten, which is
almost entirely Late Pre-Classic.16 This behemoth of the ancient New
World has temple-pyramids which reach a height of over seventy meters
above the jungle floor, with massive architectural groups connected by
causeways. All of these constructions were coated with white plaster and
painted, usually a deep red; and here, as at other Late Pre-Classic sites,
gigantic stucco masks of great Maya gods (above all, the malevolent bird-
deity known to the later Quiche Maya as Vucub Caquix) flank the
stairways that reach the summits of the pyramids.17
In effect, the more we learn about the Late Pre-Classic in the Maya
lowlands, the more “Classic” it seems. When, then, does the Classic
begin? Completely arbitrarily, we begin it with the very first Maya
monument bearing a contemporary (not a retrospective) Long Count
date. This is a broken limestone stela found by the University of
Pennsylvania project at Tikal, in the heart of the Peten. On one side is a
richly bedecked Maya ruler, literally festooned with jade ornaments,
while on the other is a Long Count date corresponding to a day in the
year ad 292.18 Twenty-two years later, a subsequent Tikal dynast
appears on the Leyden Plate, a jade plaque found in a Late Post-Classic
context in a mound near the Caribbean coast. We now know that this
records the ruler’s accession to the throne, and quite typically he is
depicted trampling a sorry-looking captive - a theme that will be
repeated over and over among the warlike Classic Maya.
Even if we round off the date for the opening of the Classic to ad 250,
it now looks as if many of the elements that made up Classic Maya
civilization are already present by then: cities of limestone masonry
ruled over by an elite class, carved stone monuments celebrating the
doings of the rulers, lavish royal tombs underneath temple substruc¬
tures, at least some elements of the calendar (especially the 52-year
Calendar Round), extensive trade in luxury goods, and most important
of all (from our point of view), writing.
64 LORDS OF THE FOREST

Let us jump ahead and assume (rightly) that most Classic Maya
inscriptions can now be read; how this came about will be the subject of
future chapters. I suppose this is once again putting the cart before the
horse, but it enables us to make sense out of what decades of intensive
and extensive archaeological research in the Maya lowlands have
produced.
Classic Maya civilization flourished for about six centuries, in Old
World terms roughly from the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian,
that formidable producer of Christian martyrs, to King Alfred of
Wessex, defeater of Danes. The Prophet Mohammed was contemporary
with the transition from the Maya Early to Late Classic; when he fled
from Mecca to Medina, marking the start of the Islamic Era, the great
Maya ruler of Palenque, Pacal or “Shield,” had been on the throne for
eight years.
Unlike the empires of the Old World, there never was any imperial
organization or overall hegemony of one city over the rest among the
Classic Maya. Rather, the lowlands were organized into a series of small
city-states - at least twenty-five of them in the eighth century, during the
Classic apogee. The distance from any particular capital to its frontier
with another state would seldom be more than a day’s walk. Some cities
were bigger than others, and certainly had more influence over the
development of Maya culture: certainly Tikal, a giant among Maya
centers, Copan in the east, Palenque in the west, and Calakmul to the
north of the Peten were in this category; and so probably were the very
late cities of Uxmal and Chichen Itza in the northern Yucatan Peninsula.
Accurate censuses are a product of the modern Western world and
the Ottoman Empire; we certainly have none for the Classic Maya. It is
for that reason that we must take all population estimates for their cities
with a large grain of salt. Very conveniently for today’s archaeologists,
the Classic Maya built their thatched-roof houses on low mounds of
earth and masonry, and these can be mapped and counted; having
accomplished that, you have to decide how many people might have
lived in such a house, and how many of them were occupied at any one
time in a given city. “Guesstimates” of how many people lived in Tikal
thus vary wildly, all the way from eleven thousand to forty thousand —
probably the latter is closest to the mark, given the current evidence for
intensification of agriculture in some parts of the Maya area as seen in
raised fields.19
As for the total Maya population in the lowlands, that cannot even be
guessed at. Certainly there were many millions, but it should be kept in
mind that there were extensive areas with no good arable land, such as
high mountains (in southern Belize) and grassy savannas; the deep, rich,
black soils favored by the Maya in the Peten just are not found
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 65

everywhere, and in the northernmost part of the peninsula soils are so

thin and rocky, and the vegetation so scrubby, that the economy there
must have depended not upon farming but upon activities like salt¬
making, bee-keeping and trade.
Classic capital cities can be recognized not only by their sheer size, but
also because only these seemed to have almost exclusive rights to
publicly displayed, monumental inscriptions, such as carved stelae, so-
called “altars” (in fact, probably thrones), and lintels. These were
usually associated with specific buildings within the cities, and often (as
at Piedras Negras on the Usumacinta River), the stelae were lined up in a
single row before a temple-pyramid. As among the pharaohs of Egypt,
the hereditary rulers and their families and ancestors were celebrated in
these inscriptions and in the relief pictures described by the associated
texts. These were no primitive democracies or nascent chiefdoms: the
royal family and the nobility were the aristocratic patrons of artists,
scribes, and architects alike, whose only goal was to glorify the gods and
the ruling house.
Reflecting their highly stratified society, there was a whole hierarchy
of cities, towns, and villages among the Classic Maya. Biggest of all were
the giants like Tikal, Naranjo, Seibal, Palenque, Yaxchilan, Copan,
Uxmal, and Coba. Somewhat lower down were smaller centers like Dos
Pilas, Uaxactun, Caracol, and Quirigua, which still, according to what
their monuments say, maintained a more-or-less independent political
life - although Uaxactun was beaten in war by its neighbor to the south,
Tikal. But lesser centers sometimes bested larger ones: little Dos Pilas
clobbered Seibal at one point, and Caracol overwhelmed Naranjo and
even Tikal.20
Notwithstanding the pious claims of a past generation of archaeo¬
logists, blood and gore were the rule not the exception among the city-
states of the lowlands.21 The stelae and lintels of many sites record the
victories of great kings and their companions-in-arms. One of the
favorite themes of Classic Maya reliefs is the stripping, binding, and
trampling of important captives, for whom sacrifice by decapitation
(probably after lengthy torture) was the sure outcome. The marvelous
late eighth-century murals of Bonampak, a site in the Usumacinta
drainage discovered by a pair of American adventurers in 1946, show an
actual Maya battle in progress: it was fought in the jungle between spear-
wielding warriors, with the victorious king in jaguar-skin battle-jacket
taking his noble prisoner.22 It must have been a very noisy affair, indeed,
as the long, wooden war trumpets sounded above the usual whistling
and shouting which we know from Spanish accounts were typical of
Maya hostilities. In other rooms at Bonampak, the unlucky prisoners
are tortured under the direction of the king, an heir-apparent to the
66 LORDS OF THE FOREST

throne is presented, and, finally, the king and his nobles in their great
quetzal-feathered headdresses and backracks whirl in a victorious
sacrificial dance.
Among the Classic cities, Tikal is probably the best known and most
completely studied.23 Founded well before the beginning of the
Christian era, this enormous center was always conservative and even
stodgy among its more innovating contemporaries, rather more like
Philadelphia or Boston than New York or Chicago. Residential units
(three or four house mounds centered on a little plaza) are scattered over
an area of some sixty square kilometers (thirty-two square miles);
nowhere in the city can streets or avenues be detected, or anything
resembling a grid pattern. As one gets closer to the “ceremonial center”
of Tikal, these residences become grander, and some must have served as
palaces for nobility and royal retainers.
So high are the six temple-pyramids of Tikal that they now project far
above the tall forest canopy. Each rises in a series of terraces, and is
fronted by a stairway of vertiginous steepness. At the top is a masonry
temple topped by a roof comb, a soaring, non-functional construction
meant to emphasize the heaven-reaching properties of the temple. The
rooms within are narrow indeed, mere corbel-vaulted slots, but the
doorways of the outer rooms have fine, sapodilla-wood lintels carved
with enthroned or standing Maya rulers.
I have read in many books that the Maya pyramids were nothing like
the Egyptian ones in that they weren’t used for royal tombs. That this is
sheer, unfounded nonsense has been shown again and again, most of all
by the clandestine tomb robbers who have been supplying the pre-
Columbian art market with fine Classic vases and jades for many years
now. Archaeologists are slow learners! At any rate, during the
University of Pennsylvania excavations at Tikal back in the early 1960s,
the most splendid royal tomb was found at ground level inside Temple I,
which dominates the Great Plaza of Tikal, and it can be proved that this
temple, and probably most others like it in the Maya lowlands, were
built to house the remains of dynastic leaders. Cheops would have felt
right at home.24
Although some specialists think that the extensive architectural
complexes called “palaces” were just that, some are not so sure. The
Central Acropolis at Tikal has a number of such multi-roomed, range¬
like buildings, and speculations on their function have varied from royal
residences, to lineage temples, to theological seminaries.25 They may
even have been all of these.
Few Maya cities in the southern lowlands lacked ball courts. Rubber -
the cured sap of the Castilloa elastica tree - was a Mesoamerican
invention, one of the many gifts of the New World to the Old, and was
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 67

used mainly for rubber balls (these astonished the conquistadors when
they saw them bouncing around Aztec courts — in fact, Cortes was so
impressed that he took a troop of ballplayers to Spain to show them off
to Charles V). The game was played throughout Mesoamerica in
masonry courts, the main playing surface being confined between two
parallel walls with sloping batters. The rules, which are not well
understood, were strict about what part of the body could be used to
propel the ball; hips were favored, but the flat of the hand was verboten.26
The more we learn about the Classic Maya ball game, the more sinister
it becomes. In Tikal as elsewhere in the Maya realm, major captives were
forced to play a no-win game against the ruler and his team, with eventual
loss and preordained human sacrifice as the outcome.
Situated far from the rivers or streams, Tikal like other cities of the
northern Peten had a perpetual water problem, and the rulers were
forced to build enormous reservoirs; there are ten of these in the central
part of the city, and these tided the population over the long dry season.
Seasoned explorers will tell you that it is entirely possible to die of thirst
in the jungle.
Since it is now possible to read most of the public inscriptions of
Tikal, it is also possible to get some idea of the major ceremonial events
witnessed by thousands upon thousands of Maya spectators. But we can
never reconstruct, even in our imaginations, the full sweep of ancient
pageantry: the sounds of the wooden and conch-shell trumpets, the
drums and rattles, the massed choruses, the clouds of incense, the
gorgeous multi-colored costumes and masks of the participants and the
sweeping quetzal plumes in their shining blue-green and gold colors. The
major transition points in a royal life were marked by the pomp and
ceremony accompanying rites of passage — his birth, his presentation as
heir-apparent, his accession to the throne, his marriage, and his death (I
say “his,” as almost all known Maya rulers were men). Every victory
called for an elaborate ceremony, followed sooner or later by the
protracted and elaborate sacrifice of the defeated, usually by beheading.
Much of this was calendrically and astrologically controlled, and the
astronomers and scribes played a major role in setting the dates for at
least some of these events. The completion of certain cycles in the Long
Count called for major celebrations and the ritual shedding of their own
blood by the ruler and his wives, and so did important anniversaries or
jubilees of important red-letter dates such as the taking on of the
rulership (again, I am reminded of an analagous practice among the
ancient Egyptians). At Tikal, the major temple-pyramid complexes are
linked by broad causeways, and one can conjure up brilliant processions
over them of royalty, nobles, courtiers, and musicians headed towards
these mausoleums sacred to the memory of past rulers.
68 LORDS OF THE FOREST

Death and ancestor-worship were deeply ingrained into the culture of

the Maya elite who ran city-states like Tikal. The deceased ruler was
buried with enormous pomp on a special litter, and a great pyramid
erected to house his funeral chamber.27 Accompanying him Were
offerings of food and drink contained in pottery vessels painted or
carved with Underworld scenes of the most macabre nature, jade and
marine-shell jewelry, and prized animals like jaguars and crocodiles. For
reasons that will become clear in later chapters, we conclude that the
Maya believed that their noble dead were really immortal, to be
resurrected as gods and worshipped in perpetuity by their royal
descendants. Death for the elite was tantamount to a recycling of the
royal essence.
I have taken Tikal as my typical Classic Maya city, but each one was as
different in its own way as Sparta was different from Athens in Classical
Greece. What is important to remember is that all this civilization was
created with a technology which really was on a Stone Age level. Metal
tools were unknown in any part of Mesoamerica until copper and gold
metallurgy was introduced from northwestern South America shortly
before ad 900, by which time the Classic was over. Our own technology,
of which we are so proud, has done little more for the Maya area than
destroy it; without any of the scientific wonders of the modern world,
the Maya fashioned a sophisticated and learned civilization in the midst
of a jungle.

Maya civilization, which reached its peak of achievement in the eighth

century, must have contained the seeds of its own downfall. While
speculations about the why of the Classic Maya collapse are plentiful,
there are pitifully few facts.28 As early as the final decade of the eighth
century, a few cities no longer put up carved monuments with Long
Count dates, and may well have been at least partially abandoned. In the
ninth century, however, failures of this kind began to multiply, and
regime after regime crumbled almost like modern business firms going
into bankruptcy after a stock market crash. The little heir-apparent
whose rites are celebrated in the Bonampak murals, painted around ad
790, may never have acceded to the throne, as the political life of the city
was shortly to disappear. Palenque, Yaxchilan, and Piedras Negras were
finished as great centers about the same time as Bonampak, as was
Quirigua in the southeast.
The record speaks for itself. Here are some dates for the last known
dynastic monuments:

Copan 820 Caracol 859 Uaxactun 889

Naranjo 849 Tikal 879
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 69

Writing books and articles on the supposed causes of the collapse is a

growth industry among Mayanists. All sorts of hypotheses have been
proposed, many of them postulating some kind of agricultural debacle -
past scholars have thought this resulted from soil depletion through
overuse of the land, or from climatic deterioration, and so forth.
Granting that the topic is a good one for term papers, in the almost total
absence of data there is little agreement on what might have caused this
immense and certainly tragic demise of one of the world’s few tropical
forest civilizations.
We all know about the barbarians at the gates of Rome as that great
empire crumbled. Not surprisingly, there is evidence for this kind of
thing among the Maya. In ad 889, at the enormous city of Seibal on the
Pasion River, four stelae were put up around a very non-Maya four-
sided temple.29 Three of these stelae show powerful leaders with foreign-
looking visage adorned with moustaches, a rare trait among the Classic
Maya elite. At the same time, Seibal was being inundated with a kind of
orange pottery known to have been manufactured in the lower reaches
of the Usumacinta, on the hot, swampy plain of the Gulf Coast. That was
the realm of the Putun Maya, a Chontal-speaking people who in Post-
Classic times were the great seagoing traders of Mesoamerica, with a
hybrid Mexican-Maya culture.30
Perhaps the Putun presence at Seibal - in fact, their invasion of the
southern lowlands - was the result, rather than the cause, of the Maya
collapse, as they took over trade routes abandoned by the anciens regimes
of the Classic cities. The Putun may have had a great deal to do with the
flourishing of the northern cities of the Peninsula both during and after
the collapse. The magnificent “Puuc-style” architecture of such centers
as Uxmal, Kabah, and Chichen Itza in Yucatan persisted through the
tenth century, as did hieroglyphic writing on public monuments.
Be that as it may, all of the southern lowland cities had ceased to
function in any meaningful way after ad 900, and while peasant
squatters continued to occupy some of them, much of this vast area
reverted to the jungle. The cultural cataclysm was as profound as the
physical. When the Maya elite who had ruled these centers disappeared,
so did most of their knowledge and traditions. These had been in the
hands of the scribes, who as scions of the royal houses may well have
been slaughtered along with their patrons. Yes, I (like Eric Thompson
before me) believe that revolutions swept the region, although I will
admit that hard evidence for this is difficult to find. “The Revolution has
no use for scientists” said the tribunal which consigned Lavoisier,
founder of modern chemistry, to the guillotine in 1794. I can imagine
equally unwanted scribes and astronomers being killed, and thousands
of books being destroyed. We know that they had books, since they are
70 LORDS OF THE FOREST

often shown in Classic art, and traces of them have been found in Maya
tombs, but not one Classic book has come down to us today through
those twin cataclysms: the Classic collapse and the Spanish Conquest.
Dealing with the period between the collapse and the arrival of the
Spaniards is frustrating — on the one hand, there are rich historical
sources on these centuries which come to us from post-Conquest
Spanish and native writers, but on the other, these are often extremely
equivocal and difficult to make sense of. The greatest source of
confusion, at least for the Maya lowlands, is that dates for events are no
longer given in the day-to-day Long Count, but in a truncated and
repetitive version known as the Short Count. This is rather as if in a
thousand years from now a historian knew only that the American
Revolution had begun in ’76, without knowing exactly which century
was being talked about. Scholars can play ducks and drakes with data
expressed in such a chronological framework, and so they have.
Notwithstanding the fact that all four known Maya codices come
from this period, I don’t intend to spend much time on the Post-Classic,
as Maya inscriptions are virtually unknown for this time-span. The Post-
Classic Maya world is a very different place, indeed.
The first part of the Post-Classic story begins with Chichen Itza in
north-central Yucatan, a city founded in the Late Classic. The name
means “Mouth of the Well of the Itza,” so-called from its famous Well
of Sacrifice, a huge, circular cenote or limestone sinkhole into which
many captives were hurled on the eve of the Conquest. Mayanists are
still fighting about the dating, and even the direction of culture flow, but
my own admittedly conservative opinion is that strong influence from
the highlands of central Mexico arrived there as a result of a foreign
invasion in the latter part of the tenth century. At this point, Chichen
Itza became the capital of the entire Peninsula, with a substantial part of
the native Maya population concentrated within sight of its Castillo, the
great four-sided pyramid that dominates the Post-Classic city.
Who were the invaders, and whence did they come? According to
Aztec historians, the mighty Aztecs themselves had been preceded in
central Mexico by a great people of immense culture whom they knew as
the Toltec, ruling from their capital Tollan (“Place of the Reeds”), or, as
the Spaniards called it, Tula. Thanks to a succession of Mexican and
American archaeological expeditions, the Toltec city has been found
and excavated.31 Located some seventy kilometers (forty-two miles)
northwest of Mexico City, it is not very prepossessing; dominated by a
pyramid with a temple roof held up by huge, stone figures of grim-
looking Toltec warriors, its style of art and architecture can also be
detected at Chichen Itza. There, in far-off Yucatan, specifically Toltec
traits derived from Tula can be detected, such as the reclining figures
 LORDS OF THE FOREST 71

called “chacmools” by archaeologists, and reliefs of prowling jaguars

and eagles eating hearts.
Our Aztec sources tell us that Tula was ruled by a god-man calling
himself Quetzalcoatl, or “Feathered Serpent,” and our Maya sources
speak of the arrival from over the water of a warrior-king called
Kukulcan — also meaning “Feathered Serpent.” Some revisionist Maya
scholars want to see Tula as derived from Chichen, rather than the other
way around, but I find this difficult to swallow. No one can deny that
Toltec Chichen was splendid, with its Temple of the Warriors, Great
Ball Court (the largest in Mesoamerica), and Castillo, in comparison to
the somewhat shoddy Tula; but keep in mind that Mongol Beijing was
far more magnificent than the felt yurts from which Genghiz Khan’s
hordes had started out, and Fatih Mehmet’s Ottoman towns were no
match in opulence for the Constantinople which he conquered in 1453.
A truly thorny problem is that of the Itza. They show up in the annals
of Yucatan - the quasi-historical and semi-prophetic Books of Chilam
Balam - as distrusted, somewhat lewd foreigners who had wandered like
a band of troubadours all over the Peninsula. It is reasonable to suppose
that they also were Putun Maya, with a good overlay of Mexican culture.
Some place them at Chichen in the early thirteenth century, and they at
least gave their name to this venerable city, perhaps undeservedly; at any
rate, it is fairly well documented that in the latter part of the century, the
Itza founded Mayapan, a walled town in the scrubby jungle southeast of
Merida, from which they dominated most of the northern lowlands for
almost two centuries.32
Mayapan itself is a wretchedly built little capital, dominated by a
runty, four-sided pyramid imitating the Castillo of Chichen Itza.
According to the histories, it was ruled by the Cocom family; to
guarantee a steady flow of tribute, these warlords held the leading
families of the rest of Yucatan as hostages within Mayapan’s walls. This
was the so-called “League of Mayapan” which once gripped historian
Oswald Spengler, of all people, author of The Decline of the West. But the
Cocom themselves were eventually overthrown, and Mayapan reverted
to tick-infested scrub.
When the first Spanish explorers touched upon the coast of Yucatan
in 1517, the Peninsula was divided into sixteen “city-states,” each
striving to establish its boundaries at the expense of neighbors and thus
often in a state of war with each other. Not so long ago, this was thought
to be an example of sociopolitical degeneration from what old-time
archaeologists like Sylvanus Morley had thought of as the “Old
Empire” of Classic times. But we now know that this pattern was in
reality typical of the Maya throughout their long history. There never
was an “Old Empire,” or a “New” one either, for that matter. The
72 LORDS OF THE FOREST

overall hegemony which had been attained first by Chichen Itza and then
by Mayapan was a total anomaly.
Each of these “city-states” at the time of the Conquest was headed by a
ruler called the halach uinic or “true man,” an office passed down in the
male line. He resided in the capital town, and ruled the provincial towns
through nobles called batabo’ob (singular batab), heads of noble
patrilineages related to that of the halach uinic. The halach uinic was the
war leader, and under him was an elite group of braves called the
holcano’ob, whom the invading Spaniards had every reason to fear. The
priesthood was enormously influential, as much of the lives of these
Maya was ruled by religion and the exigencies of the calendar; especially
important was the chief priest, the Ah Kin ‘He of the Sun”). Among the
duties of the priests were to keep the books and the calendar, regulate the
festivals and the New Year celebrations, conduct baptisms, and officiate
at sacrifices (both human and animal).
The Spanish sources, including Bishop Landa who has given us the
fullest account of Maya life on the eve of the Conquest, describe
Yucatan as a prosperous land. The people were divided between
nobility, the freemen of the soil, who did all the farming, hunting, bee¬
keeping, and the like, and the slaves. The last group seem to have had
little economic importance, and slavery in the Greco-Roman or
antebellum plantation sense was unknown in pre-Spanish Mesoamerica.
I have said little in this chapter about the Maya highlands of Chiapas
and Guatemala, because they play little part in our story except during
the late Pre-Classic, when for the only time in their history the highland
Maya dynasties produced inscribed stone monuments. In the fifth
century ad they fell under the sway of the great city of Teotihuacan, that
enormous metropolis to the northeast of Mexico City which seems to
have had most of the Maya area under its control for almost a century
and a half. At some time in the Post-Classic, Putun Maya swashbucklers,
whose depredations in the lowlands are becoming better known as
research continues, intruded into the highlands, replacing native
Cakchiquel and Quiche Maya ruling lineages with their own dynasties.
Other similar kingdoms were found among the Mam and Pokomam.33
The Quiche was the most powerful of these states, until smashed by
that most horrible of all the conquistadors, the brutal Pedro de
Alvarado. Perhaps the lasting glory of the Quiche is that they managed to
preserve well into the colonial era (when it was written down using
Spanish letters) the supreme Maya epic, known as the Popol Vuh or
“Book of Counsel” - by any reckoning the greatest achievement of
known native New World literature.34 As we shall see, this has proved to
be the key to some of the deepest and most esoteric secrets of Classic
Maya culture.
 3 A Jungle Civilization
Rediscovered

The rediscovery of the Maya cities, buried for almost a millennium

underneath the tropical forest canopy, was the product of Bourbon
acuity and Bourbon stupidity. Charles III, who ruled Spain and its
overseas dominions from 1759 until his death in 1788, is usually
described both as an “enlightened despot” and as the greatest of the
Bourbon kings. It was due to his sagacity and to his talent for
administrative reform that the inexorable decline of Spain as a colonial
power was at least temporarily reversed, although he had few successes
on the international scene.
Other than hunting, his great passion was learning and science, and for
the first time since the Conquest, the royal palace began to express a
scientific interest in the peoples and natural setting of Spain’s New
World possessions. Charles is best remembered today for rendering the
Inquisition ineffective and expelling the Jesuits from Spanish territory;
but he definitely furthered knowledge in the best tradition of the
eighteenth-century enlightenment. Unfortunately, he was followed by
far more obdurate rulers, the kind of Bourbons for whom the saying was
coined, “they learned nothing and they forgot nothing.” The conse¬
quence of their policies was that Spain lost almost all of its Latin
American colonies in the various independence movements that began
around 1810 and culminated in 1821.
As the Spanish hold on countries like Mexico and Peru disappeared,
scientific exploration by foreigners, hitherto excluded from Spanish
possessions, became a reality, and a considerable amount of new
information from men such as the German polymath Alexander von
Humboldt was published in Europe and the young United States. The
Bourbon loss was surely the world’s gain.
But to return to Charles Ill’s domains, and Central America as it was
in the late eighteenth century. Until it was ceded to Mexico in 1824,
Chiapas was part of Guatemala, which had been a Spanish province ever
since its brutal conquest by Pedro de Alvarado. Rumors of the existence
of a large, ruined city near the village of Palenque in Chiapas had been

73
74 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

reaching the ears of Josef Estacheria, President of Guatemala s Royal

Audiencia, and in the year 1784 he ordered a report on it by a local
official.1 This failed to satisfy Estacheria, so the next year he dispatched
the royal architect in Guatemala City to conduct an investigation. This
man had the temerity to return with an amateurish report and very poor
drawings of what he had seen.
Finally, the exasperated Estacheria selected a bright Spanish captain of
dragoons, Antonio del Rio, and a fairly competent artist named Ricardo
Almendariz, and ordered them to proceed to Palenque. It was not until 3
May 1787 that they reached the ruins, nestled in the foothills of the
Sierra Madre de Chiapas just above the Gulf Coast plain, and covered by
dense, high jungle. After rounding up a large contingent of local Choi
Maya to clear the bush with axe and machete, del Rio, at the end of their
labors, stated .. there remained neither a window nor doorway
blocked up,” a claim which luckily for posterity was not entirely the
case.
Acting under orders from Juan Bautista Munoz (Charles Ill’s royal
historiographer) to Estacheria, del Rio made a collection of artifacts,
including a magnificent relief-carved figure holding a waterlily plant
which we now know was a leg of a throne in the Palace at Palenque. These
were duly shipped from Guatemala to the Qabinete Real de la Historia
Natural (Royal Collection of Natural History) in Madrid, not far from
the Royal Palace.
In June 1787 del Rio submitted his report on Palenque, along with the
drawings by Almendariz, to Estacheria, who forwarded them to Madrid.
Various copies were made of the drawings, and sets were deposited in
suitable archives, but, as with many reports delivered to bureaucrats,
that was the apparent end of the matter.2
The story then jumps to George IV’s England of 1822, the year that
Shelley died; on 2 November, in London, there appeared a volume
entitled Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City.3 This was none other
than an English translation of del Rio’s report, accompanied by a long-
winded, thoroughly amateurish essay by the deservedly forgotten Dr.
Paul Felix Cabrera. Of lasting importance are its seventeen plates taken
from one of the sets of Almendariz drawings. At the bottom edge of nine
of the drawings appear the initials of the engraver, “JFW,” known to be
the incredible, flamboyant Jean Frederic Waldeck, to whom we shall
return. As Maya scholar George Stuart says, these plates constitute “the
very first published depictions of Maya writing carved on stone,”4 and
had a profound influence on both sides of the Atlantic, as did del Rio’s
matter-of-fact and remarkably accurate prose account.
On the other edge of the southern Maya lowlands is the great, Classic
city of Copan, in the western part of what is now Honduras. Knowledge
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 75

16 Tablet of the Temple of the Cross, Palenque. Drawing by Almendariz, engraved by

Waldeck, in del Rio, Description of an Ancient City.

of its ruins had probably been preserved throughout the Colonial era,
since there had always been Chord Maya settlements in the rich Copan
valley. Be that as it may, in 1834 the Liberal government of Guatemala
sent the colorful Juan Galindo on an exploratory expedition to Copan.5
Born in 1802 in Dublin, the son of an English actor and an Anglo-Irish
mother, Galindo turned up in Central America in 1827, then two years
later joined the invading Liberal army of General Morazan, creator of
the Central American Confederation.
Appointed governor of the Peten, our adventurer took advantage of
his situation by exploring Palenque in 1831, from which he concluded
first of all that the local native Indians were descended from the people
who had actually built Palenque, and secondly that Maya civilization
had been superior to all others in the world. Published short notices by
him on the subject completely ignored del Rio’s pioneering 1822 report.
Galindo went to Copan three years later. He drew up a report which
was published in 1836 by the American Antiquarian Society (located in
Worcester, Massachusetts, this was to be the only institution backing
Maya research until the end of the century). Galindo’s account of Copan
is surprisingly good, but unhappily lacks illustrations. In it, he described
the wonderful stelae and other monuments, including the four-sided
stone that is now known as Altar Q - only recently recognized as a
76 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

portrait gallery of the Copan royal lineage. In some respects, Galindo

was ahead of his time: he believed that the writing on the monuments
expressed the phonetics of the language, he decided that human
sacrifices took place at certain temples (a remarkably modern view¬
point), and he gave detailed, accurate information on a tomb excavated
by him, which had been exposed in the great section of the Acropolis cut
away by the Copan River. And, most important to our story, he
suggested, in spite of differences, the general similarity of Palenque and
Copan — in architecture, sculpture, and even writing, which took the
form of “square blocks containing faces and hands and other identical
characters.”
After these triumphs, it was downhill all the way for Galindo, as the
Liberal regime in Central America collapsed and suffered defeat. He
himself was murdered in 1840 by a group of Hondurans.
It would take a small encyclopedia, or perhaps a five-hour celluloid
Hollywood epic, to do ample justice to the life and career of “Count”
Jean Frederic Maximilien Waldeck, the self-styled “first Americanist.”6
Even the feats of the beloved Baron Munchausen sometimes pale by
comparison with Waldeck’s. In his cutting Boston manner, the historian
William H. Prescott once confided to Mme. Fanny Calderon de la Barca
that Waldeck was a person who “talks so big and so dogmatically... that
I have a soup^on that he is a good deal of a charlatan.”7
Even Waldeck’s exact place and date of birth are in doubt. He
variously gave his birthplace as Paris, Prague, and Vienna, and while he
was apparently a naturalized French citizen, at one time he carried a
British passport. He claimed to have been born on 16 March 1766, which
would have made him 109 years old on the date of his death, 29 April
1875 (the late Howard Cline, who produced a fascinating article on
Waldeck, described this latter event as “apparently one of the few
unequivocal facts about his career”8). Waldeck at one time attributed his
longevity to an “annual dosage of horse-radish and lemon that he took in
liberal quantities every spring”; it must have worked well, since it is said
that at age eighty-four he fell in love with an English girl, married her, and
fathered a son.
Like his fabled predecessor Munchausen, Waldeck was a name-
dropper of stupendous proportions. He told his admirers that he had
been on cordial terms with Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, George III,
Beau Brummel, and Byron, and that he had studied art in Paris under
David (his neoclassical style did, in fact, resemble David’s). According to
the Count (a noble rank impossible to document), he had been a soldier
on Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition of 1798, which fired his interest in
archaeology.
What is for sure is that he prepared some of the plates for the 1822 del
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 77

Rio report on Palenque, for the London publisher Henry Berthoud.

Three years later, he was on his way to Mexico as a mining engineer, at
which he was a failure. Stranded in that alien land, he turned his hand to a
variety of trades to make ends meet, but became increasingly interested
in the pre-Conquest past of Mexico.
Armed with what seemed like ample funds (these eventually gave out),
Waldeck lived among the ruins of Palenque from May 1832 to July 1833,
clearing the site and preparing drawings. The Count was miserable in his
surroundings, for he could not abide the heat, humidity, and insects, of
which there are an abundance at Palenque. He also clearly loathed
Mexico and the Mexicans, from the President down to local campesi-
nos; nor did he harbor tender feelings towards fellow archaeologists and
explorers. Eventually he found new financial support from that
eccentric Irishman, Lord Kingsborough, and went to Uxmal in Yucatan
in 1834, producing further drawings and architectural reconstructions,
some of them fanciful in the extreme.
By this time, the choleric Count was persona non grata in Mexico, and
he found it expedient to remove himself to England and Paris, where he
spent the rest of his long life (it has been claimed that he died from a
stroke when he turned his head to look at a pretty girl passing by him at a
sidewalk cafe, but this is also said to be apocryphal). As soon as he
arrived in Paris, he got to work turning his drawings into lithographs,
which were printed in 1838 in a luxurious folio volume entitled Voyage
pittoresque et archeologique dans ... Yucatan ... 1834 et 1836.9
Unhappily, all of Waldeck’s published work on the Maya is as
untrustworthy as the tall stories he told. He had his own theory of Maya
origins, one which he maintained until the end of his life, namely, that
Maya civilization had been derived from the Chaldeans, Phoenicians,
and especially the “Hindoos,” and he felt it necessary to include
elephants in his neoclassical renderings of the Palenque reliefs, not only
in the subject matter but in the hieroglyphs as well. But both George
Stuart and Claude Baudez, who have seen the original Waldeck working
drawings in the Ayer Collection of the Newberry Library, Chicago,
assure me that they are of high quality. In spite of that, one can put no
credence in his finished lithographs, which have always been treated
with disdain by Mayanists, and rightly so.

In July 1519, two years before the final assault on the Aztec capital of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Hernan Cortes and his hard-bitten conquistadors
gathered at a newly-founded town on the Veracruz coast to divide up
their spoils.10 These were considerable, for they included not only loot
gathered by them from the coastal Maya and from the Totonac of the
78 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

Gulf Coast, but also some precious objects sent to them as a kind of
bribe by the far-off Motecuhzoma the Younger, emperor of the Aztec.
One-fifth of this booty - the Royal Fifth - was destined for Charles V in
Spain, who had just been elected Holy Roman Emperor.
According to Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Cortes private secretary,
the Royal Fifth included some books, folded like cloth, which contained
“figures, which the Mexicans use for letters”; these were of little value in
the eyes of the soldiers, he tells us, “as they did not understand them,
they did not appreciate them.”11
The Royal Fifth reached Spain safely, accompanied by a small
contingent of native men and women who had been rescued from
captivity and gory sacrifice at Cempoallan, capital of the Totonac.
Traveling first to Seville, then to the royal court at Valladolid, and
eventually to Brussels (where the metalwork was greatly admired by that
former goldsmith Albrecht Diirer), the strange people and objects
aroused the kind of interest that a landing of extraterrestrial aliens would
today. In a letter to a friend in his native Italy, Giovanni Ruffo da Forli,
Papal Nuncio at the Spanish court, described the books in these terms:

I had forgotten to say that there were some paintings of less than a hand-span all
together, that were folded and joined in the form of a book, [that being] unfolded,
stretched out. In these little paintings there were figures and signs in the form of
Arabic or Egyptian letters ... The Indians [these were the Totonac captives] could
give no account of what they were.12

An even more observant eyewitness of the exotic items that had

arrived at Valladolid was Ruffo’s close friend, the Italian humanist Peter
Martyr d’Anghiera, whose The Decades of the New World was the first
great account of the lands newly discovered by the Spaniards, and of its
inhabitants. Peter Martyr tells us that the books were made of the inner
bark of a tree, that their pages were coated with plaster or something
similar, that they could be folded up, and that the outer covers were
wooden boards. Here is what he says about what was written on them:

The characters are very different from ours: dice, hooks, loops, strips, and other
figures, written in a line as we do: they greatly resemble Egyptian forms. Between
the lines are marked out figures of men and animals, principally of kings and
magnates, by which one can believe that there are there written the deeds of each
king’s ancestors.13

Other topics written in the books, according to Peter Martyr, were “the
laws, sacrifices, ceremonies, rites, astronomical annotations, and certain
computations, and manners and times of planting.”
There can now be no doubt that these books were Maya, for no other
people of Mesoamerica had a writing system which looked anything like
this or could record such things - the mathematical computations alone
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 79

would be a sure clue that we were dealing with the Maya. Furthermore,
the non-Maya scribes of Mexico generally wrote on screenfold books
made out of deer hide rather than the bark-paper favored by the Maya.
I reconstruct the presence of these codices in Valladolid as follows.
When Cortes left Cuba in February 1519, he crossed over the stormy
Yucatan Channel from Cuba, and made landfall on the offshore island of
Cozumel, where the frightened Maya took flight into the bush.
Ransacking the houses deserted by the natives, the Spaniards came
across “innumerable” books, among which must have been the items
sent back in the Royal Fifth. Now, among the passengers arriving in
Valladolid with the booty was Cortes’ close ally Francisco de Montejo -
the future conqueror of Yucatan - who had already learned a great deal
about Maya life from his debriefing of one Geronimo de Aguilar; this
Aguilar had been a shipwrecked captive of a Yucatec Maya lord for eight
years until his escape, and surely knew all about Maya writing. Finally,
we know that Montejo was closely questioned while in Valladolid by the
ever-curious Peter Martyr on all kinds of things.
What happened to these precious Maya books? One of them, at any
rate, might just have ended up in Dresden. In 1739, Johann Christian
Goetze, director of the Royal Library at the court of Saxony, in Dresden,
purchased a strange book from a private collection in Vienna.14
Cataloged by him in 1744, little notice was taken of it until 1796, when an
odd but distinctly charming five-volume work appeared in Leipzig. This
was the Darstellung und Qeschichte des Qeschmacks der verziiglichsten
Volker, “Depiction and History of the Taste of Superior Peoples” by one
Joseph Friedrich, Baron von Racknitz.15 The baron worked in Dresden
as a kind of polymath stage manager for whatever theatrical performance
or other public event the Elector of Saxony wished to have put on, and
even invented a chess-playing machine for his royal patron. His
Darstellung is basically a cross-cultural work on interior decoration, with
hand-colored depictions of rooms in all sorts of styles, from Pompeiian
to “O-Tahitian.”
When my late friend Philip Hofer showed me this curiosity in
Harvard’s Houghton Library in the early 1960s, I was immediately
attracted to a plate showing a room in “the Mexican taste,” for on its
walls and ceiling were motifs taken directly from what we now know of
as the Dresden Codex, the greatest of the four surviving Maya books:
animal-headed gods and bar-and-dot numbers, and Maya serpents greet
the spectator. I only wonder whether anyone two centuries ago had the
temerity to build such a room!
While the eccentric von Racknitz has provided us with the first
pictorial reference to the Dresden, his flight of fancy had no repercus¬
sions whatsoever in the scholarly world. That was not the case with the
80 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose beautiful atlas, Vues des

Cordilleres, et monuments des peuples indigenes de I’Amerique appeared in
1810.16 Among its sixty-nine magnificent plates was one showing, in
absolutely exact detail, five pages from the Dresden Codex. This was not
only the first publication, even in truncated form, of a Maya codex, but it
marked the very first time that any Maya hieroglyphic text had been
accurately presented. Admittedly, the pages are somewhat out of order
(three of the five pages of the Venus tables are shown, but page 49, which
should follow 48, is omitted), but at least here was something into which
a scholar could get his teeth. It would still be another seventy years
before anybody would make real sense out of the entire seventy-four-
page manuscript.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Americanist research
was replete with eccentrics: the dead hand of the academy had yet to
stifle the unbridled enthusiasms of a small band of amateurs in Europe
and America. Among these was Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough,
an Irish nobleman obsessed with the notion that the ancient Hebrews
had populated the New World. To prove his point, he published his
massive folio series, The Antiquities of Mexico.17 Now these are not just
“folio,” but “elephant folio” - George Stuart says that each volume
weighs between 20 and 40 pounds. Altogether there are nine of these, the
last two issued in 1848. But by then Kingsborough had been dead eleven
years: bankrupted by a long ride on his costly hobbyhorse, he expired in
a debtor’s prison.
To illustrate the first four of his blockbusters, Kingsborough hired the
Cremona-born artist Agostino Aglio, whose task it was to make
watercolor copies of all pre-Conquest codices known to be in the
libraries of Europe. Aglio was a very good choice: he was well known in
England for his decoration and frescoes in churches, country houses,
and theaters (he did the decorations for the Drury Lane Theater), and
was considered a very competent watercolorist. In 1829 and 1830 the
first seven volumes were issued, one of which contained the complete
Dresden Codex in faithful reproduction.
Then why didn’t some bright Champollion settle down and begin
work on the Maya script then and there? Probably in part because sets of
The Antiquities of Mexico were extremely rare (as they are today). For
instance, in 1843, the American explorer and newspaperman B.H.
Norman claimed that there was but one set in the entire United States.18
And, it must be remembered, Landa’s account of the Maya days and
months, so vital to the workings of the Dresden, was not to turn up until
1863.
1 Athanasius Kircher (1602—80), the
Jesuit priest whose ideas about the
nature of Egyptian writing held up
its decipherment for more than a
century.

2 Jean-Frangois Champollion (1790—

1832), the Frenchman who finally
deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphic
writing.

3 Michael Ventris (1922-56). This

young architect broke the Linear B
code of the Mycenaean Greeks.
iill

4 One of the fine lintel carvings

from Yaxchilan, Mexico. The text
now reveals this to be a depiction
of the ruler’s wife, Lady Xoc,
crouching before the “Vision
Serpent” in the year ad 681
(cf. p. 258).

5 Detail of the remarkable Late

Classic murals at Bonampak,
Mexico, c. ad 790. The ruler Chan
Muan and his subordinates stand in
judgment over captives.
6 Air view of the center of Tikal, Guatemala, the largest of the Classic Maya cities.

7 Detail of Stela 11, Seibal, Guatemala; the non-Maya features of this leader
suggest that he might have been a Putun invader.
 1*1
11Wm

Opposite
8 Jean Frederic Waldeck (1766?—1875), eccentric French artist and adventurer, and
an early explorer of the Maya city of-Palenque.

9 Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840), polymath Franco-American

naturalist who discovered Maya bar-and-dot numeration.

10 John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852), the American lawyer whose explorations

brought the Maya civilization to world attention.

Above
11,12 The side and back of Stela A, Copan, Honduras, engravings from drawings
made by Frederick Catherwood, artist on Stephens’ expeditions.
 Opposite
16 Alfred P. Maudslay (1850-1931), in a room of
the Monjas at Chichen Itza, Yucatan. This
Englishman was responsible for the first
comprehensive publication of the Maya
inscriptions.

17 Teobert Maler (1842-1917), the irascible

Austrian whose photographic record of Classic
monuments established new standards.

13 Charles Etienne Brasseur de

Bourbourg (1814—1874), French abbe
who brought to light Landa’s Relation
and other important manuscripts which
illuminated ancient Maya culture.

14 Ernst Forstemann (1822-1906). In

his studies of the Dresden Codex, this
German librarian worked out many of
the details of Maya calendrics and
astronomy.

15 Page 49 from the Venus Tables of

the Dresden Codex, as published by
Forstemann in 1880.
18 Leon de Rosny (1837—1914),
French Orientalist and
decipherer of the Maya glyphs
for the world-directions.

19 Eduard Seler (1849-1922),

German scholar and leading
Mesoamericanist of his
generation; he was a formidable
foe of the phonetic school
represented by Cyrus Thomas.

20 Cyrus Thomas (1825—1910),

pioneer American
anthropologist and main
proponent of the phonetic
approach to the glyphs in the
late nineteenth century.
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 89

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Smaltz (1783-1840) is one of those

people on whom there never was, is not now, and never will be,
agreement.19 Not even those who knew him well could agree on what he
looked like, whether he was tall or short, bald or had a full head of hair,
whether he was corpulent or thin, and so on. The only reasonably
accurate portrait of him appears in the engraved frontispiece of his
Analyse de la Nature, brought out in Palermo, Sicily, in 1815; there he is a
sideburned little man with dark hair brushed down over his forehead in
the fashion of the times.
Born to a French father and a German mother in Galata, Turkey, just
across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, Rafmesque showed early
aptitude as a naturalist, and arrived in the United States on this pursuit
in 1802. Returning to Europe in 1805, he spent the next ten years in
Sicily, where he made lasting contributions to the study of Mediterra¬
nean fishes and mollusks. Then, back he went to the United States,
where he passed the rest of his life. Sadly, he died a pauper in
Philadelphia, so indebted to his creditors that his landlord tried to sell
his cadaver to a medical school to settle his rent.
With the kind of naive enthusiasm that seems to have been endemic in
the young republic, Rafmesque tried his hand at everything. Here is his
own assessment of himself:
Versatility of talents and of professions, is not uncommon in America; but those
which I have exhibited ... may appear to exceed belief: and yet it is a positive fact
that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer,
Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist ... By pro¬
fession a Traveller, Merchant, Manufacturer, Collector, Improver, Professor,
Teacher, Surveyor, Draftsman, Architect, Engineer, Pulmist [sic], Author,
Editor, Bookseller, Librarian, Secretary ... and I hardly know myself what I may
become as yet ...

A fraud? This is what some of my anthropological colleagues think, who

refuse to accept as authentic Rafinesque’s Walum Olum,20 the creation
and migration story of the Delaware Indians, which he claimed to have
copied from the tribe’s original bark records. But this is definitely not
what those who know his zoological and botanical work say —
Rafmesque established countless species of living organisms still
considered as valid, and came up with a Darwinesque theory of
evolution long before Darwin’s Origin of Species. And this is not what
Mayanists now say.
It is to George Stuart of the National Qeographic that we owe the
rediscovery of Rafinesque’s pioneering efforts in the decipherment of
the Maya script. In contrast to Waldeck’s Munchausenesque pipe-
dreams, Rafinesque’s work rates serious consideration. One has first to
consider what was available to him in the years from 1827, when he
90 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

submitted a letter to the Saturday Evening Post on the subject, and 1832,
the period in which he was deeply interested in the subject.
The only half-way reliable publication of Maya monumental inscrip¬
tions which had yet been published were the Almendariz drawings
(reworked by Waldeck) in the del Rio report of 1822. If one takes a close
look at the Almendariz version of the tablet of the Temple of the Cross at
Palenque, and compares it with a modern rendering of the same subject,
one can see how truly bad it is. In the first place, the glyphs in the vertical
columns on either side of the scene have been selected at random, in no
particular order, from the much larger text. Even worse, they have been
so childishly and sloppily drawn that even today it takes a good deal of
intuition to guess what the originals might have looked like. From this
kind of publication a genius could not have made much progress in
decipherment, not even Champollion, Rafinesque’s contemporary.
By contrast with this sorry situation, let us look at what was available
to Champollion by 1822, when he wrote his famous letter to M. Dacier,
and later. From 1809 on, the French scientific team which had
accompanied Napoleon in Egypt began publishing the great Description
de I’Egypte, with its superb and accurate plates - indispensable to the
young decipherer; nothing on this scale was to appear in the Maya field
until the end of the century. Even Kircher’s engravings of the obelisks in
Rome were superior to the sorry stuff on the Maya then available to
Rafinesque.
With the Dresden Codex, things were on a slightly better footing.
Rafinesque had seen the plate illustrating five of its pages in Humboldt’s
atlas, and this gave him some ideas, but he probably never did see the
complete Kingsborough publication of the manuscript.
A pioneer in the field of “vanity publishing,” Rafinesque had his own
periodical, the Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge, which he filled
up with articles of his own composing, on every subject on earth. His
First Letter to Mr. Champollion, giving his ideas about Maya writing,
appeared in 1832 in the very first issue, and in the next issue readers
could find his Second Letter; he had intended to write a third, but the news
of Champollion’s death precluded this.21 The mere fact that he knew
about and approved of the great Egyptological advances that had been
made on the other side of the Atlantic, even though these were far from
universally accepted at the time by the scholarly world, shows that very
little moss grew on Rafinesque.
It is what he said in his Second Letter that modern Mayanists find so
astonishing. He first of all characterized the Otulum (Palenque)
hieroglyphs pictured in del Rio as an entirely new kind of script,
profoundly different from that known in Mexican (i.e., non-Maya)
manuscripts, and proceeded to these points:
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 91

Besides this monumental alphabet, the same nation that built Otulum, had a
Demotic alphabet belonging to my 8th series; which was found in Guatimala [sic]
and Yucatan at the Spanish conquest. A specimen of it has been given by
Humboldt in his American Researches, plate 45, from the Dresden Library, and
has been ascertained to be Guatimalan instead of Mexican, being totally unlike the
Mexican pictorial manuscripts. This page of Demotic has letters and numbers,
these represented by strokes meaning 5 and dots meaning unities, as the dots never
exceed 4. This is nearly similar to the monumental numbers.
The words are much less handsome than the monumental glyphs; they are also
uncouth glyphs in rows formed by irregular or flexuous heavy strokes, inclosing
within in small strokes, nearly the same letters as in the monuments. It might not
be impossible to decypher some of these manuscripts written on metl paper: since
they are written in languages yet spoken, and the writing was understood in
Central America, as late as 200 years ago. If this is done it will be the best clue to the
monumental inscriptions.22

I will have to take my hat off to Rafinesque. Here is what he has

accomplished, using the sketchiest and most unpromising material:

(1) He has seen that the inscriptions of Palenque and the writing of the
Dresden Codex represent one and the same script.

(2) He was the very first to realize the values of the bars and dots in the
Maya number system, anticipating Brasseur de Bourbourg by over three
decades.
_ • • ••
• •• •• - -
* " 1 11
0 1 4 6 19

17 Maya bar-and-dot numeration.

(3) He has suggested that the language represented by this script is still
spoken by the Maya of Central America, and knowing this, it will be
possible to decipher manuscripts like the Dresden.

(4) Once the manuscripts can be read, so can the monumental

inscriptions.

The example of Champollion was ever before him: “In Egypt, the
Coptic has been found to be such a close dialect of the Egyptian, that it
has enabled you to read the oldest hieroglyphs. We find among the
ancient dialects of Chiapa, Yucatan and Guatimala, the branches of the
ancient speech of Otulum.”
And who could disagree with Rafinesque’s prophetic words: “Inscrip¬
tions are monuments also, and of the highest value, even when we cannot
read them. Some of these will be hereafter, since those of Egypt so long
deemed inexplicable, have at last found interpreters. So it will be at a
future day, with those of America.”23
92 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

*‘Being intrusted by the President with a Special Confidential Mission

to Central America, on Wednesday, the third of October, 1839, I
embarked on board the British brig Mary Ann, Hampton, master, for
the Bay of Honduras.”24 And so began the voyage, just over one hundred
and fifty years ago, that was to bring to light the full glory of Maya
civilization. The names of Stephens and Catherwood are as inextricably
joined in this great enterprise as names like Johnson and Boswell, or
Gilbert and Sullivan, or Holmes and Watson: one just cannot think of
one without the other.25
John Lloyd Stephens was thirty-four years old when he set off with his
artist, Frederick Catherwood, on the sea trip to Belize and beyond.
Stephens was a lawyer manque, a stalwart of the Democratic Party in
New York, and already a highly successful travel writer - his Travels in
Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837) had been highly praised
by Edgar Allan Poe and had brought him a small fortune in royalties.
After a New York bookseller had apparently drawn his attention to the
newly discovered ruined cities of Central America, he absorbed what he
could find in the books of del Rio, Galindo, Humboldt, and Dupaix (an
Austro-French officer in the Spanish army who had made a considerable
archaeological survey of Mexico at the beginning of the century).
The Englishman Frederick Catherwood was forty, and a respected
topographical artist with extensive archaeological experience in the
Mediterranean and Middle East. He had accompanied Robert Hay’s
Nile expedition, where he prepared highly detailed drawings and
inscriptions using the camera lucida, a “portable apparatus with a prism
that enabled the artist to see and draw images of scenes or objects
projected onto paper.”26 He was to use this device to good effect with the
Maya monuments.
The two had met four years before in London, and become friends;
thus, it was no surprise that when Catherwood settled in New York to
practice architecture, Stephens persuaded him to accompany him to
Central America. Out of this collaboration came the landmark 1841
publication, in two volumes, Incidents of Travel in Central America,
Chiapas, and Yucatan; and, following a second trip to explore Yucatan,
the Incidents of Travel in Yucatan of 1843.27 Every Mayanist, myself
included, keeps these often reprinted masterpieces on his bookshelf in a
place of honor, since they mark the very genesis of serious Maya
research. I never get tired of rereading my own copies - there is always
something fresh to find in Stephens’ delightful, unpretentious prose,
and inspiration in Catherwood’s crisp engravings.
Their story has been told many times, even in children’s books, and
there is no need to repeat it here. But it might be worth examining just
what they did contribute to Maya research, and to look at some of
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 93

Stephens’ almost prophetic insights, drawn in part from his familiarity

with the civilizations of the Old World.
Setting aside their exploration of the Guatemalan highlands (where
there are no Classic period inscriptions at all), they surveyed, described,
and drew the major buildings and monuments of Copan, Quirigua, and
Palenque in the southern lowlands, and Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, and
Chichen Itza in the north - along with several sites in the Puuc area that
have since received little or no archaeological attention. Stephens and
Catherwood were the first since the days of the Spanish Conquest to visit
the clifftop ruins of Tulum on the east coast of the Peninsula. Needless to
say, all this was done under the most trying conditions, long before the
age of bug repellents, antibiotics, and anti-malarial pills; our travelers
clearly suffered, but never complained, and Stephens’ prose retains its
equanimity throughout (unlike that of Waldeck and other more choleric
explorers).
Stephens’ “President” was Martin van Buren, and the delicate
mission with which he had been entrusted was to find who was then in
power in Central America, and to deal with him on behalf of the United
States. Luckily for us, his duties as special agent took up very little of his
time. Although Stephens typically minimized the threat, he and
Catherwood were in very dangerous territory, at considerable risk to life
and limb.
Their explorations were carried out methodically and meticulously.
Here Catherwood’s Egyptian experience stood him in good stead. On
arrival at Copan, that stupendous Classic city in westernmost Honduras,
Catherwood went immediately to work: “Mr. Catherwood made the
outline of all the drawings with the camera lucida, and divided his paper
into sections, so as to preserve the utmost economy of proportion.”28
This kind of exactitude in dealing with the baroque Maya sculptural
style and with the complexities of the inscriptions had never been used
before among the Maya cities — certainly not by the somewhat inept
Almendariz and the over-imaginative Waldeck. Later on, for their
London publisher John Murray, the drawings were reduced and
engraved on steel.
The quality of the illustrations in the 1841 and 1843 publications was a
quantum jump away from anything that had been heretofore published
on the antiquities of the New World. One has only to compare
Catherwood’s rendering of the great tablet of the Temple of the Cross at
Palenque with the garbled version in the del Rio 1822 report to see the
difference. The same holds true with Catherwood’s more purely
architectural drawings: many years ago (when I was still an undergra¬
duate at Harvard), I was at Uxmal, armed with a copy of Stephens and
Catherwood. Catherwood’s superb plate of the facade of the Governor’s
94 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

Palace at Uxmal is folded into the volume. Standing in front of the same
Palace, I directly compared the original with the copy: setting aside the
reconstructions that had been carried out by the Mexican government in
this century, they were virtually identical. Stephens and Catherwood
could have lied and exaggerated like Waldeck about the Uxmal ruins —
who among their readers in 1843 would have known the difference? — but
they did not.
Both Stephens and Catherwood would have known a great deal about
the recent history of the Egyptian decipherment, and about Champol-
lion’s brilliant successes. Stephens was convinced that the monuments
of cities like Copan contained the record of the dynasties that had ruled
them, a highly reasonable point of view derived from their knowledge of
the ancient civilizations of the Old World, but one which was to be
pooh-poohed by later generations of Mayanists. Here is his statement
about Copan: “One thing I believe, that its history is graven on its
monuments. No Champollion has yet brought to them the energies of
his inquiring mind. Who shall read them?”29
On contemplating the richly carved hieroglyphs on the back of
Copan’s Stela F, Stephens comments: “... we considered that in its
medallion tablets the people who reared it had published a record of
themselves, through which we might one day hold conference with a
perished race, and unveil the mystery that hangs over the city.”30
On the subject of the age of the Maya ruins, and the identification of
the language spoken by those who had carved its inscriptions, Stephens’
views were remarkably similar to those advanced a few years earlier by
Rafinesque. Did he arrive at these ideas independently? According to the
late Victor von Hagen, a biographer of Stephens whose citations are
often not entirely trustworthy, shortly before his death in penury, the
“Constantinopolitan” (as one of Rafinesque’s enemies called him) wrote
to Stephens claiming priority in the interpretation of the hieroglyphs,
and this was subsequently acknowledged by Stephens.31 This is a
forgotten corner of intellectual history that may never see much light.
Unlike Kingsborough, Waldeck, and the like, Stephens was sure that
the ruins were not many thousands of years old, and that they had not
been left by colonizers from distant lands.
I am inclined to think that there are not sufficient grounds for the belief in the great
antiquity that has been ascribed to these ruins; that they are not the works of
people who have passed away, and whose history has become unknown; but
opposed as is my idea to all previous speculations, that they were constructed by
the races who occupied the country at the time of the invasion by the Spaniards, or
of some not very distant progenitors.32

Conclusion 1: the ruined cities were constructed by the ancestors of the

modern Maya.
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 95

Here is another coolly reasoned paragraph from the pen of Stephens:

There is one important fact to be noticed. The hieroglyphics [of Palenque] are the
same as were found at Copan and Quirigua. The intermediate country is now
occupied by races of Indians speaking many different languages, and entirely
unintelligible to each other; but there is room for the belief that the whole of this
country was once occupied by the same race, speaking the same language, or, at
least, having the same written characters.33

Conclusion 2: the writing system of Palenque in the west and Copan and
Quirigua in the east is one and the same.
Conclusion 3: there was once a single language and script distributed
across the southern lowlands.
Then what about the codex in Dresden, Germany, that had been
partly illustrated by Humboldt? Near the end of the 1841 volumes,
Stephens showed side-by-side (fig. 18, overleaf) the top of Altar Q at
Copan and a section from the Venus tables taken from Humboldt, and
called attention to the strong similarity between the two scripts.
Conclusion 4: the monumental inscriptions and the Dresden Codex
represent a single system of writing.
Prompted by his discoveries, yet fully aware that much was still to be
done, Stephens had three suggestions for the future. The first task would
be to search in local convents for manuscripts relating to the native
inhabitants which might determine the history of one of these ruined
cities. In this respect, Stephens practiced what he preached. During their
return visit to Yucatan in 1841 and 1842, the two explorers made a firm
friend in the Yucatecan scholar Juan Pio Perez, then jefe politico of the
town of Peto in the very center of the Peninsula. Pio Perez was the
compiler of one of the great dictionaries of Yucatec Maya, and an
indefatigable copier of native histories, which were plentiful in the
villages and towns of Yucatan.
Appended to the first volume of the 1843 Incidents of Travel, readers
could find Pio Perez’s contribution, Ancient Chronology of Yucatan,
giving for the first time a remarkably detailed account of the workings of
the Maya calendar, in which the native names for the months and days
were given (but not, of course, the corresponding glyphs - these would
only be known with the later discovery of the Landa Relacion). And in
Volume II they could read the original Maya and an English translation
of an important chronicle from the town of Mani, in which such ancient
cities as Chichen Itza, and Mayapan played a part. For the very first time,
then, scholars were applying Maya documents from the Colonial period
to the understanding of the pre-Conquest past.
Number Two on Stephens’ list of suggestions was nothing less than
the decipherment of the hieroglyphic texts. But could even someone as
brilliant as Champollion have cracked this script with the materials at
96 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

hand in the early 1840s? I doubt it. Catherwood s plates, even the
magnificent lithographs which he brought out in his portfolio Views of
Ancient Monuments (London, 1844) are indeed stunning, but they are
simply not up to the standard set by the Description de VEgypte. On a scale
of accuracy, they are somewhere between Almendariz and the monu¬
mental corpus produced by Maudslay at the end of the century, which
really is comparable to what Napoleon’s savants had done for Egypt.
Even if the plates in Incidents of Travel had been up to those standards,
there were too few of them, and these represented only a handful of
Maya sites (really Copan, Palenque, and Chichen Itza). With a script this
complex, that is just not sufficient for a decipherment.
Both Stephens and Rafinesque had correctly grasped that the Mayan
languages were involved in the script, just as Champollion (and Kircher
before him) had tumbled to the fact that Coptic was a survival of
Egyptian; but no European or American scholar had yet thought it
worthwhile to learn a Mayan tongue, with one possible and very curious
exception. This was one B.M. Norman, an American journalist who had
been in Yucatan at the same time as Stephens and Catherwood, from
December 1841 until the following April, and who jumped on the
Stephens bandwagon by bringing out his own book of travels, Rambles in
Yucatan (New York, 1843).34 The book is on the whole worthless, since
Norman had little grasp of history or much else; to him the ruins were
immeasurably ancient: “The pyramids and temples of Yucatan seem to
have been old in the days of Pharaoh,” and “Their age is not to be
measured by hundreds, but by thousands of years.” The plates in the
book are also of no value, artistic or otherwise.
Be that as it may, Norman scored one hit among many misses: the
Yucatec Maya language. He owned a copy of the very rare Yucatec
grammar published in 1746 by the Franciscan Father Pedro Beltran,
from which he prepared an English summary, for inclusion in his
Rambles. From this, any interested scholar could get a pretty good idea of
how the Maya pronoun system worked, as well as verbs and
conjugations. Norman obviously was serious about this, for he added an
appendix of over 500 Maya words, apparently elicited by himself from
native informants, along with the names for the numbers up to 100. I
have no idea of what he intended to do with this, but would-be
Champollions, if any existed then (they didn’t) could have profited from
it.
Stephens’ third suggestion for future research is the most intriguing of
all, even if it belongs more to the realm of fiction than fact. This would be
the search for a true “lost city,” one that would still have living Maya
Indians, carrying on their civilization intact. Perhaps it lay in “that vast
and unknown region, untraversed by a single road, wherein fancy
 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED 97

18 Altar Q, Copan (top) compared with a detail from the Venus pages of
the Dresden Codex: as published by Stephens, 1841.
98 A JUNGLE CIVILIZATION REDISCOVERED

pictures that mysterious city seen from the topmost range of the
Cordilleras, of unconquered, unvisited, and unsought aboriginal
inhabitants.”35 This was the yawning expanse of the forest-covered
Peten, which Stephens and Catherwood had only skirted on their
travels, lying between British Honduras (or Belize) and the lower
Usumacinta.
The great “lost cities” of the Peten - Tikal, Uaxactun, Naranjo,
Nakum, Holmul, Yaxchilan, and the like — were only discovered long
after these pioneer explorers had passed from the scene, and of course
had been in ruins for a millennium. But Stephens’ notion lived on in H.
Rider Haggard’s great adventure story Heart of the World,-,36 I count this
among my most treasured books, and have read it many times (the late
A.V. Kidder stated that this is what got the youthful Sylvanus Morley
hooked on the Maya37).
Stephens and Catherwood never returned to the scene of their
triumph. Having contracted a deadly case of malaria while involved in
the construction of a railway across Panama, Stephens died in New York
City in October 1852. Catherwood did not long survive him. In 1854, he
went down on the steamship Arctic, after it had collided with another
vessel during an Atlantic crossing.
No, they didn’t decipher the lost script of the ancient Maya. But these
two will live forever in the hearts of Mayanists, for they founded and
defined an entirely new field of study. We are still building on that
foundation.
 4
Forefathers:
The Dawn of Decipherment

It is a fact of scientific life - at least, a fact of archaeological research - that

the truly great discoverers have occasionally been extraordinarily
sloppy. This was certainly the case with the Abbe Charles Etienne
Brasseur de Bourbourg, the man who brought to light the great
manuscripts on which so much of our knowledge about the ancient
Maya rests.1 ,
It must have been wonderful to have been an abbe in nineteenth-
century Europe, for you had the best of two worlds: on the one hand you
were steeped in a kind of sanctity, and on the other you could move
freely in the living world of the flesh, with all its earthly pleasures, both
intellectual and otherwise. One has only to think of the Abbe Franz
Liszt, with his mistresses and illegitimate offspring. Now no longer in
use, the title had originally applied only to governors of monastic
abbeys, but in France it had been extended to anyone who wore an
ecclesiastical dress. Brasseur, like Liszt, wore his very lightly.
Born in 1814 in northern France, Brasseur had early on supported
himself as a hack novelist, but after entering the minor orders of the
church embarked upon a life of travels and discovery which took him
often to Canada, the United States, and Mesoamerica. He acquired an
abiding interest in Mesoamerican languages and history. In 1855, he had
the very good fortune to be assigned by friendly Church authorities in
Guatemala City as parish priest in Rabinal, a Quiche Maya town in the
Guatemala highlands, where he began his studies of the Quiche
language; the result of this stay was the Rabinal Acfii, an authentic and
unique pre-Conquest drama which was delivered to him orally by a
native informant who had committed it to memory.
It was about the same time that he stumbled on the manuscript of an
amazing work called the Popol Vuh, then in the hands of a bibliophile
friend in the Guatemalan capital. This was nothing less than the sacred
book of the Quiche Maya nation that had ruled much of the country on
the eve of the Conquest. The Popol Vuh is now generally considered to be
the greatest single work of native American literature. Fully aware of

99
100 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

what he had in his hands, Brasseur began to translate it into French while
in Rabinal, and published it together with the Quiche text (which had
been written down with Spanish letters) in 1861, on his return to France.
Unfortunately, he had been “scooped” by the German explorer Carl
Scherzer, who four years prior to this had brought out a Spanish
translation made in early Colonial times.2 Regardless of who had
priority, the repercussions caused by the reappearance of the Popol Vuh
— a majestic epic that begins with the Creation of the universe — continue
to reverberate down to our times.
Only eight years after Catherwood’s ship had gone down, our abbe
made the discovery that was to revolutionize the study of the ancient
Maya. In the year 1862, while ferreting out materials relating to the
Americas in the library of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid (in a
collection that was then totally uncataloged in the modern sense),
Brasseur came across the manuscript of Bishop Diego de Landa’s
Relation de las Cosas de Yucatan (“Account of the Affairs of Yucatan”).
He published this two years later,3 and the world of Maya scholarship
was changed forever.
What Brasseur had uncovered was not the original of Landa’s
Relation, written in Spain around 1566, but an anonymous copy work of
several hands, apparently dating to 1661: it is clearly an abridgment of a
much larger treatise which, alas, has never come to light. Nonetheless, it
is not only a gold mine of informed information on all aspects of Maya
life as it was in Yucatan on the eve of the Conquest, but also, in spite of
the denial by generations of epigraphers, the true Rosetta Stone for the
decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing.
We know Landa’s visage from a late portrait copy in the convent of his
great Franciscan church in Izamal, Yucatan, itself built on top of an
enormous pyramidal mound complex, probably of the Late Formative
period. From his ascetic face with downcast eyes, it would be impossible
even to guess at the inner conflicts and motivations which would have
led him to be so hated by his fellow Spaniards in the peninsula, and so
loved and at the same time feared by the Maya whose souls he was trying
to save. Landa was born on 12 November 1524 in Cifuentes, a town near
Guadalajara in the Spanish province of New Castile.4 In 1547 he went to
Yucatan with five other Franciscan priests, and in 1549 was named
assistant to the guardian of Izamal - curiously enough, a town which
prior to the Conquest had venerated the supreme Maya god Itzamna,
inventor of writing.
Landa has had a very bad press, and in part deservedly so. He was a
fanatic as far as native idolatry was concerned, and in 1562 started his
infamous, and perhaps illegal, proceedings against that practice, often
exercising enormous and quite unFranciscan cruelties on his victims.5
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 101

We have already seen that almost all the surviving books of the lowland
Maya perished in his terrible auto da fe in Mani at that time. Not being
then a Franciscan bishop, who alone had the right to conduct an
inquisition of this sort, he was accused by his enemies (there were many)
of having exceeded his authority, and in 1563 was recalled to Spain to
defend himself. It was in those black years for Landa that he wrote his
great Relacion, surely from notes and other materials which he had
brought with him on the long voyage from Yucatan.
Landa was exonerated, and returned in 1572 to Yucatan, this time as
Bishop, dying seven years later among his beloved Maya. It was to be
another century and a half before his bones were returned to Cifuentes,
his birthplace, but even these were destroyed in the bitter Spanish Civil
War of the 1930s.6 It seems that this troubled and turbulent man was
never to find peace.
Brasseur was an enthusiastic man, and I can imagine his enormous
excitement at seeing what Landa had put down about the Maya calendar,
for this was the very first time that the names of the days in the 260-day
calendar and the names of the months in the approximate solar year of
365 days appeared with their appropriate hieroglyphs. Remember that
Brasseur already had the complete Dresden Codex at hand in the
Kingsborough edition. In 1859, the French orientalist Leon de Rosny,
later to become a perceptive student of Maya writing, had found another
Maya codex in a dusty corner of the National Library in Paris, which he
published in facsimile the same year that Brasseur brought out his Landa
edition. Based on what Landa gave, the energetic abbe was able to
identify the day and month signs in both the Dresden and Paris codices,
and from that piece of information worked out the bar-and-dot
numerical system (in fact, reinventing the wheel, for Rafinesque had
already discovered how the numbers functioned).
In short, from the Relacion any decipherer, including Brasseur, could
have been able to interpret any Maya hieroglyphic date expressed in
terms of the 52-year Calendar Round (figs. 19, 20 overleaf). That must
have been excitement enough as Brasseur turned the pages of the
manuscript in Madrid. But more lay ahead: this was none other than
Landa’s explanation of how the Maya writing system actually worked —
language made visible. I have said that Brasseur was a sloppy scholar, and
nowhere is this laxity more evident than in his translation of this part of
the Relacion,7 which has brought down on him the opprobrium, often
unfair, of a century of Mayanists. It is worthwhile to put down what the
great Franciscan actually said, not what Brasseur wanted him to say, for
this is the heart of my book.
 102 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

1. Imix
© 11. Chuen

2. Ik S3 12. Eb

3. Akbal 13. Ben

4. Kan
© 14. lx

5. Chicchan 15. Men fc 0 \ £5*.

6. Cimi W\ 16. Cib

7. Manik 17. Caban M=:

8. Lamat 18.Edznab

9. Muluc 19. Cauac L.

10. Oc
© 20. Ahau /o
roMoi

19 The twenty Maya day signs, in Landa, the Madrid Codex, and the inscriptions.
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 103

1. Pop 11. Zac 'l/T-'

2. Uo
6.jg) 12. Ceh
f Wi
GT(<lgy

3. Zip 13. Mac

4. Zotz 14. Kankin

. 0 Kp)
5. Tzec 15. Muan ^ r4s
' azp

6. Xul 16. Pax

7. Yaxkin 17. Kayab

8. Mol •/ ^ 1• 18. Cumku <£3

9. Chen Uayeb

10. Yax

20 The eighteen Maya month signs, in Landa, the Dresden Codex, and the inscriptions.
104 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

It is not easy to read or translate the text in the Academy of History s

manuscript; in places it seems slightly garbled, for remember that we are
dealing with a sort of “Reader’s Digest’’ condensation made by scribal
bureaucrats about a century later. But here is what it says:8
These people also used certain characters or letters with which they wrote in their
books their ancient affairs and their sciences, and with these and with figures and
some signs in the figures, they understood their affairs and they made others
understand them and taught them. We found among them a large number of
books in these their letters, and because they had nothing in which there was not
superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an
amazing degree and which caused them sorrow.
Of their letters I will give here an A,B,C, since their ponderousness permits
nothing more, for they use one character for all the aspirations of the letters and,
later, they unite with it part of another and thus it goes on ad infinitum, as will be
seen in the following example. Le means noose and to hunt with it; to write le with
their characters (we having made them understand that these are two letters), they
wrote it with three, placing for the aspiration of l the vowel e, which it carries in
front of it, and in this way they do not err even though they might use [another] e if,
out of curiosity, they so wish. Example:

Afterwards, at the end, they affix the part which is joined.

Ha means water, and because the h has a before it, they put it at the beginning
with a, and at the end in this fashion:

They also wrote in parts, but in one way or another that I shall not give here nor
will I deal with it except by giving a full account of this people’s affairs. Ma in kati
means I don’t want to and they write it in parts in this fashion:

® S © &
ma i n ka ti

There follows their A,B,C:

 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 105

21 The Landa “alphabet” and examples given by Landa.

Of the letters which are missing, this language lacks them and has others added
from our own for other things of which it has need, and already they do not use
these their characters at all, especially the young people who have learned ours.

Here, then, was the long-sought key to the Maya hieroglyphs, the
Rosetta Stone that had been a dream of Mayanists since the days of
Rafinesque, Stephens, and Catherwood. The ancient Maya had written
with an alphabet, and all that remained for someone like Brasseur was to
apply it to the surviving books; he would then have in his hands the voice
of the Maya scribe speaking to us from the mist-shrouded past. An easy
task for the great abbe, with his immense command of the Mayan
languages.
But, wait a minute! Just take a look at Landa’s “A,B,C : why are there
three signs for a, two for b, and so forth? And why do some of his
“letters” stand for a consonant followed by a vowel (cu, ku in the
“A,B,C,” for example)? There is definitely something odd about this
abecedary, this primer of Landa. Even the ebullient Rafinesque, if he had
still been around, would have cautioned Brasseur to slow down. And a
comparative knowledge of scripts in other parts of the world might have
helped, for by 1864 Egyptian decipherment was at an advanced stage, the
syllabic cuneiform script of the Persians had been cracked, and so had
the more complex cuneiform script of the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Nothing, however, could hold Brasseur back, least of all when he
uncovered yet another Maya codex in 1866. A friend in Madrid, Don
Juan de Tro y Ortolano, a descendant of Cortes, had shown this family
heirloom to Brasseur, and he published it in Paris three years later with
106 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

the support of Napoleon III himself.9 Brasseur had christened it the

“Troano” in honor of its owner; but in 1875 another fragment turned up
in Madrid, the so-called “Cortesiano,” which was soon recognized by
Leon de Rosny as part of one and the same codex. Both are now joined in
the Museo de America in Madrid, and the entire screenfold manuscript
(with fifty-six leaves painted on both sides, the longest known for the
Maya) is known to the scholarly world as the Madrid Codex.10
Brasseur’s commentary accompanying the Troano facsimile is a case
study in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Without the least idea of
the order in which the Troano glyphs were to be read (he got them
backwards), he began applying Landa’s “A,B,C,” as an alphabet, to each
glyph. The results were disastrous: his readings were nonsensical and
patently false, although he remained oblivious to criticism. His
incredible carelessness even led him to invent a letter for the Landa
“alphabet” which is nowhere to be found in the original. As a result, any
kind of phonetic approach to Maya hieroglyphic writing was thrown
into an opprobrium from which it took almost a century to recover.
Brasseur went off the deep end, and not just in his ill-founded
application of the data from Landa. As historian Robert Brunhouse has
told us, “... as book after book appeared, his ideas grew more strange
and his explanations more attenuated, so that serious readers who had
respected him increasingly lost confidence in his utterances. Why his
fertile imagination got the better of him is not clear.”11
Diffusionist obsessions seem to have been the trap of many otherwise
sane Americanists, who just could not bring themselves to believe that
New World civilizations were autochthonous. Remember the Lost
Tribes of Israel hobbyhorse that bankrupted Kingsborough? Well, in
Brasseur’s case his hobbyhorse was the myth of Atlantis, the continent
that had supposedly sunk beneath the waves in ancient times, from
which cataclysm refugees bearing the arts of civilized life had supposedly
reached Yucatan and Central America.12
In his old age, not long before his death, alone in Nice in 1874, this
engaging cleric took up residence in a hotel (now a Holiday Inn) on the
Piazza Minerva in Rome. I wonder whether he ever thought about the
obelisk placed on the back of its charming little elephant in the piazza -
the Minervan Obelisk - and the utterly absurd attempt at its
decipherment made two centuries before by the Jesuit Athanasius
Kircher. Kircher, though, has survived only as an eccentric but
instructive footnote to intellectual history; Brasseur’s name will always
be bright among Mayanists, if only for his truly great archival
discoveries. On the subject of phoneticism and the utility of the Landa
“A,B,C,” he was right for all the wrong reasons; the right reasons would
only appear in the next century.
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 107

There have always been two intertwined threads in the long cord of
Maya decipherment: the phonetic-linguistic thread of the kind aborti¬
vely pioneered by Brasseur, and the calendrical-astronomical one. It is
the latter that was to triumph as the nineteenth century wore on, and it
was mainly to be associated with Germany (as phonetic interpretations
tended to be, the preserve of Frenchmen and Americans). Among these
Germans, the great - some would say almost superhuman - figure was
Ernst Forstemann, Royal Librarian of the Electorate of Saxony in what is
now eastern Germany.
Forstemann certainly does not sound like a superman: his life was the
prosaic one of dusty shelves and library index cards.13 But Forstemann’s
real adventures took place in the mind, and there is no doubt that he had
a genius for solving complex problems. I would compare him not to
Sherlock Holmes, but to his brother Mycroft, unraveling mysteries
while never moving from his armchair in the mythical Diogenes Club.
Born in Danzig in 1822, the son of a teacher of mathematics in the
Danziger Gymnasium, Forstemann studied linguistics and grammar
under scholars like Jakob Grimm (of the famous brothers Grimm),
doing research on German place-names, and received the Ph.D. degree in
1844. Then he entered the prosaic life of librarian in Wernigrode,
Saxony. Finally, in 1867 Forstemann was attached to the Dresden
Library. One can only guess how long he had been puttering there before
he became intrigued with the strange codex that his predecessor Goetze
had brought back from Vienna in the previous century, and how long
before he thought of doing something about it.
According to his admirer and intellectual follower Eric Thompson
(who of course never knew him), Forstemann was fifty-eight when he
began his studies on the Dresden Codex, and continued publishing on
Maya subjects until the year of his death (1906, when he was eighty-
four).14 It is impossible to think about this man - in many ways the exact
opposite of Brasseur, the French romantic — without thinking of the
Dresden. From this document, as Thompson has rightly said, “The
whole framework of the Maya calendar was elucidated by him.
Forstemann’s first task was to bring out an incredibly accurate
facsimile of the Dresden, using the new technique of chromophotogra¬
phy.15 I count myself very lucky to have bought this great edition at a
book auction in New York, for only sixty sets were issued. Given the
severe damage that the original suffered in V/orld V/ar II (it was under
water for a while during the bombing of the city), the 1880 publication is
a unique record for epigraphers. In that same year Forstemann began
publication of his great studies on the codex.
Aided by Landa’s days and months, and with a strong mathematical
bent acquired in his childhood, by 1887 he had discovered:
108 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

Initial Series Introductory Glyph

9 baktuns + 15katuns +
(9x144,000 days) (15x7,200 days)

10 tuns + 0 uinals +
(10x360 days) (0x20 days)

0 kins 3 Ahau
(0x1 day) (day position)

22 The Initial Series date

9.15.10.0.0 on Stela 10,
Piedras Negras. This is
counted forward from the
starting date of the Long
Count to reach 3 Ahau 3
3 Mol Mol in the Calendar
(month position) Round.

(1) the Long Count, a day-to-day count of consecutive days, unbroken

since its inception at the Calendar Round day 4 Ahau 8 Cumku,
thousands of years in the past.

(2) that the Maya used a vigesimal (base twenty) system of calculation,
instead of decimal (base ten) like ours.

(3) how the 260-day (tzolkin) almanacs work in the Dresden.

(4) the Venus tables in the Dresden - how the Maya calculated and
prognosticated for the 584-day apparent cycle of the planet Venus as
seen from Earth.

As if this weren’t enough for one man, in 1893 (by which time he was
seventy-one) he announced his recognition of the lunar tables in the
Dresden, now known to be a table warning of possible eclipses
(considered to be a calamity by the Maya).
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 109

So far, so good. But what about all those inscribed monuments lying
mouldering in the stillness of the tropical forest? “Who shall read
them?” Stephens had asked. The problem here lay in the almost total
absence of a monumental corpus: the detailed, accurate illustration of
the stone and stucco inscriptions of the Classic Maya, on the scale of the
Description de VEgypte. There was really little excuse for this other than
the generally retarded nature of Maya research as compared with the rest
of the world. After all, photography had been around for a long time: by
1839, daguerreotypes of Egyptian monuments were being brought back
to Paris (Catherwood, in fact, had used the method sporadically while
with Stephens in Central America), and the negative-positive technique
of modern photography had been invented the next year by Fox Talbot
in England. The French explorer Desire Charnay16 and the thoroughly
eccentric Augustus le Plongeon and his wife17 had used photography
sporadically in the Maya lowlands, but none of their results could have
aided the process of decipherment very much.

23 Desire Charnay (1828—1915)

on the trail in Chiapas, Mexico.
110 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

By 1879, the situation began to improve. In that year, one Charles Rau
of the Smithsonian Institution published part of the tablet from the
Temple of the Cross at Palenque in a form that any epigrapher could
have used since it appeared in a microscopically accurate photographic
plate.18 It was through a close study of Rau’s publication, and through
his knowledge of the codices, that the American scholar Cyrus Thomas
established in 1882 that the reading order of Maya writing was from left
to right, and top to bottom, in paired columns19 (if Brasseur had known
this, he might not have committed such imbecilities with the Troano).
Then came Maudslay, one of the very few figures in Maya research
about whom everybody seems to agree. Like his predecessors Stephens
and Catherwood, only superlatives seem adequately to describe this
great but modest and self-effacing man - a fitting antidote to some of
the colossal egos that have taken up the Maya stage in the last century
or so.
Alfred Percival Maudslay20 was born in 1850, and received the
classical education of an English gentleman at Harrow and Cambridge.
He began his career as private secretary to the Governor of Queensland
in Australia, then went to Fiji with Sir Arthur Gordon, becoming British
Consul in Samoa in 1878 and, finally, Consul General in Tonga. After
this colonial stint in the South Seas (charmingly recalled in his 1930
memoirs, Life in the Pacific Fifty Years Ago), he was called to the New
World on business — overseeing a gold mine in Mexico and fruit
property in California, where he met the young American who was to be
his wife and companion on his Central American explorations.
Maudslay had read Stephens, and was drawn to the Maya ruins. In
1881 he made the first of seven undertakings in Central America, all
entirely at his own expense. Maudslay had set himself the task of
providing as complete and accurate a record possible of the architecture,
art, and inscriptions of the major known Maya cities, in particular
Quirigua, Copan, Chichen Itza, Palenque, and the recently discovered
Yaxchilan, which lay on a U-shaped bend along the Usumacinta River.
To make this record, he used an immense wet-plate camera; the plates
had to be developed on the spot. To make casts, he had to bring in all the
materials necessary (plaster, papier mache, etc.). All of this work, plus
the difficulty of setting up camps and supplying them with food, had to
be done in the rain and the heat, in regions bereft of all but the most
rudimentary trails.
Compared with the grim competitiveness of today’s typical Maya
field archaeologist, Maudslay seems almost a saint. The best-known
example of his unmatched generosity of spirit concerns an unexpected
meeting at Yaxchilan with the French explorer Charnay, who had
believed that he (Charnay) had been the first at the ruins, and who had
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 111

intended naming them ‘ ‘Lorillard City’ ’ for his patron the tobacco baron
Pierre Lorillard. Here is Charnay’s account of the meeting:21

We shook hands, he knew my name, he told me his: Alfred Maudslay, Esq., from
London; and as my looks betrayed the inward annoyance I felt: “It’s all right,” he
said, “there is no reason why you should look so distressed. My having the start of
you was a mere chance, as it would have been mere chance had it been the other
way. You need have no fear on my account, for I am only an amateur, traveling for
pleasure. With you the case of course is different. But I do not intend to publish
anything. Come, I have had a place got ready for you; and as for the ruins I make
them over to you. You can name the town, claim to have discovered it, in fact do
what you please. I shall not interfere with you in any way, and you may even
dispense mentioning my name if you please.” I was deeply touched with his kind
manner and only too charmed to share with him the glory of having explored this
city. We lived and worked together like two brothers, and we parted the best
friends in the world.

Making a record of this sort may have been harrowing, but getting the
results of his great research safely back to London, casts and all, must
have been equally daunting. At any rate, they did get there, and
Maudslay employed an artist, Miss Annie Hunter, to draw, from the
casts and photographs with which he furnished her, accurate litho'
graphic plates of every monument and inscription. For Maudslay had
found his publisher in the persons of his friends the biologists Frederick
Du Cane Godman and Osbert Salvin. Beginning in 1889, when the first
fascicle came out, Maudslay’s monumental Archaeology was to appear as
an appendix to the multivolume work Biologia Centrali-Americana; the
whole of his Archaeology reached its final form as one volume of text and
four of plates.22
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance to Maya research of
Maudslay’s published work. For the very first time, Maya epigraphers
had large-scale, incredibly accurate illustrations of complete Classic
texts, not just the amateurish sketches of Almendariz or even worse, the
absurdities of Waldeck. With all of this available by 1902, and with good
facsimiles of all the codices at hand, then why didn’t some latter-day
Champollion come along and really crack the Maya code? It seems
strange in hindsight, but the odds were against it happening, for no one
then engaged in Maya research had the kind of linguistic training and
clarity of vision that enabled Champollion to make his great break¬
through.
I have spoken of Maudslay’s extraordinary generosity. This certainly
came into play with the American editor Joseph T. Goodman, whose
work on the hieroglyphs had reached his attention in 1892, and which he
offered to publish as an “appendix to an appendix,’’ at the end of his
monumental opus.23 Maudslay, rather surprisingly, had made no direct
112 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

attempt at decipherment, but Goodman had, and Maudslay was

impressed with his findings on the monumental inscriptions.
Goodman, born in 1838, was a journalist, and he had begun his career
early. Before he was twenty-three, he had become owner and editor of
the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, in what was then Nevada
Territory. This had been the site of the fabulous gold strike of 1859
known as the Comstock Lode, and Virginia City was a Vhld V^est town
par excellence: it had a hundred saloons in 1870, in a population of thirty
thousand! Among students of American literature, Goodman has a
certain claim to fame as the person who gave a young man named Samuel
Clemens his first writing job in 1861, as a reporter on the Enterprise; in
fact, Clemens first signed his name as “Mark Twain” on a humorous
contribution to Goodman’s paper. Goodman became rich on his
Comstock Lode investments, and moved to California, where he
founded the San Franciscan (Twain was a contributor to the first
number). He then bought a large raisin orchard in Fresno, California,
and in the 1880s began his Maya studies.
The rather vainglorious announcement of his results, which appeared
in 1897 in Maudslay’s Biologia, has rankled with Mayanists ever since.
According to Goodman, he had been working on the monumental
inscriptions since 1883 - but Maudslay’s publications on them did not
start appearing until 1889, and it is improbable that Goodman could
have had a great deal at hand in California before then that would have
allowed much serious research. Twain’s “Joe” Goodman claimed that,
entirely independently of Forstemann, he had unraveled the secret of the
Long Count and the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku starting date, but Eric Thompson
came up with enough internal evidence to make a good case against him:
there can be little doubt that Goodman was quite aware of what
Forstemann had already published on the Dresden.
It would be easy to put Goodman down as a frontier-type boaster
from the world of “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” but he had
made some truly lasting contributions. For one thing, the calendrical
tables which he published with Maudslay are still in use among scholars
working out Maya dates. Secondly, he deserves credit for discovering
the “head variants” which can substitute for bar-and-dot numbers in
Long Count dates (fig. 24). But far more significant than these was an
article blandly entitled “Maya dates” which appeared in 1905 in the
American Anthropologist,24 which proposed a correlation between the
Maya Long Count calendar and our own, backed by solid evidence from
Landa and other colonial sources, and from the codices. This was an
amazing achievement, not so much for the decipherment as for Maya
culture history in general, for until then Maya Long Count dates on
Classic Maya monuments had been “floating”: the scholarly world did
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 113

10, lahun 15, holahun

6, uac 11, buluc 16, uaclahun

2, ca 7, uuc 17, uuclahun

3, ox 13, oxlahun

24 Head variants for the Maya numbers, with equivalents in spoken Yucatec.
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment
114

not really know exactly which centuries were included in Copan s span,
for example, or when the last Long Count date marking the end of the
Classic had occurred. Like many great discoveries (such as Mendel’s law
of heredity), Goodman’s discovery lay forgotten or scorned for many
years, until the Yucatecan scholar Juan Martinez Hernandez revived it in
1926, giving further proof of its correctness; Eric Thompson later
emended it by three days.25 In spite of oceans of ink that have been
spilled on the subject, there now is not the slightest chance that these
three scholars (conflated to GMT when talking about the correlation)
were not right; and that when we say, for instance, that Yax Pac, King of
Copan, died on 10 February 822 in the Julian Calendar, he did just that.
Goodman lives.
In his autobiography dictated in 1906, Mark Twain had these
characteristically lighthearted words to say about Goodman, his
onetime employer:

He was here a year ago and I saw him. He lives in the garden of California — in
Alameda. Before this Eastern visit he had been putting in twelve years of time in
the most unpromising and difficult and stubborn study that anybody has
undertaken since Champollion’s time; for he undertook to find out what those
sculptures mean that they find down there in the forests of Central America. And
he did find out and published a great book, the result of his twelve years of study.
In this book he furnishes the meanings of these hieroglyphs, and his position as a
successful expert in that complex study is recognized by the scientists in that line
in London and Berlin and elsewhere. But he is no better known than he was before
- he is only known to those people.26

But Goodman had the last word. When Twain died in April 1910,
Goodman told Albert Bigelow Paine, the great writer’s first biographer,
“I am grieved - and yet glad that Mark made so good an ending. God
knows how mortally afraid I was that somebody would land him in a
dime museum before the finish.”27
The turn of the century, between the nineteenth and twentieth, marks
the great age of the recorders, and in this Maudslay certainly takes first
place: work on the Maya inscriptions necessarily begins with him. But
not far behind was the cantankerous, German-born Austrian, Teobert
Maler.28 Like Maudslay a superb photographer, using a large-format
camera with wet plates instead of the wholly unsatisfactory 35mm
substitutes of later generations of Mayanists, Maler recorded in
enormous detail the stelae and lintels of a whole range of sites not even
dreamed of by earlier explorers. By the 1890s, Americans had begun to
chew gum in earnest, and chicle - the basic ingredient — had to be
extracted by experienced chicle-hunters from trees in the forests of the
southern Maya lowlands. The chicleros, an improvident but courageous
group of rascals on the whole (I used to know some), cut hundreds of
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 115

trails through the Peten, uncovering dozens of heretofore unknown

Maya cities. This was a world undiscovered by Stephens, Catherwood,
Waldeck, and even Maudslay, and Maler was its pioneer. Charles
Pickering Bowditch, the very proper Bostonian who was the financial
sponsor for the Central American research at Harvard’s Peabody
Museum, hired the cranky and impossible Maler to explore and survey
such sites as Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, Seibal, Tikal, and Naranjo.
Beginning in 1901 and continuing until 1911 (some time after the
exasperated Bowditch had cut off Maler’s funds), Maler’s great
photographs of monuments appeared in the plates of volume after
volume of the Peabody’s Memoirs.29 Although, unlike Maudslay’s
Biologia, the plates are not accompanied by drawings, perhaps this is just
as well since Maler was a terrible draftsman and had really little idea of
what Maya glyphs should look like: I doubt if he even knew what a Long
Count date was. But this great series exactly complements Maudslay’s;
both constitute a true corpus and along with the published codices
constitute the base on which the true decipherments of the present
century have rested.

According to the dictionary, a Pyrrhic victory is one gained at too great

cost.
This was the outcome of a battle that raged in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries between two rival camps. On one side were
those in France and the United States who took Landa’s “A,B,C”
seriously, and who viewed the Maya script as largely phonetic in nature.
On the other side were the rejectionists: those who pooh-poohed the
Landa “alphabet” and who adopted a basically Kircherian view of the
glyphs - as “picture-writing” or “ideographs” (whatever those might
be). The rejectionists, largely German, won the day, but the cost was a
half-century delay in the decipherment.
The first salvo in the war was, of course, fired by the indefatigable
Brasseur de Bourbourg, whose abortive effort at reading the Troano
using Landa’s “A,B,C” as an alphabet has already been discussed.
Brasseur had fallen into the same trap as the Swedish diplomat Akerblad
had done sixty years before, in trying to read the demotic script on the
Rosetta Stone: because the few words that Akerblad had deciphered in
the demotic text had been alphabetically written, he came to believe that
the entire system was exclusively alphabetic.30 Brilliant though he was,
Akerblad got nowhere, for the script is logographic.
Brasseur’s compatriot de Rosny had a much firmer grasp of the
problems involved in Maya writing. Leon Louis Lucien Prunol de Rosny
(1837-1914) was a distinguished orientalist, with a bibliography
116 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

encompassing works on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietna¬

mese, as well as more general works on language and writing systems.
He was the first since Rafinesque to try placing the strange writing o
Central America (which he called calculiforme, pebble-shaped, rea y
not a bad description) in a larger framework, in a study which appeared
in 1870. This unusual man, probably the best-prepared would-be Maya
decipherer of the last century, was, like Brasseur, a mighty discoverer -
he found the Paris Codex in 1859, and recognized the Cortesiano as part
of the Madrid Codex in 1883. But it is de Rosny s 1876 Essai sur le
Dechiffrement de VEcriture Hieratique de V Amerique Centrale ( Essay on
the Decipherment of the Hieratic Writing of Central America”) on
which his fame rests. In it, he correctly identified the glyphs for the
world-directions (fig. 25) and was the first to pick up phonetic elements
in the day and month signs given by Landa and the codices.
De Rosny, and his Spanish translator and supporter Juan Rada y
Delgado, were convinced that Abbe Brasseur and his followers had
failed so miserably because they had not really read and understood
what Landa had told us: that the Maya did not use just the ‘‘certain
characters and letters” which he gave us in his A,B,C, but also
‘‘figures” and “some signs in the figures.” In other words, the Maya
script was a mixture of phonetic signs and logograms. It is a tragedy that
the clarity of vision shown by these two men was to be obscured in the
smoke of the polemical battle which was about to begin.
After Brasseur, the figure most closely identified with the phonetic
approach was the pioneer American anthropologist Cyrus Thomas.32
Born to immigrant German parents in 1825, in eastern Tennessee,
Thomas had received the frontier education of the times, such as it might
be. He early practiced law in Illinois, and briefly entered the Lutheran
ministry, but it was the life of science which claimed him. Thomas
became an entomologist and agronomist (his bibliography includes such
endearing titles as “Further from the Army Worm,” and “Spiders —are
they poisonous?”), but the last twenty-eight years of his long life (he died
in 1910) were spent with the great U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology.
Thomas was a stubborn and argumentative man, and he fought the good
fight for scientific truth: the most lasting of his victories was his
demolition of the racist idea that the prehistoric earthworks of the
eastern United States were the handiwork of some non-Indian race of
Moundbuilders.
Thomas began publishing on Maya writing in 1881, just about the
same time that Forstemann was embarking on his work on the Dresden,
and it is clear that Thomas from the beginning had a very different
outlook from that of the German school. In 1882 he brought out his own
study of the Troano part of the Madrid Codex, identifying in it for the
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 117

NORTH
(xaman)

©
BLACK RED
(ek) (chac)

YELLOW
(kan)

25 The world-directions as discovered by de Rosny, and the associated colors later

discovered by Eduard Seler.

first time the New Year ceremonies which take up four of its pages.33
Landa describes these rituals, which occurred at the end of each year in
late pre-Conquest Yucatan, in enormous detail, and Thomas’ keen mind
saw the connection with what he was seeing in the Troano: the first time
that an ethnohistoric account had been used in decipherment. Simulta¬
neously, his scientific training showed in the rigor with which he
established once and for all the true order of reading of the Maya glyphs.
By the late 1880s, Thomas had become convinced that much of the
Maya system was phonetic, or at least, as he put it in an 1893 article in the
American Anthropologist,34 “in a transition stage from the purely
ideographic to the phonetic.” Thomas had been struck by a statement
made by the Franciscan commissary-general Fray Alonso Ponce, who
had been in Yucatan in 1588. Ponce described the Maya folding-screen
books, and the writing in them, as follows:
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment
118

The natives of Yucatan are, among all the inhabitants of New Spain, especially
deserving of praise for three things: First, that before the Spaniards came they
made use of characters and letters, with which they wrote out their histories their
ceremonies, and the order of sacrifices to their idols, and their calendars, in books
made of bark of a certain tree. These were on very long strips, a quarter or a third
(of a yard) in width, doubled and folded, so that they resembled a bound book m
quarto, a little larger or smaller. These letters and characters were understood
only by the priests of the idols (who in that language are called Ahkins) and a few
principal natives. Afterwards some of our friars learned to understand and read them,
and even wrote them [my italics].35

Thomas could not believe that the missionaries would have bothered
learning a script which consisted merely of symbolic characters.
A fellow American, the distinguished linguist and ethnologist Daniel
Garrison Brinton of Philadelphia, who knew his languages and sources
very well indeed, was of the opinion that the Maya glyphs were
“ikonomatic”; by this abstruse word, he meant that they were based
mainly on the rebus, the “puzzle-writing principle so important to all
early known scripts.36 This was the method used by the Aztec and
possibly other people in non-Maya Mexico to write their place-names.
An example cited by Brinton comes from the Aztec tribute list, the sign
for a place called Mapachtepec, meaning “at Raccoon Hill. Instead of
showing a raccoon, the scribe drew a hand, or ma-itl, grasping a bunch of
Spanish moss, pach'tli in Nahuatl (the Aztec language). For tepee, “at the
hill,” the scribe drew a conventionalized mountain.

Now Thomas not only believed that Maya scribes had progressed
beyond this supposed evolutionary stage, but that like Egyptian, the
Maya system probably included phonetic-syllabic signs, “ideographic”
signs (today we would call these “logograms”), and possibly even
semantic determinatives. Even more astonishing is Thomas’ suggestion
that “it is probable that the same character may be found in one place as
phonetic and in another as retaining its symbolic significance” - in short,
he was suggesting polyvalence! Small wonder that David Kelley has
recently asserted: “I believe that he had a clearer view of the nature of the
script than any other man of his period.”37
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 119

There is a kind of pathos in Thomas’ work that almost makes one

weep. As Kelley has said, both Thomas and de Rosny went far beyond
their evidence, and opened themselves to justified attack. But both of
them scored some real hits in deciphering the codices, and a few of their
readings are still valid. We shall see these two scholars championed in
our own time by none other than Yuri Knorosov, who has always
regarded them as pioneers.
The attack on the phoneticists began in earnest in 1880, when the
American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts published
a pamphlet called “The Landa Alphabet; a Spanish Fabrication,” by one
Philipp J.J. Valentini, Ph.D.381 have no idea who Valentini was, but he
sounds like an extremely acerbic fellow, a sharp-tongued schoolmaster
lecturing to a group of dim-witted pupils. Although the pamphlet is little
more than a now-forgotten curiosity, it is worth looking into, for
Valentini’s approach and methodology were to be used as a club over the
phoneticists well into our own century.
One part of Valentini’s argument comes from the early Colonial
period in non-Maya Mexico, particularly from those regions in which
Nahuatl (Aztec) was the spoken language. The natives were required to
learn by heart the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo. As
Valentini so nicely puts it, “It was a difficult task for the teachers [the
friars] to force the foreign long Latin text into the stolid or rather
illiterate heads of the poor Indians.” So what did the friars do? In a part
of the world where only picture-writing had been known, they drew
pictures of objects, the Nahuatl names of which began with sounds
similar to those which began the appropriate words in Nahuatl. Thus,
for Pater noster, they drew a banner (pantli) and a prickly-pear cactus
(nochtli); and so it went.
Since Valentini could not bring himself to believe that any “Central
American hieroglyphics” could have been anything but picture-writing,
he thought that Landa must have been up to the same tricks with his
Maya. So he reconstructed the following scenario, complete with his
“poor Indians”:
Let us fancy our learned Bishop Landa sitting in the refectory of his convent in
Merida. A group of barefooted Indians stand waiting at the door and their elected
speaker is beckoned by Landa to approach the table. In response to his question
what object he would think of and draw when hearing the sound of a, the man,
with somewhat doubtful hand begins to trace before him, this little picture ...

Let us, in turn, temporarily set aside the fact that Landa’s principal
informants were Juan Nachi Cocom and Gaspar Antonio Chi, both
noble princes and hardly likely to have been the barefoot hayseeds
imagined by Valentini; these were scions of the royal Yucatecan houses,
and were probably trained scribes themselves. Landa, then, according to
120 FOREFATHERS: THE DAWN OF DECIPHERMENT

Valentini, must have gone through the Spanish alphabet in so far as it

was applicable to the Maya language, pronouncing the letters one by one
and letting his native stooges select an appropriate picture of something
in the real world for each sound in turn. To pull this particular rabbit out
of the hat, Valentini had at hand a copy of the Pio Perez dictionary of
Yucatec Maya.39 But Valentini was as slipshod in this exercise as the
principal target of his attack, Brasseur. For instance, he explained
Landa’s sign ca as a picture of a comb, selected by the illiterate Maya
“because the Maya word caa means to pull a man’s hair out ; today this
is generally accepted as a representation of a fish fin ( fish is cay in
Yucatec).
Nonetheless Valentini, for all his knuckleheadedness, had hit on
something real: the signs given by Landa’s informants truly did represent
sounds made by Landa as he pronounced for his Maya friends the names
of the Spanish letters. Yet picture-symbols of the sort envisioned by
Valentini they were not.
But Cyrus Thomas was a far more credible scholar than Brasseur, and
his papers called up a more formidable array of opponents, this time in
Germany.
This was the Germany of Bismarck, with its newly found unity and
with an empire, fresh from the crushing defeat which it had recently
inflicted upon the French. In culture, learning, and science it had few
equals in those days, and certainly in the field of Americanist research
there was simply no one quite of the stature of the Prussian scholar
Eduard Seler, the intellectual giant whom Eric Thompson once called
“the Nestor of Middle American Studies.”40 Born in 1849 to poor
parents, Seler had married a very rich and cultivated woman, and never
had to worry about financial matters throughout his long life. He also
had the good fortune to attract the patronage of the Due de Loubat, who
not only bankrolled his Mesoamerican trips, but also published Seler’s
lengthy and detailed studies of the Mexican codices, complete with color
facsimiles of the manuscripts. Incredibly well prepared for his research
(he knew most of the major languages of Mesoamerica and gave classes in
Maya and Nahuatl), blessed with an encyclopedic mind, and an
exceptionally good visual memory, Seler was the founder of Mesoameri¬
can iconographic research: he was the first to demonstrate from pre-
Conquest art and books that there was a fundamental unity to Mexican
and Maya thought and religion. His output was stupendous: his
collected essays alone fill five very thick volumes, and all of them are still
worth reading.
He must have been a wonderful man, with his long white beard, seated
in his great scholarly library and poring over manuscripts and books, the
very picture of the Old World professor. In an affectionate reminis-
 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment 121

cence, Seler’s niece Lotte Hopfner (who was raised by her aunt and
uncle), recalls the old man:

In wintertime, in a small greenhouse next to the library, worked my uncle,

standing on foot, using a large writing-desk. On warm summer nights, this desk
was placed in a projection and lit by a light protected from the wind. How many
times, on returning from dances late at night, going up to the Fichteberg hill, did I
see that light shine through the thick foliage of the garden and emphasize the
silhouette of the old scholar of lengthened skull and long beard! His seer’s gaze
wandered off in the distance: surely Seler received his scientific revelations in the
deep silence of the night.41

The last years of Eduard and Caecilie Seler were sad, indeed. They
suffered greatly during and after World War I, and in November 1922
the dean of Americanist research, by then sick and aged beyond his
years, died in his Berlin home. His ashes were placed in an Aztec-style
urn in his wife’s family mausoleum in Steglitz, Caecilie’s eventually
joining his. But his spacious house and the unique library were utterly
destroyed in the siege of Berlin at the close of World War II.
Seler was the center and focal point of a brilliant German circle of
Americanists, in a tradition that had begun with Forstemann. Among
these was Paul Schellhas, close associate of Forstemann, who brought
out in 1897 a classification of the deities in the Maya manuscripts which
is still in universal use as the basis for dealing with each god or god-
complex, along with the glyphs associated with each deity.42 Schellhas
wisely decided to indicate each god only with a capital letter from our
alphabet, and we still refer to God A, God B, God K, God N, and so on
even though in some cases we can now read their names as they were
known to the ancient Maya.
One would have thought that Seler himself, with his formidable
command of languages, ethnohistory, archaeology, and every known
Mesoamerican codex, would have been just the person to make a
Champollionesque decipherment of the Maya script, but in actuality his
devotion to detail and his suspicion of intuitive thought effectively
blocked any such breakthroughs. In fact, the only Maya decipherment
for which he can claim credit is the identification of the glyphs for the
major world-colors (colors associated with the four directions of the
world in the Maya codices: fig. 25).43
Now to return to Cyrus Thomas: how could a Tennessee frontiers¬
man stand up in debate with a walking encyclopedia like Seler? The
answer is, he didn’t.
The battle royal between Thomas and Seler appeared in the pages of
the American journal Science in the years 1892 and 1893.44 Thomas had
made the mistake of presenting his phonetic readings from the codices as
a “key” to the hieroglyphs, and Seler took up the challenge. It did not
122 forefathers: the dawn of decipherment

take long for the Prussian scholar to demolish most of Thomas readings
on the basis of faulty identification of both the objects depicted and of
individual glyphs. Seler was certainly right in rejecting this as a key,
but it is not too clear what Seler thought about Maya writing as a system,
if he thought about it at all. And occasionally Seler, like all of the
German school a believer in the semasiographic nature of Maya
hieroglyphs, seems to have accepted some sort of phonetic reading, but
always with a proviso.
The proviso was that while Landa’s letter symbols “without doubt
possessed a certain phonetic value,” and while the Maya probably wrote
in the manner indicated by Landa in early Colonial times, originally they
could not write texts in this way but adopted the ‘ ‘Landa method” on the
instigation of the missionaries. Shades of Valentini. And shades of
Kircher, too, for Seler throws at Thomas his contention that “without
doubt, great part of the Maya hieroglyphs were conventional symbols,
built up on the ideographic principle.”
In the face of this onslaught, Thomas gave up abjectly. In 1903, the
seventy-eight-year-old Thomas published a general article called
“Central American Hieroglyphic Writing” in the Annual Report of the
Smithsonian Institution.45 Here is what he now said: “the glyphs, so far
as determined, are to a large extent symbols (not phonetic characters),
used to denote numbers, days, months, etc.” Not only is the “inference
of phoneticism doubtful,” but because about half of the inscriptions
consist of “numeral symbols, calendar symbols, etc.,” one can only
conclude “that they contain little, if anything, relating to the history of
the tribes by whom they were made.” A people with writing, but without
written history! This is hardly what Stephens had predicted, standing in
the ruins of Copan so many years before.
But this was the general consensus of Maya scholarship in those days.
Maya numbers and Maya dates had conquered all, and the phoneticists
had fallen on the field of battle. Some years later, the young Alfred
Marston Tozzer met the aged Goodman only a year before the latter’s
death.46 He describes the encounter thus:

It was at a lunch at the Faculty Club, Berkeley, in September 1916; and the writer,
because of his studies along the same line, had the honor of sitting next to Mr.
Goodman, then just seventy-eight. It was a personal moment long anticipated and
never to be forgotten.
The veteran scholar discussed the Maya texts for upwards of an hour, always
emphasizing more and more the importance of the numerical elements, and finally
in conclusion stating as his belief that it was not history of which they treated, but
of arithmetic and the science of numbers; and that the only promising method of
approach to the meaning of the yet undeciphered characters - the method by
which he had made all his great advances, he added - was the mathematical, and
not the phonetic, indeed he rejected the latter with some show of impatience.
 5 The Age of Thomp son

Until his death in 1975, only a few months after being knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II, John Eric Sydney Thompson dominated modern
Maya studies by sheer force of intellect and personality.1 Thompson
never held a university post and never had any students; he never
wielded power as a member of a grant-giving 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.
I don’t find it easy to write about Eric Thompson dispassionately even
at this late date: I am torn between admiration for him as a scholar and a
liking for him as a person, and an intense distaste for certain aspects of
his work and for the way he treated some of his opponents. Unlike some
who met with his disapproval, Eric (as I feel bound to call him) usually
tolerated me as a kind of “loyal opposition,” although he occasionally
directed some sarcastic barbs in my direction. We had a mutual friend in
the Americanist archaeologist Geoffrey Bushnell of Downing College,
Cambridge University. After reading a series of somewhat heretical
articles and reviews by myself, Eric told Geoffrey that “Mike Coe is
another Joe the Fat Boy: he likes to make people shiver” - a sardonic
reference to one of the characters in The Pickwick Papers. From then on, I
signed my letters to him as “Joe the Fat Boy,” and he signed his as “Mr.
Pickwick.”
I suppose that it was his prose style that first tempered my enthusiasm
for some of Eric’s publications. He did not wear his learning lightly, and
his articles and books usually carried a heavy freight of literary and
mythological references; 1 find most annoying the irrelevant quotations
from English poets and prose writers that head chapters of his magnum
opus, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing} The sheer pretentiousness of all this
appalled me, but it had great appeal among archaeologists, I’m sorry to
say. This was especially true in Latin America. The Mexican archaeo¬
logist Alberto Ruz, a very close friend of Thompson’s, had this to say in
an obituary:

123
124 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

For the presentation of his research and conclusions, Thompson possessed

magnificent gifts as a writer. His concepts, perfectly organized, flow with clarity,
borne by a language at once simple, precise, and rich, discreetly adorned with
literary and historic allusions in which his broad humanistic erudition flowers.

I once conveyed my feelings about Eric’s style to a very cultured

Mexican scholar, explaining to him that to be really effective, English
prose has to be written in the simplest way possible — basically that a
writer in our language should try to be more like Hemingway, and less
like Thompson. I am afraid that my message did not get across.
There is a distinct tendency today among the younger generation and
among the victims of his acerbic attacks to dismiss Thompson
altogether: he was very, very wrong about the nature of Maya
hieroglyphic writing, so he must have been wrong about everything else.
I do not feel this way. 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.

Eric Thompson was a product of the Edwardian era, raised as a member

of that upper middle class that gave pre-World War I England its
doctors, military officers, lawyers, clergymen, and sometimes its literary
men - the well-off professionals of a very comfortable and well-educated
society. He was born in 1898 on New Year’s Eve, the younger son of a
London doctor. In 1912 he left the house at 80 Harley Street to enter
public school, the ancient Winchester College; in later life, he was to
dedicate one of his books to its medieval founder, William of
Wykeham, who had “cast his bread upon the waters.”
When the Great War came, Eric was caught up in it while yet a boy.
Lying about his age, he joined the London Scottish Regiment and served
in the horrifying world of the trenches, where he was severely wounded.
Sent back to England to recuperate, he ended his army career as an
officer in the Coldstream Guards. With the Armistice, rather than
immediately entering one of the Oxbridge universities as a more typical
member of his class might have done, Eric went off to Argentina. The
Thompsons were actually an Anglo-Argentinian family, and his father
had been born in that country. Eric made his way to the Thompson
estancia at Arenaza, 331 kilometers west of Buenos Aires, which they had
owned since the 1820s, and he spent the next four years happily working
cattle as a gaucho, becoming completely fluent in Spanish - he was, in my
experience, one of the very few non-Latin Mayanists to be at home in
that language (most of them are near monolingual).
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 125

Argentina in those days was a deeply divided society, with a great deal
of labor unrest and class conflict. The large influx of foreign workers and
peasants which had previously fueled the Argentine economy had led to
a radicalized underclass as this economy worsened, and there were
xenophobic, anti-“Bolshevik” massacres in 1919, the year after Eric
reached the country. The Thompsons surely would have been among
the great land-owning elite challenged by this leftist movement, and it
may have been this milieu which formed Eric’s tenacious attitudes about
the Communist menace.4 Speculation perhaps, but there can be no
doubt that his uncompromisingly conservative political stance in later
years colored his reaction to a more intellectual threat from “Bolshevik”
Russia.
Returning to England in 1922, Eric entered Cambridge, where he read
for a certificate in anthropology under A. C. Haddon. I have no idea why
he chose anthropology, for in my experience, Eric really had little use
either for the subject, or for the people who practiced it. There is little or
no reference in any of his published work to the past greats of the field,
or to any of their findings or theories. For instance, Eric wrote much
about Maya religion, but one would be hard pressed to discover any
awareness of such powerful thinkers on the general subject as
Durkheim, Fraser, or Malinowski. It is as though one were pursuing a
career in evolutionary biology, and decided to ignore Darwin.
One might perhaps excuse this, but it definitely affected his future
work on the Maya glyphs. What is probably anthropology’s greatest
strength is its comparative approach to human and cultural variation,
across time and space. Thompson’s mentor Haddon was a pioneer
practitioner of comparative studies. Basically, anthropologists long ago
discovered that peoples around the world on similar levels of cultural
complexity have come up with extraordinarily similar institutional
responses when faced with similar problems — for example, the
invention of hieroglyphic writing systems as an answer to the needs of
nascent political states. Thompson never once acknowledged that what
we know about early civilizations in the rest of the world - in China,
Egypt, Mesopotamia, or the Mediterranean — might throw light on his
beloved Maya. They were unique.
Be that as it may, Eric’s interest in the Maya began in Cambridge.
During his stay, he saw Alfred Maudslay receive an honorary degree,
and, using S.G. Morley’s An Introduction to the Study of the Maya
Hieroglyphs,5 published in 1915, he taught himself Maya calendrics. One
fateful day in 1925, Eric wrote to Morley, then running the Carnegie
Institution’s project at Chichen Itza, asking him for a job. His selling
point, as he tells us in his autobiography,6 was that he knew how to
compute Maya dates, a particular passion with Morley. The response
126 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

was positive, and after he had been interviewed in London by the

American archaeologist Oliver Ricketson and his wife Edith (both of
whom had been digging at Uaxactun), he was hired by Carnegie.

Sylvanus Morley must have been a wonderful man to know — all who did
are unanimous in praise of him as a human being (but not necessarily as a
scientist). His long-time colleague A.V. Kidder once described him as
“that small, nearsighted, dynamic bundle of energy.”7 Born in 1883,
until the close of his life in 1948 he was the ancient Maya’s spokesman to
the outside world, a popularizer in the best sense of the word, through
his books, lectures, and magazine articles. I know of more than one
archaeologist who was drawn to the field as a boy by reading one of
Morley’s National Qeographic contributions, vividly illustrated with a
color rendition of a purported virgin in filmy huipil being hurled into the
Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza.
Morley took his A.B. at Harvard in 1907 and an A.M. in 1908. His
early interest had been Egyptology, but he was steered to the Maya field
by F.W. Putnam, then Director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and by
the young Alfred Tozzer, a neophyte teacher in the Anthropology
Department who was to be mentor of most of the outstanding Mayanists
of the last generation and the great editor of Landa’s Relacion.
Harvard was the pioneer institution in Maya research, and in 1892 had
fielded the first real archaeological expedition to the Maya jungles - in
this case, to the ruins of Copan.8 In those days of gunboat diplomacy and
pliant banana republics, under a generous contract the Peabody over the
next several years was able to bring back (legally) a treasure trove of
Classic Maya monuments from Copan, realizing, at least in part,
Stephens’ dream when he bought the site for fifty dollars. But for the
first time a real excavation program was under way in a Maya city. Thus
began the era of the great expeditions, which eventually was to see the
entry of Carnegie, the University of Pennsylvania, Tulane University
(under the colorful and bibulous Frans Blom), and Mexico’s National
Institute of Anthropology and History. This was a kind of golden age
which lasted up until World War II.
Carnegie was always the leader in the field, with monetary and human
resources which no university could match. The story of how it was
drawn into this kind of activity has often been told.9 In brief, three
scholars were invited by the Carnegie Institution of Washington to
submit competing plans for a large-scale program of anthropological
research. In retrospect, the best was clearly that of the British ethnologist
W.H.R. Rivers, for a huge research project among the fast-changing and
threatened cultures of Melanesia; but Morley had presented a compre-
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 127

hensive plan for Maya research, and it was this that was accepted in July
1914, largely on the basis of the pint-sized epigrapher’s boundless
enthusiasm for his subject.
Off went Morley the next year to do fieldwork among the monuments
of Copan, which he published in a huge volume in 1920. Morley knew
that many ruined cities must lie undiscovered in the vast Peten region of
northern Guatemala - where Stephens had once fantasized a still-
inhabited great city - and longed to find them. Chicle (as we have seen,
the raw material for chewing gum), was tapped by native chicleros from
the chicozapote tree, and these often grew in profusion near Maya ruins
(the ancients had used their wood for architectural lintels and beams), so
Morley advertised a bounty of twenty-five dollars in gold to any chiclero
who reported to him an unknown ruin with inscribed stones. Among
other ruins, this largesse led to the discovery of Uaxactun, a day’s walk
north of Tikal, named by Morley from a stela bearing an 8th cycle date
(Uaxactun = “8 Tuns”).
Due to a misunderstanding on the part of trigger-happy Guatemalan
troops, who thought they were revolutionaries, Morley’s party was
ambushed on the return journey from Uaxactun across the British
Honduras border, and the expedition doctor lost his life. Morley barely
escaped with his.
“Vay” Morley was a born leader of men, and beginning in 1924 he
went about recruiting young archaeologists for a double-barreled
investigation of the ancient Maya, centered at Uaxactun in the south
under the direction of the Ricketsons, and at the far more accessible
Chichen Itza in the Yucatan Peninsula, where he set up his own
headquarters in the old hacienda. It was not long before Chichen was a
Mecca for foreign tourists visiting Yucatan, who were often entertained
by the ebullient “Vay” himself. Morley had developed an idea about
Maya civilization which he was to retain until his dying day:10 that the
cities in the south, such as Copan and the Peten centers, had been part of
an “Old Empire,” a united theocracy ruled over by enlightened priests
for whom warfare was abhorrent. This peaceful Arcadia eventually
disintegrated for unknown reasons, and the population fled north in two
great migrations to found a “New Empire,” with cities such as Uxmal,
Labna, Kabah, and Chichen Itza. Eventually these also succumbed, this
time to nasty, idol-worshipping militarists from central Mexico.
In these days when the dead hand of professionalism reigns supreme
in archaeology, it is pleasant to look back on the kinds of people whom
Morley brought into Carnegie, and the life that they led. Few of them
had that union card of modern times, the Ph.D. (although he was called
“Dr. Morley” by everybody, even Morley had never earned the degree).
It is said that the Smith brothers, Bob and Ledyard, were recruited for
128 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

the Uaxactun dig by Oliver Ricketson at the bar of Harvard s very social
Fly Club. Gus Stromsvik, later to direct the Carnegie project at Copan,
was a rough-hewn Norwegian sailor who had jumped ship in Progreso,
Yucatan, and who began work at Chichen repairing the expedition’s
trucks. Ed Shook entered his career as a Carnegie draftsman, and Tatiana
Proskouriakoff as a staff artist. All turned out to be very, very fine
archaeologists.
No Carnegie archaeologist ever had to time his digging with an
academic schedule, for they never taught; nor did they have to spend
endless hours preparing proposals for uncertain funding, for the
Carnegie cornucopia was eternal; and none of them, with the exception
of the boss himself, had to devote enormous time and energy to
negotiating excavation permits with foreign governments, for Carnegie
had long-term agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Staff artists were available both in the field and back at home base in
Carnegie’s Cambridge headquarters (next to the Peabody), and they
were guaranteed prompt publication. Paradise! No wonder envious
colleagues called Carnegie “The Club.’’
In hindsight, Morley’s failings as a leader of a large-scale scientific
project became clearer as time went on. However much he might
command the devotion of his staff and the admiration of his superiors in
Washington, it is a sad fact that in spite of seventeen years of research at
Chichen Itza by Carnegie, this world-famous city yet remains an
archaeological enigma: specialists are still arguing about its nature, its
chronology, and even the reality of the Toltec “invasion” believed by
traditionalists like myself to have resulted in some of its most famous
buildings, such as the Castillo. Most of the archaeologists employed by
Morley spent their time putting fallen buildings back together for the
edification of the tourists, and very little in reconstructing a cultural
picture of ancient Chichen anchored in a firm chronology. The young
Thompson wasted his considerable talents in this kind of work,
directing the reconstruction of the frieze on the Temple of the Warriors,
and did not relish the task:

I labored for weeks in the incandescent sun of Yucatan fitting the stones together,
moving them sometimes nearly forty yards to see if I could make a fit. Part of the
time I had a Maya assistant to do the carrying, but in my memory it seems that I
personally shifted every blessed stone.10

In contrast, the Uaxactun project under Oliver Ricketson, and later

the Smith brothers, was a resounding success, giving the first full picture
of the life and death of a Classic city that is still valid and useful today.
The handwriting was on the wall regarding Morley, and in 1929 the
Carnegie archaeological program in the Maya area was reorganized and
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 129

placed under the direction of Alfred Vincent Kidder, an old friend and
associate of Morley who had become the pioneer digger and synthesizer
of Southwestern Pueblo prehistory.11 Kidder was a Ph.D., a truly
professional, anthropologically-oriented archaeologist, and just the man
to lead “The Club” over the next few decades. Morley spent the rest of
his life laboring in the epigraphic vineyard that had been his first love,
anyway.
Well, what about Morley as an epigrapher? He liked to say that his
main job was to “bring back the epigraphic bacon”; but what kind of
bacon was this? Let us look into his two major works on the subject. The
Inscriptions of Copan of 192012 is a huge tome, with 643 pages, 33 plates,
and 91 illustrations; but the real blockbuster, the “Fat Boy” of Maya
epigraphy, was issued in 1937—38, The Inscriptions of Peten13 in five
volumes containing a total of 2,065 pages, 187 plates, and 39 maps. Now,
assuming that you have before you Maudslay’s Biologia Centrali-
Americana, compare his work with Morley’s, and you will see what has
gone wrong. In place of Maudslay’s magnificent photographs, all made
with his elephantine, large-format, wet-plate camera, Morley’s are
terrible. Even worse are the black-and-white renderings in Copan and
Peten: crude and lacking in essential details, they are no match for the
magnificent lithographic plates prepared for Maudslay by his artist
Annie Hunter.
But the real problem lies even deeper than this. Morley’s “epigraphic
bacon” consisted of almost nothing but dates, and lots of them. Morley
had an undoubted genius for wresting Long Count and Calendar Round
positions from the most unpromising material - eroded and broken
stelae lying in the jungle, often covered with lichens and moss. Given the
prevailing view of the nature and content of the Classic Maya
inscriptions then held by Morley and just about every other specialist
during the heyday of Carnegie, it is little wonder that these vast tomes —
unlike Maudslay’s — virtually ignored all parts of the text that were not
explicitly calendrical or astronomical. All those little inscriptions so
beautifully carved and incised beside the figures of what were then
supposed to be Maya priest-rulers were simply left out. Morley, then,
never did produce from his years of work at Copan and in the Peten a
real corpus of Maya inscriptions, nor did any of the other Carnegie
people, including Thompson. Unlike Maudslay, they apparently never
thought it worthwhile.

It was probably just as well that Thompson left Carnegie and Chichen
Itza at the close of the 1926 season, for his intellect was too powerful to
be squandered on architectural reconstruction. He was offered, and
130 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

accepted, a post at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, which

allowed more scope to his far-ranging interests. Eric was a fine dirt
archaeologist, and he conducted digs at various sites in British Honduras
(in a way, it is a pity that it was not he but Morley who had run the
Chichen project, for we would certainly now be in a much better
position to talk about it). But even more important to his future thinking
about the ancient Maya, he took time off from digging to study the living
Maya themselves — the Kekchi and Mopan in the south of the colony,
and the Itza Maya of Socotz in the west.
Among his workmen and ethnological informants was a young Socotz
Maya named Jacinto Cunil, who was to become Eric s lifelong friend and
compadre (co-godparent). The influence of this man on Thompson
cannot be overestimated: the last chapter of the 1963 Rise and Fall of
Maya Civilization14 (note the Gibbonian cadence), which summarizes his
views on the Maya, is essentially a paean to Jacinto as an exemplar of
those virtues and traits which he ascribed to Cunil’s distant ancestors:
moderation in all things, honesty, humility, and a profound religious
devoutness. That may have been the case, but there was another side to
Cunil - whom I got to know quite well during the summer of 1949 - a
mental world of which Eric must have been aware, but which he
managed to edit out in his books. Moderate though Jacinto usually was,
in my experience he could be quite an uncanny person, almost a fanatical
mystic. To use the Classical terminology so favored by Eric, he was far
more Dionysian than Apollonian in his outlook and personality. And
from what we now know of the ancient Maya, based on the testimony of
the glyphs and the iconography, it was this mysterious, truly weird
aspect of Cunil’s persona that had prevailed among the elite rulers of the
Classic lowland cities.
In short, the ancient calendar priests according to Thompson were
basically High Church Anglicans like himself, and he felt a deep affinity
with those ancient wise men and astronomers. It is no surprise that his
main contribution to decipherment was restricted to the calendar and to
the influence of the ancient gods over Maya life. Taking up where
Forstemann and Goodman had left off, he began to concentrate on
calendrical problems during his days at Chicago, and even more when he
was hired as a staff researcher by Carnegie in 1936 (a position which he
was to keep until the dissolution of Carnegie’s Maya research program
in 1958).
A close associate in this enterprise was a New York based chemical
engineer named John E. Teeple, who had been encouraged by Morley to
study Maya calendrical problems as a hobby. In a brilliant series of
articles that began in 1925, Teeple solved the mystery of what
epigraphers had been calling the “Supplementary Series,” and which
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 131

Introductory Glyph 9 baktuns +

(9x144,000 days)

0 katuns + 19 tuns +
C/3
(0x7,200 days) (19x360 days) m
3
m
C/3

2 uinals + 4 kins
(2x20 days) (4x1 day)

2 Kan G8 C/3
(day in 260-day cycle) (Lord of Night) C
“0
T)
I-
m
m
Z, Y 7E >
(unknown meaning) (moon is 27 days old) 33
-<
03
m
3
m
03
3C X 9A
(3rd lunation (presiding (lunar month
in series) god) has 29 days)

27 Th.e Supplementary Series, on Lintel 21, Yaxchilan.

had stumped Goodman, Morley, and Charles Bowditch of Harvard s

Peabody Museum.15 It will be remembered that the texts on most Classic
monuments begin with the Initial Series, a Long Count date which
reaches a day and a month in the 52-year Calendar Round. Now,
between the day and month glyphs there usually appears a cluster of
other glyphs, some with numbers attached, comprising the Supple¬
mentary Series.”
Teeple proved that most of these glyphs, which had been given non¬
committal letter designations, presented lunar data for the particular day
(or night) of the Initial Series: the number of days since the last New
Moon, the position of that particular lunation in a cycle of six moons or
lunar months, and whether that lunar month contained 29 or 30 days
(the Maya eschewed fractions or decimals). Even more astonishing was
132 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

Teeple’s finding that the astronomers of Copan had calculated with a

formula that held 149 moons to be equal to 4,400 days; that would work
out in our terms to 29.53020 days for an average lunation, only 33
seconds off its known value! Teeple went on to show the relation
between these calculations and the Eclipse tables that had been pinned
down in the Dresden Codex by the American astronomer Robert
Willson in the early decades of this century. All this added credibility to
the almost universally held notion that the Maya inscriptions dealt
exclusively with calendrics and astronomy.
Thompson had a distinct gift for this kind of work: like his friend
Teeple, he would have made an excellent Maya calendar priest. The first
big question he tackled was that of the correlation between the Maya and
Christian calendars. We have seen that Goodman had come up with a
proposed correlation, but this was generally rejected in 1910 when
Morley published his own,16 later to be espoused by the young
archaeologist/art historian Herbert Joseph Spinden; instead of fixing the
Classic period to about ad 300-900, as indicated by Goodman’s
scheme, this would have pushed it back by some 260 years.
When Juan Martinez Hernandez resurrected the Goodman correla¬
tion in 1926, Thompson joined suit. He defended his position until the
end of his days, even when most “informed” opinion and even the new
radiocarbon technique seemed to go against him. In this case, time has
proved Goodman, Martinez, and Thompson exactly right.
Now let us go back to the so-called “Supplementary” (or better,
“Lunar”) Series on the monuments. At the head of the line, immediately
following the day glyph, is a sign which was given the designation “G”;
Glyph G is actually a succession of alternative glyphs. Thompson
showed that there are nine of them, forming a cycle of nine different
glyphs in series, over and over and over.17 This can have nothing to do
with the moon. Eric was a lifelong admirer of Eduard Seler, who had
died while Thompson was still punching cattle in the Argentine pampas.
Seler’s great strength - and it was to become Thompson’s as well — was
his remarkable knowledge of both the central Mexican and the Maya
data. The learned Prussian was as much at home with Mexican codices
like the Borgia as he was with the Maya manuscripts, and it led him to
great insights into the nature of the Venus and New Year pages in the
Dresden.
Eric knew that the Colonial period sources on the Aztec, and the
codices themselves, tell us that there were Nine Lords of the Night, a
succession of nine deities ruling over the hours of darkness, each with
his or her own augury (good, bad, or indifferent), and he showed that
functionally and structurally, at any rate, the Maya and Mexican
sequences must be related. This was quite an achievement, and once
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 133

28 Qlyph Q: the Nine Lords of the Night.

again demonstrated the fundamental unity of Mesoamerican systems of

thought - even though it must be admitted that even now we cannot read
the names of the Maya gods of Glyph G, or provide a one-to-one
correlation with the Mexican series.
Having demonstrated that a cycle of nine was running concurrently
with all those other cycles in the incredibly complex permutation
calendar of the Maya, Thompson went on to unearth yet another cycle in
the grand scheme of the ancient calendar: this measured 819 days, the
product of the magic numbers 7 (the number of the earth), 9 (the
heavens), and 13 (the underworld).18 To this day no one knows exactly
what it means, but the cycle was important among the Classic elite for
ceremonies associated with the world-directions, world colors, and with
the enigmatic God K or Kauil, patron god of the royal house. Perhaps the
great causeways found at lowland cities like Tikal saw huge processions
over these “royal roads” on days beginning 819-day cycles.
134 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

a.

29 Directiori'count glyphs:
a. Posterior Date (“count
forward”) Indicator, b. Anterior
Date (“count backward”)
Indicator.

b.

Ever since Goodman’s times, students of the subject had known that
there were other dates on the Classic monuments in addition to the
Initial Series date, and they confusingly called these the “Secondary
Series’’; these were given as positions in the Calendar Round, reached by
“Distance Numbers’’ counted either forward into the future or
backwards into the past. Such “extra dates” could be anywhere from a
few days to millions of years from the Initial Series date, and for a very
long time nobody knew why most of them were there. Some clearly fell
on anniversaries ofthe opening date-say, at5-tun(5 x 360 days), 10-tun,
or 15-tun intervals, while others marked the endings of great periods in
the steady march of the Long Count (as 1 January 2000 will certainly be
marked in our own calendar). Thompson contributed significantly to
the study of these calculations, by recognizing the so-called “count
forward” and “count back” indicator glyphs, and the glyph for the 15-
tun period.19
That still did not answer the nagging question of what all those dates
really meant. Was it true that the Maya worshipped time itself? If there
was no history in the inscriptions, then maybe that is what those old
calendar priests were up to. Thompson thought that the answer to at
least part of this question had been provided by the ever-resourceful
Teeple, who used to while away the time spent on long train journeys in
this kind of exercise. In 1930, Teeple came up with his Determinant
Theory,20 an extraordinarily involved and complex way of proving the
existence of something which we now can say never existed in the first
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 135

place. In its way, it reminds me of all those beautiful experiments

undertaken by physicists in the last century to probe the nature of the
“aether” which was then supposed to suffuse the empty spaces of the
universe.
Briefly, Teeple claimed that at least some of the “odd” dates in the
records - those that did not fall on period endings - were attempts by the
Maya to bring their Calendar Round, which did not take into account
leap days or leap years, into adjustment with the true length of the solar
year (about 365^ days). The determinants were supposed to express the
error that had accumulated since the mythical beginning of the Long
Count calendar in the fourth millennium before Christ. A little over
thirty years were to elapse before the Determinant Theory went the way
of the inter-galactic aether, and disappeared forever: Teeple had wasted
his time.

Benjamin Lee Whorf is one of the most intriguing and sympathetic

characters in all of Maya research. While his impact on the science of
linguistics has been enormous (arguments still rage over his theories), his
efforts to decipher the non-calendrical part of the Maya hieroglyphs
have fallen on barren ground, and are now regarded as little more than
intellectual curiosities. And yet these efforts were worth making in the
first place, and in my view kept open an avenue of investigation that
otherwise would have been hermetically shut by the powers that be -
especially by Thompson.
There are curious contradictions about WTorf. Y*/hile he looked
rather like the old-time Hollywood star Robert Taylor, there he was
pursuing a fairly prosaic life in the Hartford insurance business. He was
at the same time mystic and scientist, theoretically rigorous and often
factually slipshod.
Whorf was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, in 1897, the son of a
commercial artist.21 Graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in chemical engineering, he went to work in fire engineering
protection for the Hartford (Connecticut) Fire Insurance Company.
Like two other gifted Yankees in the same line of business (the composer
Charles Ives and the poet Wallace Stevens), his professional work in
Hartford Insurance allowed him plenty of opportunity to follow his
particular hobbyhorse. In Whorf’s case, it was the study of language. In
1928, his studies took him to the Nahuatl (Aztec) language, and his
lifelong research in the larger language family (Uto-Aztecan) to which
Nahuatl belonged.
Eventually, he became a really good linguist, largely under the
influence of Edward Sapir whom he met in 1928. When Sapir came to
136 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

Yale’s newly founded Department of Anthropology three years later,

Whorf enrolled in his first class as a special student, and worked on the
Hopi language of Arizona, another member of the Uto-Aztecan group.
This was his lasting contribution to knowledge. Whorf’s research led
him to believe, as his literary executor John Carroll has said, that “the
strange grammar of Hopi might betoken a different mode of perceiving
and conceiving things on the part of a native speaker of Hopi,”22 a
hypothesis that became enormously influential in intellectual circles
through a series of popular articles that he wrote for the MIT Technology
Review. If Whorf (and his mentor Sapir) were right, then perhaps all of us
have been conditioned in our view of the world and reality by the
particular grammar in which we think and speak.
At about the same time that he first encountered Sapir, Whorf became
obsessed with the Maya glyphs, and was encouraged in this pursuit by
Herbert Spinden, then at the Brooklyn Museum, and by Alfred Marston
Tozzer at Harvard. Tozzer, born in 1877, was a pivotal figure in the
Mayanist world, at once the trainer of most of the significant figures in
the field, and a gadfly and iconoclast. He never got on particularly well
with the Carnegie establishment; I remember well my first meeting with
Tozzer - a dapper little man with a toothbrush moustache - in the halls
of the Peabody Museum, when I was still an undergraduate, and his
indignant, high-pitched denunciation of Morley’s The Ancient Maya,23
which had just appeared and which I had only just finished reading with
wonder and admiration.
In 1933, Whorf published his “The Phonetic Value of Certain
Characters in Maya Writing” in the Papers of the Peabody Museum.24
Tozzer’s introduction seems designed to annoy his stick-in-the-mud
colleagues: “It is with no little satisfaction that the Peabody Museum
publishes his paper on a subject which most Maya students have long felt
was practically closed. With great acumen and courage Whorf dares to
reopen the phonetic question.”
Amazingly, Teeple had also encouraged Whorf to publish, and even
defrayed the cost of some of the illustrations - this in the face of the fact
that he (Teeple) had written only three years before: “I can foresee the
clear possibility that when the Maya inscriptions and codices are
deciphered, we may find absolutely nothing but numbers and astron¬
omy, with an inter-mixture of mythology or religion.”25 Perhaps his
generosity reflects the sympathy of one chemical engineer for another.
Right from the beginning, Whorf insisted that a writing system must
record spoken language, and thus its study should be in the domain of
linguistics. Past attempts to decipher the glyphs using the Landa
“alphabet” were “hastily constructed by people who were not scientific
linguists,” which was certainly the case. “Landa’s list of characters has
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 137

certain earmarks of being genuine and also of being the reflex of a

phonetic system.” It was genuine because: (1) the u sign is the 3rd person
subject when prefixed to a verb, or the 3rd person possessive, or the
construct of a following genitive when before a noun (in today’s
parlance, this would be an ergative construction); (2) the “double
writing” of various sounds (two signs each for a, b, l, u, and x) is the
natural reflex of a system that had several ways of representing such
simple sounds - we would now call this polyvalence; and (3) when
Landa’s sources gave him the signs for the syllables ca and ku, this was the
“natural reflex of a syllabic system.”
Naturally enough, Whorf occupied himself exclusively with the
codices, since the texts are usually accompanied by pictures which might
give clues as to the reading, and he showed by examples in the Dresden
that the block of glyphs over each picture has a linguistic structure: with
verb first, then the object, and the subject (usually a god) last, closely
reflecting the usual VOS order of Yucatec Maya - recall “knows the
counsel the scribe?”
Sadly, when it came time to apply these highly valid generalizations to
the nitty-gritty of deciphering glyphs, Whorf seemed to go to pieces, and
made errors as egregious as any in Brasseur and Thomas. Whorf was an
atomist, both in this paper and in another that he brought out in 1942: as
the young epigrapher Steve Houston has recently put it,26 “Whorf
argued that signs could be reduced to even smaller parts, a hook
indicating one sound, doubled lines another” - a very odd position to
take by someone who knew how other early writing systems in the Old
World worked. This sloppiness left him open to attack from the
Mayanist establishment.
Whorf did, however, score a few hits. He correctly identified the sign
for the verb “to drill” in the codices, and gave it the yet-unproven
reading hax (Thompson later adopted this without giving Whorf credit),
and used Landa’s ma and ca signs to decipher the month sign of Mac
(ma + ca), a harbinger of the great breakthrough which was to be made
ten years later in the Soviet Union. And he was surely right in his reading
of the name-sign for God D in the codices as Itzamna, the Maya supreme
deity in late pre-Conquest Yucatan.
Whorf did not have to wait very long for the attacks to begin. In the
January 1935 issue of Maya Research the Irish solicitor Richard C.E.
Long, a close friend of Thompson, brought out an article entitled “Maya
and Mexican writing”27 which pretty much expressed the received
opinion of Whorf’s opponents, who were many. I will omit mention of
the details of Long’s refutation of Whorf s individual readings, for there
can be no doubt that Long was right and Whorf was wrong. I will turn
instead to Long’s major points, for here the case was the reverse.
138 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

Text

(glyphic
script )
ae m.

open
transcription
fnfl h ••• | 00©
transliteration h-i-e-sa u-to-kak i - win - a ka - haw

reconstruction ha^esah V 'tok-kak ijamna ka aha*/

translation TCauses by! his burning-fire Itzamna our lord
Ldrilling J
traditional
Maya haxezah u tooc kak Itzamna ca ahau
orthography

stews: ha4 ‘drill taladrar o

voca bulary agujerear taladrando ’
of the hai kak 'encender luwbre
text frota-ndo un palo con otro’
"tok 'burn* ‘guernar*
kaK ‘f ire’ ruego o lumbre
ijawtia. name of a god
a haw ‘lord’ Vey, ogren senor*
u ‘his’ ka 'our1 -es- Causative
-an transitive, non-future i llustrati on

30 Whorf’s attempt at deciphering page 38b of the Madrid Codex: an example of

his atomistic approach to the glyphs.

To Long, only “true” or “complete” writing can express every word

of the language; in contrast, “embryo” writing cannot, even though it
may still transmit some information. The Maya script is “embryo”
writing: “I do not think that in any instance there is a real grammatical
sentence,” Long tells us. He doesn’t even accept Whorf’s verbs as verbs.
There simply isn’t room to say much, once one sets aside the known
numerical and calendrical material. Grudgingly accepting that a small
amount of phoneticism might exist in certain non-calendrical glyphs, he
claims that these are comparable to the rebus or puzzle-writing of the
Aztec, and, like that other “embryo” script, are probably confined to the
writing of personal and place-names.
But Long’s real, underlying agenda is his unwillingness to grant the
brown-skinned Maya a culture as complex as that of Europe, China, or
the Near East. Here are a pair of telling quotes: “E. B. Tylor said long ago
that writing marked the difference between civilization and barbar-
t®tn.the fact remains that no native race in America possessed a
complete writing and therefore none had attained civilization according
to Tylor’s definition.” The same quasi-racism was to color Ignace Gelb’s
Study of Writing of 1952, and I am afraid other works of this century.
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 139

Whorf answered Long in the October 1935 issue of Maya Research,28

using eerily prophetic language:

... this position of Long’s is methodological in implication. It might be a

comforting one, in the sense that it would absolve archaeologists of responsibility
if they fail to take up the problem of deciphering those combinations of
characters. For if Mr. Long is right we may have the soothing assurance that these
“hieroglyphics” cannot make definite, positive statements; statements that might
require us to revise archaeological theories about the Maya or about general
cultural history. Therefore we may proceed almost as though they did not exist.

Here Whorf proved himself about fifty years ahead of his time, and he
did so again with his prediction that “it will eventually be possible to
reconstruct the languages of the Old Empire [i.e., Classic] cities just as
our scholars have reconstructed Hittite.”
Whorf died on 26 July 1941, after a “long and lingering” illness, at age
forty-four. Thompson chose not to criticize Whorf s work while he was
still alive, apparently content with the drubbing that it had received at
the hands of Long. But nine years after Whorf s death, Eric rose (or fell)
to the occasion, in an appendix to his Maya Hieroglyphic Writing.29 This
he headed with a barbed quotation from John Buchan: “It is an old trait
of human nature when in the mist to be very sure about its road.” The
opening line of the first paragraph gives a telling example of Eric’s brand
of invective when he was on the offensive - or defensive:

It had been my intention to ignore Whorf’s attempts to read the Maya

hieroglyphic writing, supposing that all students of the subject would by now have
consigned them to that limbo which already holds the discredited interpretations
of Brasseur de Bourbourg, de Rosny, Charency, Le Plongeon, Cresson, and Cyrus
Thomas.

Thompson then went for the jugular, taking three of Whorf s weakest
cases, and worrying them to death, while at the same time deliberately
skirting the truly important part of the Whorfian message, his general
statements about the probable nature of the script. On the unwary or
unwise, this methodology makes a great impression — you attack your
opponent on a host of details, and avoid the larger issues. Eric did this
with Matthew Stirling in 1941 when he “proved” to his own satisfaction
and that of most of his colleagues that the Olmec civilization was later
than the Classic Maya;30 in the 1950s when he “proved” his Russian
opponent, Knorosov, to be wrong; and again in a posthumous article
which “proved” that the Grolier Codex was a fake.
There is almost no way to defend Whorf s readings - they are almost
all wrong. But his real message - that Maya writing must phonetically
record one or another Mayan language — lives. Whorf s Maya research
was a tragedy with an ultimately happy ending.
140 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

I have very mixed feelings about what some consider not only
Thompson’s greatest work but the alpha and omega of all Mayanist
research: his Maya Hieroglyphic Writing of 1950.31 In the face of my
dislike of many aspects of this huge work, I still use it as a textbook in my
course on the subject, and virtually force my students to buy it. For
anyone wanting to know how the Maya calendar and astronomy actually
worked, this book is a must. Eric was a superb iconographer, and came
up with very astute and generally correct insights about Maya religion
and mythology - here Jacinto Cunil was a positive influence. Setting
aside the heavy overlay of artsy-literary allusions there is much still to be
learned from the book. I view it not as a kind of Summa Hieroglyphicae
of the Maya script, as many do, but as a sort of gigantic, complex logjam
which held back the decipherment among a whole generation of
Western scholars, held in thrall by its sheer size and detail, and probably
also by Thompson’s sharp tongue.
First, though, the good news. Eric did present some new readings in
his 1950 work, and these have generally held up in the light of the great
decipherment of our time. He established that one sign, very common in
the codices where it appears affixed to main signs, can be read as te or che,
“tree” or “wood,” and as a numerical classifier in counts of periods of
time, such as years, months, or days. In Yucatec, you cannot for instance
say ox haab for “three years,” but must say ox-te haab, “three-te years.” In
modern dictionaries te also means “tree,” and this other meaning for the
sign was confirmed when Thompson found it in compounds accompa¬
nying pictures of trees in the Dresden Codex. He also hit upon the
reading of tu for another affix appearing before counts of days; this is the
3rd person possessive which changes cardinal numbers like “three” into
ordinals (“third”). This was indeed an advance, since it made it possible
for him to read the peculiar system of dates used on lintels in Yucatecan
sites like Chichen Itza.

Thompson, a. te, “tree,”

vScQ “wood”; numerical classifier.
b. ti, “at,” “on,” “with.” c. tu,
>■ riH “at his/hers/its.”

c.

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
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 141

functioned as a purely phonetic-syllabic sign, as the bishop implied, was

something that Eric simply could not allow.
Here were three glyphs, then, that the leading anti-phoneticist of his
day was reading in the Yucatec Maya tongue. That begins to sound
subversive! Even further, back in 194433 he had shown that the pair of
fish fins, or at times a pair of fishes, which flanked the Month-patron
head in the great glyph which always introduces an Initial Series date on a
Classic monument, is a rebus sign: the fish is a shark, xoc in Maya (Tom
Jones has recently proved that xoc is the origin of the English word
“shark”)- And xoc also means “to count” in Maya.
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. Now Webster defines anagogy as the
“interpretation of a word, passage, or text (as of Scripture or poetry) that
finds beyond the literal, allegorical, and moral senses a fourth and
ultimate spiritual and mystical sense.” The glyphs are not expressing
something as mundane and down-to-earth as language, but something
much deeper, according to Thompson:
Without a full understanding of the text one can not, for instance, tell whether the
presence of a glyph of a dog refers to that animal’s role as bringer of fire to
mankind or to his duty of leading the dead to the underworld. That such mystical
meanings are imbedded in the glyphs is beyond doubt, but as yet we can only guess
as to the association the Maya author had in mind. Clearly, our duty is to seek
more of those mythological allusions.34

The epigrapher’s task, then, is to find these mythological associations

for every sign — this will bring us to “the solution of the glyphic
problem,” which “leads us, key in hand, to the threshold of the inner
keep of the Maya soul, and bids us enter.” Athanasius Kircher would
have recognized all this.
If Thompson had little use for anthropologists, he had even less for
linguists, a viewpoint which received ample confirmation when a review
of Thompson’s book by the linguist Archibald Hill of the University of
Virginia appeared in a linguistics journal.35 In it, Hill had the gall to
suggest that given the fact that the language of the glyphs is known, and
given the presence of clues to the content of the writing in the codices in
the accompanying illustrations, then perhaps the failure of a real
142 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

decipherment “invites the suspicion that there have been shortcomings

in the method by which the problem has been attacked.” “The present
book reveals what many of these shortcomings are. Thompson is
unaware that his problem is essentially a linguistic one....” Worst of all,
“Thompson assumes, as have all Maya scholars with the exception of
Whorf, that many of the glyphs represent, not Maya words or
constructions, but universal ideas.” “A glance through this or any of the
other publications in Maya hieroglyphs will amply confirm the
statement that the intimate dependence of the inscriptions on Maya
language is unfortunately minimized.” Hill’s review must have been a
bitter one for Eric, for it not only extols Whorf, another linguist, but
pillories the style of the book as “discursive, interlarded with quotations
from literature and the arts.”
Thompson’s reply36 was swift and characteristic: “In writing a review
one should know something about the subject under discussion and
should have read the book with some care. Dr. Hill ... fails in both
respects.” “Dr. Hill feels that he is more at home when faced with
Whorf’s ideas on decipherment. When a colleague read my manuscript,
he remarked of the discussion of Whorf’s methods ‘Why flog that dead
horse? There can’t be a person who takes seriously Whorf s fantastic
work.’ ” The linguistic approach was useless: “One cannot translate all
glyphs into modern Yucatec because many of them are ideographic and
in many cases the corresponding archaic term is now lost.”

An example invoked by Thompson to defend what Hill had castigated

as the “semi-romantic approach” - that is, a partial dependence on
ethnology and mythology for translation - is the glyph identified in the
last century as the sign for the direction which is chikin, meaning
“sunset” (and, by extension, “west”), in Yucatec. Eric claimed that the
hand which appears over the sun glyph is “completion,” and that the
whole combination means “completion of sun”; it would thus be
entirely logographic. This in retrospect was an unfortunate choice of his,
for we now know that the hand is the glyph for the sound chi, and that
when placed above the logogram kin the combination does indeed read
chikin. But typical of Thompson, he ignored Hill’s main point while
zeroing in on subsidiary details. Hill was relegated to the limbo into
which Whorf had been hurled.
 THE AGE OF THOMPSON 143

33 Clauses isolated by Beyer at Chicken hza. These ones are now all
read as Kakupacal (see pp. 159-160).

A far more formidable enemy, however, than any of these despised

linguists was waiting just over the horizon.

Although few admitted it, by mid-century the decipherment of the non-

calendrical part of the inscriptions and codices was really no further
advanced than it had been fifty years earlier. In an appraisal published in
1940, Morley probably spoke for most of his colleagues when he said
that “time in its various manifestations, the accurate record of its
principal phenomena, constitutes the major content of Maya writ¬
ing. .. .”37 Thus far, not one name for any of the ancient Maya centers
had been identified, “much less that for any of the different rulers of its
many city states,” and Morley could state that “the writer strongly
doubts that any place name will ever be found in the Maya stone
inscriptions.” “One may hazard the guess that the remaining undeci-
phered glyphs deal with ceremonial matters.”
Apart from the almost plaintive stabs at decipherment by linguists —
speedily quashed by Thompson — the only shaft of light to penetrate the
epigraphic gloom was an analysis of the inscriptions of Chichen Itza
carried out in the 1930s by Hermann Beyer,38 a short-tempered German
employed by Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute in New
Orleans. What he did was to identify recurring sequences of glyphs -
which we now recognize to be clauses (fig. 33); and while he made no
144 THE AGE OF THOMPSON

pretense of actually being able to read or translate these sequences, it was

a structural approach which was to prove extremely fruitful in later
decades when the great decipherment actually took off. Beyer was a very
fine scholar, even though he often drove colleagues like Morley to
distraction. When World War II came, the poor man, already suffering
from cancer, was taken off to a concentration camp in Oklahoma, where
he died in 1942.
But another German, Paul Schellhas - the same one who had classified
the gods in the codices - was completely pessimistic. “The character of
the Maya hieroglyphs is principally ideographic,” he wrote in 1936.
Whorf’s attempts at phonetic readings would probably be the last, and
he agreed with Long that the glyphs “are by no means a real writing in
our sense, and no counterpart to the Egyptian hieroglyphs,” since they
are not able to reproduce the language.39
In 1945, at the war’s end, when Schellhas was a very old man of eighty-
five, he published his last paper in the Swedish journal Ethnos.40 The title
posed the question: “The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs: an
unsolvable problem?” Schellhas’ despondent conclusion was that it was,
in fact, unsolvable.
If so, seldom in the history of science had so many brilliant minds
labored so long with so little to show for their effort. Who would read
the glyphs? No one, apparently.
 6 A New Wind from the East

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the autumn of 1952 was a

most unlikely place and time for a great breakthrough in Maya
decipherment. Only seven years before, the Soviet Union had emerged
from a war that had cost it twenty million lives and untold suffering.
With its people held in the iron grip of the world’s most ruthless
dictator, terrorized by Stalin’s political police and the Gulag system, the
nation’s only aim seemed to be the glorification of the pockmarked
“leader, teacher, friend,” whose days were numbered. Stalin in fact died
the very next year, but the hold of the Party, the bureaucracy, and the
KGB was to remain strong for the next few decades.
In those fear-ridden days, intellectual innovation was nearly an
impossibility. From 1946 until his demise in 1948, Stalin’s henchman
Andrei Zhdanov instituted a program of xenophobic repression in the
arts and sciences that virtually put a halt to creative work in and out of
the universities. And in 1948, Comrade Trofim Lysenko triumphed in
his struggle to replace genetics with his own brand of hare-brained
pseudo-science - he had the dictator’s ear, and his enemies did not. The
price of dissent was the Gulag or worse.
It was thus improbable that under such dreadful circumstances
anything new or exciting would emerge in the world of Soviet
scholarship, least of all in Leningrad: in 1949, the paranoid Stalin
ordered almost the entire leadership of the city to be arrested on
trumped-up charges and “shortened by a head,” as Stalin liked to put it,
and Zhdanovism reigned in Leningrad University and in the various
institutes under the mantle of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.
But in October 1952, a new number of the anthropological journal
Sovietskaya Etnografiya (a publication largely given over to “scientific”
Marxism-Leninism and replete with praise for the great Stalin) con¬
tained an article entitled “Drevniaia Pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noi Ameriki”
(“Ancient Writing of Central America”).1 The author was a thirty-year-
old investigator in Leningrad’s Institute of Ethnology, and his article
would eventually lead to the cracking of the Maya script and enable

145
146 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

those distant Lords of the Forest to speak to us in their own voice. A

Russian, a citizen of Stalin’s vast domains, effectively isolated from the
rest of the intellectual world, had accomplished what generations of
more fortunate Mayanists in the outside world had failed to do.

The article’s then-unknown author, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, was

born to ethnic Russian parents on 19 November 1922 (12.15.8.10.13 13
Ben 6 Zac in the Maya system), in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.2
Entering Moscow University at the age of seventeen, he was eventually
swept up in World War II and joined the Red Army in 1943.
That Knorosov survived the terrible carnage of that conflict is a
miracle. Serving as an artillery spotter in the 58th Heavy Artillery, his
unit reached Berlin at the beginning of May 1945, during the death
throes of the Third Reich; the Soviet Flag flew at last over the Reichstag.
The young artilleryman found the National Library on fire. Out of the
thousands of books being consumed, he managed to snatch one from the
flames. Incredibly, it was the one-volume edition of the Dresden,
Madrid, and Paris codices published in 1933 by the Guatemalan scholars
Antonio and Carlos Villacorta. Knorosov brought this old trophy back
home with him, along with his four battle medals.
Demobilized, Knorosov returned that year to Moscow University,
where he concentrated in Egyptology; but Japanese literature, the Arabic
language, and the writing systems of China and ancient India also
claimed his attention. Some of his mentors at the university, believing
him to be a born Egyptologist, tried to persuade him to abandon Chinese
and to preoccupy himself less with archaeology and ethnology. But
comparative studies were Knorosov’s real forte, and his enquiring mind
could not be confined to Egypt.
The spark that had been implanted in the ruins of Berlin by the finding
of the Villacorta book was nourished by his professor, Sergei
Aleksandrovich Tokarev, a specialist on the peoples of Siberia, eastern
Europe, Oceania, and the Americas (Marxism had at least the merit of
encouraging a comparative approach), who had read Paul Schellhas’
pessimistic article on the impossibility of ever reading the Maya glyphs.
In 1947, Tokarev posed his brilliant pupil a question:
If you believe that any writing system produced by humans can be read by
humans, why don’t you try to crack the Maya system?
Many thought Knorosov too young, too imprudent for such a
difficult task, but Tokarev’s reply was, “Youth is the time to undertake
bold enterprises.” Knorosov’s response was to learn Spanish and to
commence a translation of - and commentary on - Bishop Landa’s
Relacion; this became his doctoral dissertation and the foundation of his
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 147

pioneering work on the decipherment.3 He completed his studies in

Moscow and took up a research post in Leningrad’s Institute of
Ethnology; there he has been ever since, in his first-floor office in Peter
the Great’s old Kunstkammer above the banks of the Neva.

Knorosov’s great achievement indicates that even in those days,

considerable advances could be made by Soviet scientists and scholars,
as long as they stayed clear of tabooed subjects like Mendelian biology,
Freudian psychology, and Western social theory; the rapid develop¬
ment of the Soviet nuclear weapons and space programs is ample
evidence for this. But bearing in mind the Zhdanovian atmosphere
which prevailed in the research institutions and journals, it is hardly
surprising that the nineteen pages of the Sovietskaya Etnografiya article
were preceded by a brief comment by the editor, S.P. Tolstov (author of
a Stalinist diatribe entitled “Anglo-American Anthropology in the
Service of Imperialism”), in which he extolled the Marxist-Leninist
approach which had enabled the young Knorosov to triumph where
bourgeois scholars had failed. Tolstov thus provided ammunition for
the unrelenting attacks of the man who was to be Knorosov’s most bitter
foe: Eric Thompson.
After the semi-mystical and pseudo-literary ramblings by Thompson,
the Knorosov paper seems like a model of logical presentation.
Incidentally, neither here nor anywhere else in his published writings
does Knorosov ever invoke the sacred names of Marx, Engels, or Stalin,
contrary to what many of his Western detractors, and even supporters,
have claimed.
After a description of Landa’s opus, and Landa’s exposition of the
script, Knorosov explores the history of attempts to decipher the non-
calendrical Maya glyphs, and the ups and downs of the Landa
“alphabet,” taking his account up to the gloomy Schellhas paper of
1945. What he says next sets the stage for his own unique contribution.
It will be remembered from Chapter 1 that Sylvanus Morley, following a
scheme that dates back to the Victorian anthropologist E.B. Tylor,
proposed that writing systems had progressed from pictographic,
through ideographic (with Chinese given as an ideographic system par
excellence, since according to Morley each sign stands for an idea), to
phonetic. Roundly denouncing this scheme for its hyper-evolutionism,
Knorosov demonstrates that these supposed stages coexist in all early
scripts, including Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese, and he gives
examples proving it. These kinds of scripts he calls hieroglyphic, and
places Maya writing squarely with them.
Hieroglyphic writing, in this sense, is typical of state societies, in
148 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

which they are maintained as a monopoly by a class of priestly scribes. In

such systems one finds “ideograms” (now known as logograms), which
have both conceptual and phonetic value; phonetic signs (like the
monoconsonantal signs of Egypt); and “key signs” or determinatives,
classificatory signs with conceptual but not phonetic value.
Here is what Knorosov says about the Landa “alphabet,” flying in the
face of received opinion:

Signs given by D. de Landa, in spite of a century of attack upon them, have exactly
the phonetic meaning that he attributed to them. This does not mean, of course,
either that these signs cannot have other meanings, or that they exhaust the
phonetic signs of the Maya hieroglyphs.

Knorosov accepted what both Valentini and Thompson had accepted

before, that the signs Landa’s informants produced were a response to
each letter of the Spanish alphabet as he (Landa) then pronounced them
in the Spanish of that day. Thus, b would have sounded like English bay, l
something like el-lay, and s like essay; for h, the cleric would have said
something like ah-chay. According to Valentini, the bewildered natives
would have matched these sounds with pictures of “ideograms” of
things, the names of which sounded vaguely like what they were hearing
from the cleric’s mouth; in no way could these signs be interpreted as
phonetic.
Knorosov takes another tack, based on his broad knowledge of scripts
in other parts of the world. To him, most of the signs given by Landa
were not alphabetic, but syllabic: except for the pure vowels, each sign
stands for a consonant-vowel (CV) combination (as in Japanese kana
writing). The principles under which Maya scribes operated are similar
to those of other hieroglyphic systems: (1) signs can have more than one
function, that is, a single glyph might sometimes be phonetic, at other
times stand for a morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning); (2) the
writing order might be inverted for calligraphic purposes, a principle
known to Egyptologists since Champollion’s day; and (3) phonetic signs
might sometimes be added to morphemic ones to lessen ambiguity in the
reading (remember that phonetic-morphemic combinations constitute
most of the characters in Chinese script).
Next, Knorosov closely compares some of the texts in the codices
with the pictures that accompany them, especially in the Dresden. Apart
from its remarkable astronomical content (Venus tables and tables
giving warning of solar or lunar eclipses), most of the Dresden Codex
contains innumerable 260-day counts of tzolkins divided up in different
ways; each division of the tzolkin describes an action of a specific deity on
that particular day; above the god or goddess concerned is a text usually
containing four glyphs; at least one of these glyphs, as Seler, Schellhas,
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 149

and other early scholars had recognized, has to refer to the deity,
followed by an epithet or augury. It was the much-maligned Whorf who
saw that the first of the signs, in the upper left, ought to be the verb or
something like it, and the second, in the upper right, the object of the
sentence.
In his article, Knorosov calls attention to the passage at the bottom of
page 16 in the Dresden. Here the same goddess - almost surely the young
lunar deity - is seated facing left. In the text above her, her glyph appears
in the lower left. Just in back of her head in each picture is a specific bird.
In the first case, this is a mythical horned owl long recognized to be the
Muan Bird associated not only with the Maya Underworld but also with
the topmost, thirteenth heaven. The head of this same creature can be
found in the first position in the text, preceded by the bar-and-dot
number “thirteen.” Logically, then, the rest of the signs in the initial
position above our Moon Goddess should name the other birds
associated with her, but it will be seen that unlike the case of the Muan
Bird, they have no pictorial content. Seler and his followers, ignoring the
Landa “alphabet,” would have labeled them “ideographs” or something
similar. We shall see what our young Russian does with them.
The logic of his procedures goes thus (fig. 34, overleaf):

(1) Let us begin with the sign for “west,” first identified by Leon de
Rosny in 1875. As we saw in the last chapter, this is read in Yucatec Maya
as chikin, and consists of a sign like a grasping hand (phonetic chi),
followed by the logographic sign for “sun,” kin.

(2) Landa’s ku plus chi appear above the picture of the Vulture God in
Madrid 40a and elsewhere. The combination is thus to be read as ku-
ch(i), “vulture” in Colonial and modern Maya dictionaries, the final
vowel of CV-CV combinations remaining silent in syllabic writing.

(3) cu (also in Landa) plus an unknown sign, over the picture of a

turkey, must be the word read in Colonial and modern Maya as cu~tz(u),
“turkey.” (Here Knorosov hints at the Principle of Synharmony, which
he elaborates further in later papers: that in CV-C(V) writing of CVC
words, the vowel of the second syllable is usually (but not always) the
same as the vowel of the first.) The unknown sign must therefore be tzu.

(4) cu plus an unknown sign, over a picture of the Moon Goddess

carrying a burden (Dresden 16b and elsewhere) must be cu<h(u),
“burden.” The unknown sign is thus chu.

(5) chu plus ca (Landa) plus ah or ha (Landa), over a picture of a captive

god must be chu-c(a)-ah, “captured.” We shall see that this reading will
play a crucial role in the decipherment of the monumental inscriptions
of the Classic cities.
 150 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

cutz, “turkey”

6.

buluc, “eleven”

cuch,“burden” chucah, “captured”

ku-> . i - .... - ku

8. 9.

tzul, “dog” kuk, “quetzal” mo’o, “macaw”

34 Knorosov’s methodology. For key to numbers 1-9, see main text.

 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 151

(6) In Dresden 19a, in a position which should contain the bar-and-dot

number “eleven” above a column of day-signs, there are three glyphs.
The first of these is defaced, but the second is one of Landa’s Vs -
presumably l followed by an unknown vowel - and the third is cu. Since
“eleven” is buluc in Yucatec Maya, the missing sign must be bu and
Landa’s second l must be lu.

(7) tzu plus lu over a picture of the Dog God in Dresden 21b and
elsewhere must be tzu-l(u), “dog” in one of our earliest Maya
dictionaries, the Motul.

(8) Returning to our Moon Goddess with birds, where she is pictured
with a quetzal, the relevant glyph is clearly Landa’s ku reduplicated. This
must then be ku-k(u), “quetzal” in all Mayan languages.

(9) An unknown sign plus reduplicated o (in Landa), over the goddess
pictured with a macaw must be mo-o-o (or mo’o), “macaw.” The
unknown glyph is thus mo.

What about the glyph which follows the name of each bird? Knorosov
notes a phonetic substitution for the usual, logographic sign for the
month of Muan (usually expressed by the head of the Muan Bird), in
which the first sign is a cartouche with a curl in it; he thus reads it as the
syllable mu. This also precedes Landa’s ti in the glyphic combination
mentioned above, and it, in turn, is preceded by Landa’s u, the 3rd
person possessive. We must therefore here decipher it as u mu't(i), “her
bird (or omen).” An entire glyph block in this famous passage ought to
be parsed as “[bird-name], her bird (or omen), the Moon Goddess,
augury or epithet.”
He even finds a good example of phonetic reinforcement, with the
logographic sign for “sky, heaven,” caan, followed by an affix which he
interprets as na.
Freely admitting that some of his decipherments were first made by
Cyrus Thomas (whom he admires), Knorosov points out that the words
deciphered are ordinary, well-known ones registered in all the Yucatec
vocabularies, and are not hypothetical. His epoch-making article
concludes, “The system of Maya writing is typically hieroglyphic and in
its principles of writing does not differ from known hieroglyphic
systems.” If he was right, then Landa’s “alphabet” was truly the Rosetta
Stone (although he never calls it that) to the cracking of the script, and
Knorosov’s methodology would lead the way to the full decipherment.
The Soviet media were not slow to pick up on a story which cast glory
upon the scientific prowess of the U.S.S.R., and Knorosov’s achieve¬
ment was broadcast throughout the world, even appearing in the pages
of the New York Times. A gauntlet had been cast down to Western
152 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

epigraphers, particularly to Thompson, who was hardly one to avoid a

challenge like this.

Thompson chose to fire the first cannonade in his one-sided war with
Knorosov in the 1953 issue of the Mexican journal Yan,4 a short-lived
anthropological publication edited by Carmen Cook de Leonard, a good
friend of Eric’s who was perpetually at odds with Mexico’s Institute of
Anthropology and History. Eric’s opening paragraph gives the reader a
hint of what is to follow:

During recent years, claims of “first things in the world” which have emanated
from Moscow have gone from the invention of the submarine to the invention of
baseball. A little-known claim of this sort pertains to the discovery of the
principles which are the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphic writing of the
Maya of Central America....

After quoting at length Tolstov’s tendentious introduction extolling

Marxist-Leninist methodology, Thompson claims (wrongly, in fact) that
Knorosov repeats such cant; what the young Soviet actually did in his
first section was to accuse Thompson and Morley of taking a mystical
approach to the glyphs through their notion of a cult of time - a fairly
just charge!
It will be recalled that Thompson dealt posthumously with Whorf by
paying no attention whatsoever to Whorf’s larger points, and devoting
much ink to the latter’s minor mistakes (and mistakes they were), like a
terrier worrying a rat. He did exactly the same with this new menace
from behind the Iron Curtain. After wholeheartedly accepting the old
Valentini explanation of the Landa “alphabet,” Thompson chides the
Russian for the fact that five of his fifteen decipherments had already
been made by Thomas (as Knorosov makes clear in his article); and
Thomas, he was quick to point out, “worked in a horizon previous to
Lenin.” Next, Thompson eagerly pounced on a clear-cut bloomer: Yuri
Valentinovich had identified an animal on Dresden 13c as a jaguar, when
it is surely a doe. Gleefully, Eric illustrates this creature side-by-side with
an indubitable jaguar also from the Dresden, “so that readers may reflect
on the Marxist jaguar.” As Knorosov had rather slipshoddily read the
glyphic combination accompanying this picture as chacmool (“great
claw”), a known epithet for the jaguar, the whole epigrammatic edifice
thrown up by the Russian collapses like a house of cards, in Thompson’s
jaundiced view.
At the close of his contemptuous review, Thompson poses a question:
does Knorosov have any “scientific honor”? The answer is clearly “no.”
In conclusion:
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 153

... this could be an authentic example of the effects of strict Party cooperation by a
small group who work in research in Russia. For the good of the Free World, it is
hoped that it is so, as far as military research is concerned.

The great Mayanist had spoken: Knorosov’s methodology was not even
worth a sentence, and his so-called “decipherment” was a Marxist hoax
and propaganda ploy.
During Thompson’s lifetime, it was a rare Maya scholar who dared to
contradict the field’s Grand Panjandrum on this or most other questions
- certainly not in print. But, in 1955, the Swedish linguist and Sinologist
Tor Ulving published a remarkable appreciation of the 1952 article in
the Swedish journal Ethnos.5 Following a summary of the Soviet’s
approach and findings, here is his evaluation of what Knorosov had
accomplished:

It will be the task of the experts in Maya hieroglyphics to give the final verdict on
the value of the new decipherment here briefly outlined. But even now it can safely
be said that its importance in the history of Maya glyph deciphering cannot be
questioned [he presumably had not read Thompson’s diatribe]. The troublesome
fact that it is presented in a language inaccessible to most scholars of the Western
world must be no excuse for them not to familiarize themselves thoroughly with
it. For the first time the writing system has been shown to be built up according to
principles prevailing in other primitive writings. This is already a strong indication
that the new decipherment is laid on a sound basis. It is further hard to believe that
so consistent a system of syllabic signs, with phonetic values that seem to fit all
combinations where they occur, could have been worked out if it were not
essentially correct.

Sweden may have been open to such a new avenue of research, but
Germany (the home of Forstemann, Seler, and Schellhas) was certainly
not. The next year, in 1956, the young German epigrapher Thomas
Barthel - who had been a cryptographer with the Wehrmacht during the
war - took up where Thompson had left off (but minus the Cold War
polemics), at a meeting in Copenhagen of the International Congress of
Americanists.6 This was a meeting also attended by Knorosov, who had
managed to sneak into the large entourage of the great expert on Siberian
archaeology, Academician Okladnikov, and he delivered a paper (in
English) at the same session. By this time, there was considerably more
for an enemy of Knorosovian methodology to get his teeth into, for
Knorosov in 1955 had brought out a more ambitious work in Spanish
translation; his new readings included a great many of mainly morphe¬
mic references, and I must with some sorrow say that even those most
sympathetic to his approach from the very beginning have felt that with
many of these, Yuri Valentinovich has strayed off the mark - or at least
did not provide the justifications that are so strong with his phonetic
work based upon Landa.
154 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

Be that as it may, Barthel stressed that the Cambridge (i.e., Thompson)

and the Hamburg schools (he then taught there) saw eye-to-eye on the
Knorosov problem.
Barthel’s career is a curious one. Like some sort of doppelganger, his
career in decipherment parallels that of Knorosov’s in many ways, yet
unlike the Soviet’s, has left few intellectual offspring. Both have devoted
their lives to epigraphy, both have tried to crack the Maya script, and
both have put their minds to the Rongo-rongo script of remote Easter
Island. To my mind, where Barthel went wrong was in his unswerving
loyalty to the anti-phonetic tradition of his German predecessors (he
noted that his Copenhagen paper was given on the fiftieth anniversary of
Forstemann’s death), but perhaps even more in his unwillingness to see
the Maya script as a true writing system like those of the Old World
civilizations - a view matched by Thompson and his friend Richard
Long. Knorosov’s background in comparative studies, whether Marxist
or not, gave him the strength that they lacked.

Some thirty-five years ago, Merida was Mexico’s quietest backwater, a

gleaming white city of largely one-story houses, with many bronzed
Maya women clad in dazzling white huipils in the streets and markets;
Yucatec Maya could still be heard throughout, and it had a deserved
reputation as being a safe, spotlessly clean provincial capital. I had
married the daughter of the noted geneticist and Russian exile
Theodosius Dobzhansky in March of 1955; Sophie was an undergra¬
duate major in anthropology at Radcliffe, I was a beginning graduate
student at Harvard (we actually met over a lab table, filling human skulls
with mustard seed to measure cranial capacity). I proposed taking her to
the Maya area, which she had never seen, over the next Christmas
holiday, and in late December and early January of 1955-56,7 we found
ourselves in Merida, as a base for excursions to sites like Uxmal and
Chichen Itza.
Our hotel in Merida was the Montejo, a thoroughly old-fashioned
hostelry in Colonial style. We were delighted and somewhat awed to
find that a fellow guest was the famous Carnegie artist-archaeologist
Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a slim, nervous, brown-haired lady then in her
mid-forties. I had gotten to know many of the Carnegie people, including
Eric Thompson, because their Cambridge headquarters at 10 Frisbie
Place was cheek-by-jowl with the Peabody Museum, where the
Anthropology Department was based, so “Tania” was an old acquain¬
tance, so to speak.
Tania was definitely interested in Maya writing, but she always
deferred to Eric’s opinions (as did the rest of the Carnegie crowd); her
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 155

epoch-making findings about the subject-matter of the inscriptions were

not to see the light of day for another five years. But even though she
pretty much toed Eric’s particular line, Tania was a gloriously contrary
person. In fact, she was legendary in this regard: if you said, “Tania, isn’t
this a nice day?,” Tania would deny it, but a few minutes later comment
on how good the weather was. Given this, and given her (often denied)
interest in things Russian - like my parents-in-law, she, too, was an exile
— it is hardly surprising that she would have expressed a curiosity about
the work of Yuri Knorosov.
One of my manias is the collecting of books on Mesoamerica, a
disease that began in my student days, and one that I have never once
regretted. Prowling through Merida’s scattering of bookstores, all badly
stocked, we did come across one of the last copies for sale of the great,
early Colonial, Yucatec Maya dictionary edited by Martinez Hernandez,
along with a grubbily-produced little pamphlet8 turned out by the
“Biblioteca Obrera,” apparently a front organization of the then-illegal
Communist Party of Mexico. While the other titles in the series
included J.V. Stalin’s “Economic Problems of Socialism in the
U.S.S.R.” and “How to be a Good Communist” by Liu Shao-chi, this
one was an unauthorized Spanish translation of most of Knorosov’s
1952 Sovietskaya Etnografiya bombshell.
I read this through several times. It made incredibly good sense to me,
in fact seemed to be the first sensible treatment I had read of the non-
calendrical portion of the script. In the light of what I knew of Oriental
scripts (I had just spent two years in Taiwan, and was currently studying
Japanese at Harvard with Edwin O. Reischauer), it made even more
sense. Since Sophie was bilingual in English and Russian, we reached the
conclusion that Knorosov’s work ought to reach a wider audience in the
United States and elsewhere through translation.
Tania had bought the same pamphlet, and when she finished it, we
could see that she was deeply interested, but I believe that until Eric’s
death she was torn between a conviction that Knorosov might just be
right, and her fear of Eric’s disapproval. She never did reconcile these
two attitudes. “Maybe he’s got something, but I just don’t know” was
her usual reaction.
I felt considerably fewer qualms about opposing Thompson, even
though I was but a young neophyte in the Maya field, and Thompson had
been at it for decades. Years of strict education and discipline in New
England boarding schools had made me reluctant to accept authority
without question, and I had long agreed with Thomas Jefferson that “a
little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” Much as I respected Eric
Thompson for his vast erudition, I sensed that, in certain areas, that
particular emperor had no clothes. One of these was his absolute
156 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

unwillingness to grant the Olmec of Veracruz and Tabasco, the carvers

of great stone heads, any priority in the development of civilization over
the Classic Maya; Eric had marshaled vast quantities of facts to crush the
Olmec and their enthusiasts, but I had the gall to publish a refutation
when I was yet a graduate student, thereby alienating various Thompso-
nians, young and old alike.
My other act of subversion was to write directly to Knorosov,
expressing my interest in his work and support for his ideas about early
writing systems. In my letter of 20 August, 1957,1 said in one paragraph:
If I correctly understand your viewpoint, the Maya script would be very much
like modern Japanese writing. As you know, the Japanese have a large number of
Chinese ideograms (kanji) to express the roots of their words; for an essentially
non-affixing language like Chinese this would suffice, but not for grammatically
complex Japanese. Consequently, Japanese affixes are expressed by syllabic signs
(kana) ultimately derived from the ideograms. However, any Japanese sentence
can be expressed entirely by kana. It appears that it is this dual nature of Maya
writing which has led Thompson, on the one hand, and Whorf, on the other,
astray. You have conclusively demonstrated syllabic affixing in the Maya script
and that Thompson’s so-called “decipherments” are no more than guesses at the
meaning of some ideograms.

I was wrong about affixing: syllabic writing has turned out to be

pervasive throughout the Maya script. I was also wrong about
“ideograms.” This was part of a correspondence that extended over the
years; I get a degree of satisfaction thinking about the puzzlement of all
the spooks who opened and read this mail, for this was the period when
the CIA was scanning all correspondence with the Soviet Union, and
their KGB counterparts were doing a like job, on their side.
Knorosov’s doctoral thesis on Landa was published in 1955, and he
sent us a copy. Sophie and I wrote a laudatory review in American
Antiquity, calling attention to his work on decipherment. This must have
displeased Thompson, but what really must have galled the great
Mayanist was when we called attention to the Soviet’s telling compari¬
son of Thompson with Athanasius Kircher! And matters were made
even worse when Sophie’s translation of a new paper by Knorosov
outlining his methods and decipherments appeared in the same journal
in 1958,9 ensuring a wide audience among Mayanists and linguists for
those subversive views from behind the Iron Curtain.

Dave Kelley - David Humiston Kelley, to give him his full name - must
surely be unique in the annals of Maya studies.10 A lively mixture of Irish
puckishness and New England Yankee sobriety, Dave’s large frame, bald
head, and leprechaun smile are familiar features at professional
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 157

meetings, where he can always be expected to present a paper that may be

unusual and even outrageous, according to one’s lights, but is usually
grounded in the most impeccable scholarship.
I have known Dave since the days when we were fellow undergra¬
duates at Harvard, and I have always been struck by his immense
knowledge of whatever is strange, outlandish, and out-of-the-way
anywhere in the world. UFOs, the genealogy of Irish and Armenian
kings, trans-Pacific diffusion, and lost continents have all claimed his
attention at various stages of his career. He is a born non-conformist, and
it is small wonder that he has pursued his own untrammeled path in
Maya decipherment, to the disgust of Eric Thompson.
East Jaffrey is a delightful, old-fashioned New Hampshire village in the
shadow of Mt. Monadnock, and it was there that Dave spent much of his
youth, in a Victorian frame house with two aunts. I will never forget the
day that he invited me up there with other student friends. There were
the two aged maiden aunts in rockers. Up on the third floor was Dave’s
own room, which one entered through a horrific wall mural depicting
the destruction-of-the-world page from the Dresden Codex, painted by
his younger brother. The shelves were lined with archaeology books, sci-
fi pulp magazines of the most outre sort, and UFO literature. This was
clearly not your average Harvard student.
Dave was born in Albany to an Irish Catholic father and a Yankee
mother, and passed his early years at school in upstate New York. His
career as an archaeologist was set at age fifteen. His Aunt Alice Humiston
(one of the two old ladies I met in East Jaffrey) was then Chief Cataloguer
for the University of California in Los Angeles Library, and a friend of
Miss Margaret Morley, Sylvanus’ niece. Miss Morley recommended
Digging in Yucatan by Ann Axtell Morris (wife of a Carnegie
archaeologist) as something a boy might be interested in.11 So, Aunt
Alice sent him a copy. Two of the plates in the book fascinated him: one,
near the beginning, showed a tremendous mound of dirt at Chichen Itza,
with people standing on it, while in the second one, near the end, that
same mound had turned into the resplendent Temple of the Thousand
Columns. As Dave puts it, “I thought, hey, that’s something I’d like
doing.”
A few years later, Dave wrote to A.M. Tozzer about getting into
Harvard, and Tozzer replied encouragingly. Following a three-year stint
in the Army, Kelley entered Harvard as a freshman in 1946, where he
became one of Tozzer’s two last student advisees (William Sanders, who
was to specialize in central Mexico, was the other). Tozzer was an
exacting teacher: he covered the blackboard in the seminar room with
bibliography in a minute hand, and one was expected to read everything,
including even those sources that did not support your point of view.
158 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

“This included people like Eric,” Dave told me, “of whom he was not
overly fond, and whose opinions he didn’t always respect.” Dave and
myself were both lucky in that Carnegie’s Division of Historical
Research, which was responsible for the study of the Maya, occupied an
old frame building right next to the Peabody Museum, and Dave saw a
great deal of both Eric Thompson and Tania Proskouriakoff.
Dave Kelley recognizes that his relationship with Thompson was
never particularly close; Eric obviously disliked Dave’s non-conformist
views on the historical nature of the Classic monuments and inscriptions
(in which he anticipated a revolution that was to follow), his non-
acceptance of the Thompson (or GMT) correlation (about which in fact
Thompson proved to be right), his theories about the trans-Pacific
diffusion of the Mesoamerican calendar from west to east (Dave made
this the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation), and his interest in
phoneticism.
It was chance that brought Kelley and Knorosov together, an event
that turned Dave into the Russian’s most effective spokesman in the
West. During the summer of 1956, Dave was in Scotland and Ireland,
characteristically researching Woodrow Wilson’s genealogy for a friend
who was writing the President’s biography; he took advantage of his stay
in Europe to cross over to Copenhagen for the International Conference
of Americanists.12 There he was transfixed by the presentation of
Knorosov (of whom he had previously nevei* heard), and after meeting
him, chatted with him in Spanish, their only lingua franca (both spoke it
badly, according to Dave).
Returning to Harvard that fall, he found a conspiracy in progress. For
several years running, those students who were interested in Mesoamer-
ica had joined together in an informal seminar which we called the
“Mesa Cuadrada” (“Square Table”) in emulation of the Mesa Redonda
(“Round Table”) which had existed for many years in Mexico. The
speakers we managed to bring in, and our student talks, were a lot more
interesting than the more official seminar series sponsored by the
Anthropology faculty, and we had a larger attendance than they did, to
the annoyance of the authorities. During the academic year 1956-57, it
was my turn to be Mesa Cuadrada president, and with Tania’s
surreptitious help I organized an evening session entirely devoted to the
implications of Knorosov’s work. It was quite a session. In line with
Knorosov’s comparative approach to early writing systems, we had
presentations on the Egyptian script from William Stevenson Smith of
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and on the Chinese script by a Chinese
scholar from Harvard’s Yenching Institute (his name now escapes me).
For historical perspective on past attempts at phonetic decipherment,
linguist John Carroll, Whorf’s literary executor, talked on that much-
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 159

maligned innovator, and for Knorosov’s own theories and decipher¬

ments, we had Dave Kelley himself. I still have Tania Proskouriakoff’s
proposed outline for the session (see Appendix A), and it shows that she
had an entirely modern approach to this controversial subject: she was,
in retrospect, years ahead of her time.
I thought that it was only fair to invite Eric Thompson to present his
point of view, but he turned us down on the probably spurious excuse
that his blood pressure wouldn’t stand it. It just wasn’t Eric’s style to
defend his position on the glyphs in a public forum, especially among
lowly graduate students.
Dave went on to a teaching post at Texas Technological College in
Lubbock Texas, and there prepared what was to be his most influential
paper - and one that was studiously ignored by Thompson for the rest of
his life. Entitled (in translation) “Phoneticism in the Maya Script,” it
appeared in 1962 in the respected Mexican journal Estudios de Cultura
Maya, and was a long and thoughtful defense of Knorosov’s phonetic-
syllabic readings, and a refutation of Thompson’s attacks, which were
increasing in frequency and stridency.13 But Kelley took Knorosovian
methodology into an entirely new area for the very first time: into the
monumental inscriptions.14 As Classic Maya civilization was disinte¬
grating in the southern lowlands, the great city of Chichen Itza in the
center of the northern Yucatan Peninsula entered a period of vigorous
growth; within the space of a few decades in the ninth century a number
of stone lintels were carved with long glyphic texts (some first published
by John Lloyd Stephens in the last century). It was from these
inscriptions that Hermann Beyer had isolated repeating glyph combi¬
nations and clauses back in the 1930s, and Kelley’s eye was caught by one
of these.

In this particular cluster, Dave recognized Landa’s (and Knorosov’s)

syllabic ka, ku, and ca, as well as the upside-down Ahau sign that
Knorosov had identified as la in the sign for “east,” lakin. Preceding la
was a crosshatched glyph that Dave concluded was an allograph (or
variant) of the “open” sign read by the Russian as pa. Put together, all of
160 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

ka ku ca ka pa

36 Kelley’s reading of Kakupacal at Chicken Itza. These are

variant spellings based upon the Maya phonetic syllabary.

the glyphs spelled out ka-ku-pa-caAfa), or Kakupacal (“Fiery Shield”),

mentioned in the post-Conquest chronicles as a valiant Itza captain. This
was a tremendous achievement: a personal name was found to have been
written in a stone inscription by scribes operating under the rules
discovered by Knorosov; it was an achievement which presaged the
present generation of decipherers. And it brought us closer to one of
John Lloyd Stephens’ dreams, that histories recorded in the Colonial
documents might be linked in some way to events in the ancient Maya
cities.
Notwithstanding Thompson’s disapproval of somebody he liked to
believe was on the lunatic fringe, Kelley persisted in his determination to
put phoneticism on a firm basis: underneath all of that Irish mischie¬
vousness there is a rockbed of good sense. When Dave’s massive
Deciphering the Maya Script appeared in 1976,15 a year after Thompson’s
death, even the most loyal Thompsonians were faced with irrefutable
evidence that Knorosov had been right and Eric very, very wrong.

Let us return to 1957. ^7ith the demise of the Carnegie program in Maya
archaeology, Thompson had left the United States for his new home in
Essex, where he was immersed in preparing his long-planned Catalog of
Maya Hieroglyphs, a prodigious task that was finally published five years
later.16 He and I continued to correspond, I on my part trying to explain
to him why I thought that Knorosov and Kelley had something. I imagine
that he was quite peeved at our review of Knorosov’s Landa, and
considerably nettled by the reference to Athanasius Kircher. On the
27th of October he sat down to type this letter to me:
Dear Mike
You can’t believe - oh, surely not
When the centuries of the world are so high -
You’ll not believe what, in their innocence,
These old credulous children in the street
Imagine
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 161

And these children? Not Christopher Fry’s but the Witches coven which rides
wild at midnight in the skies at Yuri’s command. Dave Kelly [sic], who chases
Quetzalcoatl, Xipe, Tonatiuh, and Xolotl17 as lightly across the atolls of the Pacific
as I once chased Marble Whites and Red Admirals with my butterfly net into the
limestone quarries of an England which vanished in 1914, and Burland18 and those
fugitive nuns of the Abbey Art Center in holy New Barnet, who dance with
lightsome toe on cups of steaming cocoa, and, fluttering on the outskirts, poor sex-
starved Tania seeking in the oracle of once Holy Russia a droshky which can carry
her to a Chekhov bliss ...
Well, the old bull ought to be at bay, but he isn’t; he’s just quietly chewing the
cud out at pasture. I seem to remember two years ago everyone was saying its all up
with old J.E.S.T.; C-14 has blown his correlation sky high, and he’s the only one
that doesn’t know it... Well, looks to me now that with the new C-14 readings the
old 11.16.0.0.0 correlation is right back on top, where it obviously had to be for
historical, astronomical, archaeological and every other reason.
I can watch with equanimity the Burlands and Dave Kelly’s [sic] running after
Yuri, for I know that exactly the same thing will happen to Yuri as has happened to
all the other guys who tried to read glyphs in that way from Cyrus Thomas to
Benjy Whorf. Now that I have found that there are at least 300 affixes in the Maya
glyph writing (I have 296 to date and haven’t finished yet), I am more than ever
certain that there never was any system such as Yuri propounds.
That’s why I didn’t have to have the old blood pressure checked before I read
the latest Yuri outburst.19 With my Constable view of mellowed red brick and
white house across the Valley and with a fairly successful return (provided one can
be conveniently blind at times) to the 18th century, I can take matters quietly as I
proceed with my catalogue of Maya glyphs which, I know, will be a rich mine in
years to come for Yuri and others of his kidney who will prove to their own
satisfaction that the glyphs on the last prisoner of P.N. 1220 say Epstein me fecit.
That’s why I don’t have high blood pressure, and stayed away from your Mesa
Cuadrada, for as the poet has it:
May I govern my passions with absolute sway
Grow wiser and better as strength wears away,
Without stone or gout to a gentle decay.
Well, Mike, you’re going to see the year A.D. 2000. Paste this in the flyleaf of
Maya Hieroglyphic Writing; Introduction, and see whether I’m all wet then.
Yours
In gentle decay
Eric T.

Eric was indeed right in one respect: the Catalog has become an
indispensable tool for all Maya epigraphers (everybody uses the
Thompson or “T” numbers in referring to glyphs), and the followers of
Yuri certainly do mine it. The irony is that all modern glyph specialists
are of Knorosov’s “kidney.”
It was in vain that I answered Eric’s letter by suggesting that he hadn’t
really addressed the general theory of Maya writing which his antagonist
had advanced, but concentrated only on details. It was not long before
another missive came from his pen, saying in part:
162 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

Thank you for your good letter. I think that we are arguing at cross-purposes. I
don’t claim that there is no phonetic element in Maya writing, especially by the
time the present edition of the Dresden was written. What I object to is the K.
approach, which I consider completely untrained. If he has hit the nail once or
twice, fine, but I would put into his mouth (although fool is not correct in his case)
3 lines of Cowper:
I am not surely always in the wrong;
Tis hard if all is false that I advance,
A fool must now and then be right by chance.

New fuel was added to the fire when my wife’s translation of

Knorosov’s 1958 article came out in American Antiquity,21 for in it
Knorosov twitted Thompson in these terms: “Some authors consider as
decipherment any plausible interpretation of unknown signs.” He went
on to say:

In contrast to the determination of the meaning of separate hieroglyphs by

indirect clues, decipherment is the beginning of an exact phonetic reading of
words written in hieroglyphic form. As a result of decipherment, the study of
texts becomes a branch of philology [linguistics].

In other words, Knorosov was denying Thompson any merits as a.

decipherer. As an example of Thompsonian “method,” Knorosov
pointed a finger at Eric’s interpretation of the accepted hieroglyphic
combination for “dog” (already read as tzul by Knorosov). It consists, as
we have seen, of two signs, one of which appears to be the ribs and
backbone of an animal. Thompson says that this is a metaphorical sign
for “dog” because in Mesoamerican mythology the dog accompanies
the shades of the dead to the world beyond the grave - hardly a case of
“decipherment” in Knorosov’s definition of the word (incidentally, the
glyph in question provides an excellent example of the rebus origin of
phonetic signs, for in Yucatec Maya, tzul means both “dog” and
“backbone,” the syllabic sign tzu being the end result).
Thompson’s increasing annoyance and bitterness are tellingly
revealed in a comment he published in the same year:22

A review [the one in Yan] expressed at some length my unfavorable impression of

the first paper by the Russian Knorosov, who, treading in the footsteps of so many
discredited enthusiasts, claims to have discovered (nestling in the bosom of
Marxist philosophy) the key to the decipherment of the Maya glyphs. His second
and much fuller publication, containing large numbers of purported decipher¬
ments, has recently appeared. My enthusiasm is still in deep freeze.

In spite of his assertions as to the worthlessness of Knorosov’s

publications, Thompson spent a great deal of time refuting them - which
is something he never bothered to do with dozens of lunatic and semi¬
lunatic fringe efforts to crack the glyphs which have appeared in every
decade for the last seventy-five years. YC^hat made Knorosov even more
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 163

dangerous was that his work had appeared in English in a journal which
was - and still is-the “house organ” for all U.S. archaeologists, whether
Mayanist or not. It is therefore no surprise that Eric’s major counter¬
blast appeared in the same journal in 19 5 9.23 With the title “Systems of
hieroglyphic writing in Middle America and methods of deciphering
them,” it reveals all of Thompson’s faults and none of his strengths.
Repeating once again the Valentini arguments about the Landa
“alphabet,” he then moves to missionary writing systems used by the
Spaniards in sixteenth-century Mexico, such as Testerian, with which
the friars tried to inculcate phoneticism among the natives, and implies
that the Landa abecedary was one of these.
Thompson then describes past attempts at using the Landa “alpha¬
bet” as “making silk purses out of sows’ ears”; these are all “thoroughly
discredited” (one of his favorite words). He spends the remainder of the
article on certain details of his opponent’s claimed decipherments, and
pounces on the fact that there are sometimes reversals of the usual left-
to-right order in the glyphs - ignoring the fact that change of order due to
aesthetic or scribal considerations was among Knorosov’s hieroglyphic
principles. But our friend Athanasius Kircher would have been proud of
one of Eric’s summary paragraphs:

No fire-faced prophet brought me word which way behoved me to go, as

Housman put it. I can claim neither to have deciphered the Maya glyphs nor to
know of any system to replace the one I have attacked, for I suspect that Maya
writing, like Topsy, just grew. Rebus writing is surely an important factor and
rebus pictures also. Clearly glyphic elements represent both words and syllables
(often homonyms). There are ideographs, glyphs with roots in mythology [his so-
called “metaphorograms”], and bits and pieces of half a dozen other attempts to write
[my emphasis].

In his 1962 Catalog he presents the same messy picture of the script:24 “In
short, we are confounded by an unsystematic hodgepodge of slow
growth. Hodgepodges, of course, lack either keys or locks to fit them.”
But how any scribe could communicate with such a hodgepodge, or how
such communications could ever be read, in any sense of the word, was a
question left as unanswered by Thompson as it had been by Kircher
some three centuries earlier.
One of Eric’s very last diatribes against the Red Menace came in 1971,
in his preface to the third edition of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing.25 As
usual, Eric misstates Knorosov’s position by claiming that the latter
views Maya script as entirely phonetic, then takes up his Cold War
cudgel:

A point of some importance, I feel, is that with a phonetic system, as with breaking
a code, the rate of decipherment accelerates with each newly established reading. It
164 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

is now nineteen years since it was announced with such fanfare of tabarded heralds
of the U.S.S.R. that after nearly a century of abortive bourgeois effort, the
problem had been solved by this Marxist-Leninist approach. I would gladly make
a pilgrimage to Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery to give thanks, were that really
so. Alas! The first flow of alleged decipherments has not swollen to a river, as it
should with successful solving of a phonetic system; it has long since dried up.

He took one final kick at Knorosov in his Maya Hieroglyphs Without

Tears,26 a British Museum pamphlet of 1972 which now has little other
than curiosity value in spite of its elegant appearance (Kircher’s
publications were very handsomely published, too - the coffee-table
books of their time).

We know in retrospect that Thompson was completely off the mark,

and Knorosov right on it. You might well ask, why did it take so long
after Knorosov’s 1952 article for the flow of decipherments to swell into
a river? Why did the Maya decipherment take so very long as compared
to, say, Egyptian or the cuneiform scripts or Hieroglyphic Hittite? I am
sorry to say that the major reason was that almost the entire Mayanist
field was in willing thrall to one very dominant scholar, Eric Thompson,
who by the force of his personality, his access to the resources of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington, his vast learning, and his acerbic —
even cruel - wit, was able to stem the Russian tide until his demise in
1975. Most Mayanists had (and have) little grounding in linguistics or
epigraphy; by default, they left the field to Eric, who, by bombarding
them with endless references to dead poets and Greek gods, effectively
robbed them of their critical faculties.
Even Knorosov’s major publication on the subject, the massive and
minutely documented Pis’mennost Indeitsev Maiia (“The Writing of the
Maya Indians”),27 which appeared in 1963, made little impression on
Thompson’s constituency, even when my wife brought out a translation
of selected chapters from it, with a typically cautious introduction by
Tania. I stuck my neck out in 1966, when my book The Maya28 was the
first popular work on Maya civilization to praise the Knorosov
approach; the reviews which I received from the experts were
characteristically negative on this subject. As late as 1976, Arthur
Demarest, then a student at Tulane University, was able to publish a
contentious and ill-advised attack on Knorosov’s decipherment in a
respected series,29 including the lofty statement: “It is hardly necessary
to conclude that Knorosov’s system is invalid ... He is not the first
scholar to create an erroneous decipherment, and he will probably not
be the last.”
Dissenters like Dave Kelley and myself found ourselves on the
 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST 165

outside, as far as our views on the Maya script went, but beyond the
confines of archaeology we discovered an important group of allies: the
linguists. These had not forgotten the rough treatment meted out by
Thompson oft their colleagues Benjamin Whorf and Archibald Hill.
Some of the specialists on the Mayan languages, such as the much-
respected Floyd Lounsbury at Yale (who was subsequently to play a
major role in the decipherment), thought very highly of Knorosov, and
knew a great deal more than Eric did about writing systems in general.
And I had heard a rumor that one very distinguished linguist had flatly
claimed that, once Thompson had been gathered to his ancestors, he
would crack Maya writing!
Arrogant or not, there was a certain accuracy in what the anonymous
linguist predicted, for the take-off period of the great decipherment came
only after Thompson died in 1975, and the linguistic contribution to this
extraordinary intellectual feat was a powerful one.
In the final year of his life, the Queen conferred a knighthood on
Thompson in recognition of his many contributions to Maya studies. I
have no idea why I had a premonition, but when I saw the New Year
Honours list published in the New York Times, I knew I would see Eric’s
name on it, and there it was, along with Charlie Chaplin’s. I immediately
wrote him my congratulations; his letter of thanks expressed his chagrin
that Alfred P. Maudslay had never received such an honor. Wrong, and
perhaps wrongheaded, on some important matters, Thompson was
certainly not wrong on everything, and he made many very real
contributions to the subject. I cherish my copy of Maya Hieroglyphic
Writing, complete with pasted-in letter, as he had stipulated.
Why was Thompson so bitterly opposed to Knorosov and everything
he did or published? One reason might have been his deep religiosity,
which led him to prefer “metaphorograms,” almost mystical Kircherian
explanations for the glyphs. Another might have been his detestation of
Communism and Soviet Russia. But his obsession with Knorosov, to
the point where he felt it necessary to pound away at him year after year,
with every means fair or foul, suggests to me something else: he feared
Knorosov’s theories because, at bottom, he knew they were correct.
My suspicions that this was so stem from a consideration of the
figures illustrating glyphs for the Maya months in Maya Hieroglyphic
Writing.30 For each month, Thompson had his artist draw a series of
glyphs, from the earliest to the latest forms; naturally, the last in each
series is the glyph as it appears in Landa’s Relacion. Now, the names of
the months as they were known in late pre-Conquest Yucatan mostly
bore little relation to these glyphs as they were read and pronounced in
Classic times. Accordingly, as we now understand, Landa s informant
prefixed some of them with helpful phonetic-syllabic signs defining their
166 A NEW WIND FROM THE EAST

“modern,” Yucatecan sound. For example, to the left of Landa’s Pop

(the first month) is a reduplicated sign which reads, as Floyd Lounsbury
discovered, pO'p(o). Eric had all such signs stripped off for his Maya
Hieroglyphic Writing of 1950.
How, I ask, and why, should he have done this unless he had
recognized and censored out phonetic writing — or what Knorosov
would have called phonetic reinforcement? This evidence suggests that
he must have been entertaining such phonetic ideas at least two years
before Knorosov burst on the scene, and then suppressed them as they
didn’t fit in with his “hodgepodge” notions about the script, or with his
“metaphorograms.” The savagery of the salvos that he sent Knorosov’s
way demonstrates to me, at least, that he knew he was wrong, and very
much in the wrong. Once having made his declaration of war in the Yan
review, he couldn’t rescind it.
So Thompson, like Seler before him in his dispute with Cyrus
Thomas, had a victory of a sort. But it was very short-lived: in less than
four years, as many as a hundred-and-thirty-five participants were to
attend the Albany conference on phoneticism in Maya hieroglyphic
writing. The sun had set on the Thompson era.
 7 The Age of ProskouriakofF:
The Maya Enter History

It was Tsar Peter the Great who exiled the Proskouriakoffs to Siberia. In
June 1698 (one year after the last independent Maya kingdom at Tayasal
had surrendered), the Streltsy musketeers had risen up against the young
despot - a revolt immortalized in Moussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina.
But the Streltsy failed and suffered the most terrible punishments; the
lucky ones were banished, including the ancestor of the woman whose
brilliant research was to bring the ancient Maya civilization into
history.1
Tatiana ProskouriakofF was born in 1909 in Tomsk, then the largest
city in Siberia.2 Tomsk lies on the headwaters of the Ob River, on a rail
spur leading north from the Trans-Siberian Railway. Notwithstanding
its remoteness from St. Petersburg and Moscow, it was hardly a frontier
town in the early part of this century: it boasted a university, various
museums, libraries, and scientific societies. Tania’s family belonged to
that great and unsung class of intelligentsia — scientists, writers, teachers,
and so forth — that had given pre-Revolutionary Russia its considerable
distinction in the arts and sciences.
Avenir ProskouriakofF, her father, was a chemist and engineer, and
her paternal grandfather had taught natural science, while her mother
Alla Nekrassova (daughter of a general) was a physician. In 1915, Avenir
was commissioned by the Tsar to go to the United States to inspect
munitions and other equipment destined for the Russian war effort.
Tania, her older sister Ksenia, and her parents set sail that autumn from
Archangel on the YCTite Sea but the ship became locked in the ice;
simultaneously, the two girls came down with scarlet fever and diptheria
(Ksenia also contracted measles!). They had to be carried back across the
ice, but finally left Russia by the following summer.
Their destination was Philadelphia. Following the Russian Revolu¬
tion of 1917, this became their permanent home. Yet it was not so
foreign to them, for the Proskouriakoffs found themselves among a

167
 168 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

group of intellectual White Russians, the very milieu in which they had
lived back in Tomsk. Tania and her sister entered grade school; among
her schoolmates and by her sister, Tania became known as “Duchess,”
not because of any false pride on her part, but because her young
contemporaries had recognized that here was someone who outshone
them all. If Tania ever had a Russian accent in those early days, she soon
lost it, for when I knew her she spoke unaccented, East Coast American
English; but she always retained the ability to speak the language, and
could write Russian in a fine, pre-Soviet hand.
When Tania graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a
degree in architecture in 1930, the country had just entered the Great
Depression, and jobs in her new profession were almost non-existent.
She worked for a while in a Philadelphia department store, then out of
boredom she began making drawings for one of the curators in the
University Museum, at very low pay.

Tania’s drawings of artifacts attracted the attention of Linton Satterth-

waite, Jr., a lanky, pipe-smoking archaeologist who had become director
of the museum’s massive excavation program at Piedras Negras, a ruined
Maya city of the Classic period on the right bank of the Usumacinta
River in Guatemala. Satterthwaite was looking for an artist to do
architectural reconstruction drawings of buildings uncovered at the site,
and Tania landed the job - all travel and expenses paid, but no salary
(these were lean times for museums, too). Tania’s life as a Mayanist had
begun.
That irascible Austrian, Teobert Maler, had explored Piedras Negras
at the close of the nineteenth century, and had produced for the Peabody
at Harvard a magnificent photographic record of its splendid stone
monuments - stelae and lintels. But the site was, and still is, in a very
dilapidated state.3 “Penn” had been digging at “P.N.” since 1931, and
Tania worked there under Satterthwaite’s direction from 1934 to 1938.
Archaeological camps run the gamut from Spartan - even sordid -
conditions at one end of the comfort scale, to luxurious at the upper end,
and there was no question as to which category the Piedras Negras dig
belonged. It is said that a uniformed houseboy served cocktails every
evening (Satterthwaite liked his dry martinis); whether true or not, Tania
was lucky to work for a highly competent archaeologist with a dry sense
of humor and real competence in the glyphs.
Tania s task was to produce an architectural restoration of Structure
P-7, and a perspective drawing of the Acropolis as it might have looked
during the Late Classic. Her watercolor rendering shows the pyramid-
temples and range structures covered with gleaming white plaster, with
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 169

the Usumacinta winding through jungle-covered hills in the back¬

ground. Apart from the almost deserted appearance of the complex (in
line with the then-current notion that Classic cities were near-empty
“ceremonial centers”), what is striking are the rows of stelae standing in
groups before two of the pyramids flanking the broad stairway. Our
young artist was to file these P.N. stela groups in a recess of her mind, and
they would be remembered with notable results many years later, in her
Cambridge apartment.
Satterthwaite was one of those scholars who take most of their
learning with them to the grave. He published very little; what did reach
print was often couched in prose so elliptical and obscure that even the
experts had difficulty following his arguments. Somewhat mischie¬
vously, Thompson once told me that he had never been able to finish
Satterthwaite’s “Concepts and Structures of Maya Calendrical Arith¬
metic”4 through to the end. Yet by all accounts he was an excellent
teacher and a sympathetic colleague who kept an open mind to every
point of view, and he certainly did not take everything that Thompson
said as gospel truth. Although he never actually deciphered a single
Maya hieroglyph, he was a figure to be reckoned with in the Maya field.

Tania’s reconstructed Acropolis perspective immediately kindled the

enthusiasm of the Carnegie Institution’s ebullient Sylvanus Morley. He
dreamed up the idea that Tania should do a whole series of reconstruc¬
tions of the most significant Maya sites, and in 1939 he sent her to Copan
for that purpose. Tania became a full-fledged Carnegie employee, with a
real salary for the first time in her life; this was a post she would occupy
for the rest of her life.
Copan in the late 1930s must have been quite a place. Carnegie’s
excavation and restoration program was directed by the colorful
Norwegian Gustav Stromsvik, whose picaresque career was noteworthy
even by Mayanist standards. In the late 1920s Gus and a fellow crewman
had “jumped ship” from their merchantman while it was anchored off
Progreso, on the north coast of Yucatan; days later, two battered dead
bodies washed ashore, and it was assumed that they were the two
deserters. It is said that once a year, Gus used to travel to the Progreso
cemetery to grieve over his own gravestone. Subsequently, Gus made his
way to Chichen Itza, where he had heard of a “gringo” archaeological
project, and Morley gave him a job repairing the expedition’s trucks, for
Gus was not only a fine sailor but a very good mechanic and engineer.
It was not long before Stromsvik was helping to dig and reconstruct
buildings at Chichen. His talents in this line led Morley and Kidder to
select him for the Copan project, where he turned out to be one of the
 170 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

finest field archaeologists on the Carnegie staff. Ian Graham describes the
scene at Copan:

ProskouriakofF traveled alone to Copan, and once there, found life at the staff
camp distinctly wild. Having been brought up in a very proper European
household, she was surprised considerably by the battery of bottles displayed on a
table in the camp sala, and more so on finding out how much the consumption of
their contents enlivened the nightly games of poker, especially on Saturdays. One
Sunday morning, annoyed with the men for sleeping so late, she opened the door
of Gustav Stromsvik’s room and let his parrot in. Soon there was a duet of
squawking, the parrot having gotten Stromsvik by the mustache.5

A home movie, made by John Longyear when he was a Harvard graduate

student preparing a thesis on the ceramics of Copan, shows a young and
very good-looking Tania swigging beer from a bottle at the same camp,
so she must have adapted at least somewhat to the regime.
After Copan, Tania journeyed to Chichen Itza and the sites of the
Puuc region in Yucatan, making measured drawings in preparation for
her reconstructions, all of which appeared in her Album of Maya
Architecture in 1946.6 It being increasingly clear to “Doc” Kidder that
this woman was considerably more than an artist, he appointed her in
1943 as a full-time staff archaeologist.
From her school days on, everyone who knew Tania seems to have
been in agreement that hers was an extraordinary, unusual mind. One
facet of it certainly leaned towards the artistic: she was a highly
competent draftswoman, and a fine artist with a perceptive and
appreciative eye for the visual arts. But she also had a strong scientific
bent and a gift for logical analysis. Being raised in a family of scientists
certainly helped hone her scholarly talents. ^JC^hen she applied herself to
a problem - and she was a “loner,” usually working by herself in self-
imposed isolation - her mind operated like the proverbial steel trap.
Unlike so many Russian exiles, Tania was a convinced rationalist and
atheist. She greatly enjoyed an argument, and perhaps she had
deliberately taken an extreme position on this subject, but I remember
her trying to convince me that one should not even listen to Bach’s B-
Minor Mass because it was religious! Be that as it may, such a mindset
predisposed her to seek rational explanations in everything, even Maya
art and writing, and it steered her well away from the kinds of semi-
mystical mumbo-jumbo that so entranced Eric Thompson. On the
down side, though, she had absolutely no interest in the iconography of
Maya art, and went so far as to deny that there were any gods at all among
the Classic Maya. Here is where Eric was surely on the right track, and
Tania not.
Tania’s penchant for rigorous formal analysis was applied to a body of
about four hundred Maya monuments from the Classic, resulting in a
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 171

method of dating each one stylistically within a span of twenty to thirty

years. Her 1950 monograph, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture,7 allowed
specialists to compare stylistic dates against Maya dates; but Tania went
further, and provided an evolutionary picture of how Maya relief
sculpture changed from earliest times through the Maya collapse. The
book, which placed her in the forefront of Maya research, gave her an
unparalleled view of the whole corpus of Maya art on stone, and led her
inexorably to ask questions which, when finally answered, turned the
whole Mayanist world upside down.

My Harvard undergraduate education concluded in 1950, but I skipped

my graduation, thus inadvertently missing George Marshall’s speech to
the senior class, in which he announced what was to become the
Marshall Plan for a Europe in ruins. With a guilty conscience, I decided
that I had better be present to receive my Ph.D. degree from Harvard,
which was awarded in June 1959. With spare time on my hands, I
wandered over to the Peabody to see Tania. I found her in her usual spot:
seated at a table in the museum’s basement smoking room, for Tania was
a chain smoker and had been so ever since she was sixteen.
I could see that Tania, always somewhat of a nervous person, was
unusually excited over something, and she told me what it was: she had
discovered a “peculiar pattern of dates,” as she put it, at her old site of
Piedras Negras. Before her was a chart on which she had graphed all of
the dates on P.N.’s many stelae. Referring to the chart, Tania explained
to me what this pattern meant; the subject-matter of the texts on the
monuments was history, plain and simple, and not astronomy, religion,
prophecy, and the like. The figures on the stelae and lintels of the ruined
Maya cities were mortal men and women, and not gods, or even priests,
for that matter.
I was truly thunderstruck. In one brilliant stroke, this extraordinary
woman had cut the Gordian knot of Maya epigraphy, and opened up a
world of dynastic rivalry, royal marriages, taking of captives, and all the
other elite doings which have held the attention of kingdoms around the
world since the remotest antiquity. The Maya had become real human
beings.
Tania told me that she had submitted a detailed paper on her findings
to American Antiquity; when it appeared next year under the title
“Historical Implication of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras,
Guatemala,”8 the entire field of Maya research was revolutionized. We
had entered the Age of Proskouriakoff.
A window on how her mind worked is provided by an article she
published next year, 1961, in the University Museum’s journal
172 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

Expedition,9 at the invitation of her old friend and early supporter

Satterthwaite. Written for a popular audience, it is a remarkable
example of logical exposition, explaining the sequence of events that led
to her momentous discovery.
It all began in 1943, Tania said, when Thompson changed the date of
Piedras Negras Stela 14 from ad 800, which was the date Morley had
assigned it, to ad 761. Eric described it as one of a group of stelae
showing “gods seated in niches formed by the bodies of celestial
dragons,’’ and remarked that this correction made Stela 14 the first to be
erected in its particular row in front of Temple 0-13.
Several years later, Tania noticed not only that P.N. Stela 33 had a
similar scene (although no niche), but that all monuments of this type
were the first to be set up in a given location (i.e. in a row in front of a
particular pyramid). Subsequently, at every hotun (a five-tun interval,
something less than five years), a monument with another motif was
erected in the same row until another similar row was started near
another temple. In short, there were distinct sets of monuments, each
beginning with a niche stela.
At that time, Tania thought that such “niche” stelae represented the
dedication of a new temple (a rather Thompsonian point of view): the
ladder which was depicted marked with footsteps leading up to the niche
must have symbolized the rise to the sky of the sacrificial victim, whose
body was sometimes shown at the foot of the ladder. She then searched
for a glyphic expression peculiar to these stelae which might indicate
human sacrifice.
“What I found instead started an entirely new train of thought and led
to surprising conclusions.” And this is what she found:

(1) There was a date just prior to the erection-date (always a hotun-
ending) on each niche stela; this earlier date was always immediately
followed by a sign which Thompson had nicknamed the “Toothache
Glyph” since it consists of a head with its jaws bound up (or a moon-sign
so tied up).

(2) Anniversaries of this event, whatever it was, were often subse¬

quently recorded, but only on monuments of the same group.

(3) The only dates two groups of stelae had in common were some
marking the ends of conventional time-periods (in the Long Count), thus
proving that each set of monuments presents an independent set of
records.

(4) It is not the date associated with the “Toothache Glyph” that is
earliest in each set, but another which is anywhere from 12 to 31 years
earlier; this “Initial Date” is always immediately followed by a sign that
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 173

appeared to Thompson like a frog’s head looking upward, hence the

nickname “Upended Frog Glyph.” Teeple, parenthetically, thought that
this sign stood for a new moon day or for the same moon age. This Initial
Date could not have had much public importance since it is noted only
retrospectively after the “Toothache Glyph” event had taken place, and
it is only then that it begins to be noted by anniversaries.

37 Dynastic event glyphs

identified by Proskouriakoff.
a. Birth (“upended frog”).
b. Accession (“toothache”).

Tania then framed three hypotheses to account for her findings:

—The “Upended Frog Glyph” date is the birth date of the person in the
niche.
—The “Toothache Glyph” date is the accession date of the person in the
niche.
—The entire set of records represents the lifetime of a ruler.
Taking only those sets whose full span was known, she calculated the
length of time covered by each set: it came out to 60, 64 and 56 years,
certainly what one would expect the normal lifetime of a ruler to be.
Her next step took her even deeper into the long-vanished world of
these lords of the forest: this was the search for their personal names and
titles. These glyphs should differ in each set, she reasoned, while the
event glyphs would remain constant. Tania found what she was looking
for - nominal phrases of three or four glyphs - but she had yet to prove
that these in truth were related to the sculptured figures. Here she turned
to Stelae 1 and 2 from Piedras Negras; the front side of each shows a male
figure, but it is extremely eroded. On the back of each stela is a hefty,
robed figure. Perversely, but probably in line with the dogma that the
Classic Maya lived in a kind of theocracy, the long-held notion about
such figures was that they were male priests, but Tania’s work knocked
this delusion into a cocked hat: the robed figures are women, as a far
earlier generation of Mayanists had thought all along.10 To return to our
stelae, the birth dates on both are the same, and they are followed by the
same pair of name glyphs, each prefixed with a profile, female human
head. Tania identified the latter as the proclitic classifier for women (now
read as na, the Classic form of the later Yucatec ix, “Lady-”). The
 174 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

38 The prefix (ha) for female

names and titles.

woman on Stela 3 stands alone, but on Stela 3 seated next to her is a very
small, robed individual with another birth date 33 years later than the
first, and with her own name and female proclitic. There can be only one
possible conclusion: that the portraits on the two stelae are of a single
woman (surely the wife of the man on the obverse), and the little figure is
her daughter. Ergo, the monuments show real people and their lives,
along with their names and titles.
Like many great discoveries, Tania’s was of such simplicity and of
such downright obviousness, that it is a wonder that epigraphers like
Morley and Thompson — who had all the data at their fingertips over a
long period of time — did not hit upon it long ago. Tania was right when
she said, “In retrospect, the idea that Maya texts record history, naming
the rulers or lords of the towns, seems so natural that it is strange it has
not been thoroughly explored before.”11

In truth, there had been a few criers in the wilderness, but their voices
were generally ignored. Remember that Stephens had said of Copan, as
far back as 1841, One thing I believe, that its history is graven on its
monuments.” In his day, little or nothing of the dates on the stones of
the Classic cities could be read or understood. But in 1901, Charles
Bowditch, a wealthy, aristocratic Bostonian who was the “angel” for the
Peabody Museum’s expeditions to Central America, was already an
authority on Maya chronology. Here is what he had to say in
commenting on Teobert Maler’s report on Piedras Negras and its
monuments: “Let us suppose the first date of Stela 3 to denote the birth;
the second the initiation at the age of 12 years 140 days, or the age of
puberty in those warm climates; the third, the choice as chieftain at the
age of 33 years 265 days; the fourth his death at the age of 37 years 60
days.”12 After a parallel interpretation of Stela 1, he asks, “Could the
two men represented on these stelae have been twins having the same
birthday?”
David Kelley has justly commented on this passage: “If Bowditch or
some contemporary scholar had gone on to check the glyphic context of
this acute idea, scholars studying the Mayan writing might have been
saved some sixty years of dubious astronomical interpretations.”13
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 175

And back in 1910, Herbert J. Spinden, who had pioneered the study of
Maya art and in this respect was a forerunner of Proskouriakoff, took a
sharp look at the subject-matter of Maya reliefs.14 “Judging by the graven
pictures,” he wrote, “many monuments of the southern Maya are
memorials of conquest,” with depictions of both victors and van¬
quished. “Now it is obvious that the presence of vassals and overlords
on the monuments increases the probability that actual historical events
are being commemorated and that actual historical personages are being
portrayed.”
Spinden then called attention to Piedras Negras Stela 12, which shows
a war chief above bound captives, guarded by what Spinden thought
were two soldiers (they are actually sahalo’ob, subsidiary war leaders); on
or near the bodies of both victors and victims are groups of glyphs, and
“it seems reasonable to suppose that names of both persons and places
are recorded.” Amazingly, as David Stuart has pointed out to me, in this
same article he indicated a bat-glyph compound on this and on many
other monuments both at P.N. and elsewhere which “may have some
general meaning as ‘here follows a name”’; almost eighty years later,
David was indeed to identify this compound as introducing the name of
the carver.
Spinden was truly a precursor of much that we take for granted today,
and it is a tragedy that so many of his insights about Mesoamerican
civilization were pushed aside and ignored during the Age of Thompson
as a consequence of his lifelong espousal of a Maya-Christian
correlation which proved to be untenable. I met him in his very old age,
when he was admittedly senile, but he was once a truly original thinker.
Although we have come to think of the later Sylvanus Morley as a
leader of the anti-historical, worship-of-time school, the early Morley
had been of different mind. Impressed by the numerous Spanish
accounts that the late pre-Conquest Maya kept detailed histories in their
folding-screen books, Morley wrote in 1915:15 “For this latter reason the
writer believes that the practice of recording history in the hieroglyphic
writing had its origin, along with many another custom, in the southern
area, and consequently that the inscriptions on the monuments of the
southern cities are probably, in part at least, of an historical nature.”

The way Thompson and an older, but not necessarily wiser, Morley had
it, the Classic Maya were unlike any other civilized people who ever
lived, and they were unlike even Mesoamerican neighbors such as the
Mixtec, whose passion for their own history is expressed in a number of
late codices. Again, Thompson could talk himself (and his colleagues
such as Morley) into any position if it coincided with his own
176 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

preconceptions and predilections. In 1950 he was still able to state, in his

Maya Hieroglyphic Writing:16

I do not believe that historical events are recorded on the monuments. The almost
complete absence of dates, other than period endings, common to two cities ... is,
I believe, due to the almost limitless choice of dates in gathering information on
the katun endings. A priest in one city, gauging the aspects of a katun ending,
might put more emphasis on lunar influences, and be governed accordingly in his
choice of dates; priests in other cities may have regarded solar influences as
paramount, and chosen dates with that in mind.

Teeple’s cleverly devised but totally erroneous Determinant Theory -

explaining dates other than “round” ones as solar year corrections to the
calendar - held Thompson captive. He simply could not conceive of
Jacinto Cunil’s priestly ancestors as writers of mundane history. To Eric,
even the scenes showing captives may have been religious at bottom, the
unfortunate ones being destined for sacrifice in some important
ceremony (which they were!), and not celebrating conquest. Like the
Marxists that were so much on his mind, Eric was always finding what he
knew was there in the first place.
Thompson’s reaction to Tania’s 1960 heresy was uncharacteristically
mild, notwithstanding the demolition of one of the pillars supporting his
general views about the Maya. Peter Mathews was once told by Tania
that she had felt badly for not letting Eric know about her discoveries in
time for him to correct the foreword to the 1960 edition of Maya
Hieroglyphic Writing and save himself from retrospective embarrass¬
ment. When she did give him her still-to-be-published paper, Eric’s
immediate reaction was “That can’t possibly be right!” But after he had
taken it home and read it that night, by the following morning he had
made an about-face: Of course you’re right!”17 Russian she may have
been, but Tania was no Red Menace.

The reader will have noted that Proskouriakoff’s great breakthrough had
very little to do with the Maya language: the texts might as well have been
written in Swedish or Swahili for her immediate purpose, for her
approach was purely structural. She was not the only epigrapher who
worked largely in this mode, which was really concerned with meaning
and interpretations rather than readings in one or another Mayan
language. Because of her interest in Knorosov, I do know that Tania was
concerned with linguistic decipherment, but it played little part in her
own research, and progressively less so as she moved from middle into
old age.
The same could be said of her friend Heinrich Berlin, a German-born
grocery wholesaler in Mexico City who had escaped Hitler’s persecu-
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 177

tions in the 1930s. As an avocation, Berlin had for many years been
structurally analyzing the inscriptions of Palenque, a task made lighter
than usual by the high quality of Alfred Maudslay’s epigraphic record,
and by the new inscriptions and other discoveries made during the 1940s
and 1950s by Alberto Ruz and other Mexican archaeologists.
Ruz’s most spectacular find - a discovery of stellar magnitude - had
been the crypt and sarcophagus in Palenque’s largest pyramid, the
Temple of the Inscriptions; this is to play a role in the next stage of the
story, in Chapter 8. Suffice it to say here that the sides of the sarcophagus
are carved with human figures accompanied by glyphs, and in 1959, one
year before Tania’s American Antiquity article, Berlin suggested that
those glyphs were the names of the ancestors of the individual buried in
this spectacular Late Classic tomb.18 In other words, the inscription
must have been historical.
Back in 1940, Morley could state “... indeed, the writer strongly
doubts that any place names will ever be found in the Maya
inscriptions.”19 But in 1958, a short paper by Berlin appeared in the
French Journal de le Societe des Americanistes, announcing the discovery

39 Berlin’s great discovery, Emblem Qlyphs. a, b. Palenque. c, d. Yaxchilan. e. Copan.

f. Naranjo, g. Machaquila. h. Piedras Negras. i. Seibal. j. Tikal.
 178 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

of what he called “Emblem Glyphs,” for want of a better term.20 An

Emblem Glyph consists of three parts: (1) a so-called Ben-Ich superfix,
the meaning and reading of which were only to be established some years
later; (2) a special prefix to which Thompson (wrongly it turns out)
assigned a water association; and (3) a main sign which Berlin realized
varies with the city with which it is linked. This was a truly important
discovery with far-reaching consequences for the future of Maya
research, but the question remained (and it is still being debated)
whether Emblem Glyphs represent place-names, or the names of
tutelary divinities of the cities, or the dynasties that ran them.
Be that as it may, Berlin succeeded in isolating Emblem Glyphs for
Tikal, Naranjo, Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, Palenque, Copan, Quirigua,
and Seibal (fig. 39); many more are now known. Occasionally a city will
have more than one Emblem: Yaxchilan, for instance, has two, and
Palenque as many as three. He was quick to point out that from time to
time, Emblem Glyphs of one city will appear in the inscriptions of
another, indicating some sort of relationship, and hinted that a study of
Emblem Glyph distributions might enable the analysis of Maya political
geography to be made.
Like Hermann Beyer before him, Berlin was interested in the structure
of texts, and the isolation of recurring clauses: he saw that Emblem
Glyphs sometimes were associated with what he called “useless” katuns
- katun glyphs with Ben-Ich superfixes and with number prefixes - but
he had no explanation for these. It would be left to Tania to find out the
meaning of Ben-Ich Katuns and to find the personal names that appeared
with them and with Emblem Glyphs.
Berlin went on to publish further studies in Palenque texts - one of his
outstanding successes was his detection of the “Palenque Triad” of
gods,21 which we shall see enter so importantly into the mythological
history of the site, and much of his work formed the substructure for
Floyd Lounsbury’s brilliant research of the next few decades. I have
asked people who knew him (he died in 1987) why Berlin had no interest
in phonetic analysis of the sort pioneered by Knorosov, and why he paid
no real attention to the problems of linguistic decipherment. Linda
Scheie tells me that she once asked him this, and his reply was that “he
was too old for such things.”
But this cannot be the full answer. In 1969, he published in American
Antiquity a short and decidedly sour review of my book The Maya,
which he clearly did not like (he seems not to have approved of any of my
work, for that matter; I never knew him, so this could not have been
personal).22 Here is his parting shot:
Coe briefly treats the topic of Maya hieroglyphic writing, and he reveals himself as
an ardent follower of the phonetic-syllabic readings launched by Yuri Knorosov.
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 179

Unfortunately, Coe does not mention Eric Thompson’s severe criticism of the
Knorosov approach and thus the reader is led to believe that the latter is an
undisputed positive achievement in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics,
which this reviewer feels it is not.

In his hostility to this approach, Berlin was at least consistent. His

valedictory work in epigraphy appeared in 1977 under the title “Signs
and Meanings in the Maya Inscriptions”;23 one would look in vain in it
for any mention of Knorosov’s publications or anything else in the same
vein. I suspect that for Berlin the possibility that the ancient Maya
actually spoke a Mayan language was of no consequence.

As it winds northeastward on its journey to the Gulf Coast plain, the

Usumacinta makes a small loop; within this loop, on what is now the
Mexican side of the Mexico-Guatemalan border, lies the Classic city of
Yaxchilan, explored by Maler and Maudslay in the last century. The city
is laid out in the typical loose Maya fashion on a series of natural terraces
and steep hills rising above the river bank, and has long been famous for
the beauty of its relief sculptures, the best of which were removed by
Maudslay to the British Museum. Apart from its stelae and hieroglyphic
stairways, most of the carvings at Yaxchilan are found on the undersides
and front edges of a number of flat, limestone lintels which span the
doorways of its most important temples.
Aided by the splendid graphic record and photographic record left by
Maudslay and Maler, Tania Proskouriakoff turned her attention away
from Piedras Negras to the Yaxchilan reliefs, which she briefly touched
upon in her 1960 article but analyzed more fully in 1963 and 1964, during
that decade when she was at the height of her scholarly powers.24 Here
again she worked out a dynastic history for a Maya city, but she limited
this to the short span of slightly more than a century when most of the
site’s sculpture was carved and its visible buildings erected. This cultural
effervescence was largely the doing of two aggressive, warlike leaders of
the eighth century, both of whom had the head of a jaguar in their name
glyphs. The earliest of the pair she nicknamed “Shield-Jaguar,” since the
head was prefixed by something resembling a shield; “Shield-Jaguar”
had a very long life, dying in his nineties, and was succeeded by his son,
whom she called “Bird-Jaguar,” whose nominal glyph is preceded by
some kind of bird.

40 Rulers of Yaxchilan.
a. Shield.^]aguar. b. Bird-
Jaguar.
180 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

41 “BenAch Katuns.” a. 2nd “BenAch Katun.” b. 3rd “BenAch

Katun.” c. 4th “BenAch Katun.”

In this line of research, Tania accomplished three things. First, she

showed how the personal names of rulers were generally followed by the
Emblem Glyph of that particular city. Second, she solved the problem of
the Ben-Ich Katuns: these inform the onlooker in which katun of his life
the ruler then was when such-and-such an event took place, counted
from his birth (for example, I am in my 4th Ben-Ich Katun as I write these
words, for I am now sixty-two). Third, she established that war events
involving capture - and these are frequent in the Yaxchilan records — are
always represented by a glyphic combination for which she cites
Knorosov’s reading chucah, the past tense of chuc, “to capture.” And
fourth, Tania recognized that the lintels sometimes celebrated important
bloodletting rites, such as on the famous Lintel 24, which depicts a wife
of Shield-Jaguar pulling a rope set with thorns through her tongue on her
husband’s birth anniversary, and isolating the event glyph to go along
with this gruesome but important rite.
As a result, it becomes almost ludicrously simple for all but the most
illiterate Mayanists to scan the text and interpret the scene on Yaxchilan
Lintel 8, a relief celebrating a battlefield event of 9 May 755. On it, Bird-
Jaguar and a companion (now known to be Kan-Toc, one of his war
leaders or sahalo’ob25) are taking captives; the richly garbed Bird-Jaguar
seizes his captive by the wrist, while the less sumptuously clad assistant
has his by the hair. The unfortunate captives are identified by the names
carved on their thighs, as Spinden had surmised. The text begins at the
top left with the Calendar Round date 10 Imix 14 Tzec, followed by
chucah, “he captured.” After this verb is the name of Bird-Jaguar’s
captive. At the top of the right-hand column is a glyph compound which
we now read (phonetically) u ba-c(i), “his captive,” the sentence ending
with Bird-Jaguar and the Yaxchilan Emblem Glyph. A shorter text in the
middle of the lintel names the battle-companion and his captive.
If the reader turns back to Chapter 2, it will be seen that the Mayan
languages “prefer” the transitive sentence order verb-object-subject, or
VOS, as opposed to our SVO. This is exactly how the hieroglyphic
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 181

Kan-Toc

42 Lintel 8, Yaxchilan, a war record of Bird-]aguar.

sentence on Lintel 8 behaves, and so do most texts in the inscriptions

which involve transitive actions. Quite naturally, the Mayan linguists in
various universities soon began to prick up their ears at what was going
on in the epigraphic world; they had held their peace after their
colleagues had been so forcefully put down by Thompson. At last, the
Classic inscriptions were being shown to reflect Mayan speech, as the
linguists Whorf and Hill had surmised.

The stage had been set for a concerted attack on the Classic Maya
inscriptions throughout the lowland cities. But let us pause to consider
what epigraphers were faced with in the decade of the 1960s. Given the
almost half century that Carnegie had been in the Maya field, one would
have expected them to have produced a mighty corpus of all known
Maya monumental texts on the order of, say, the wonderful record
produced for Egypt by Napoleon’s scholarly team in only a few years.
182 THE AGE OF PROSKOUR1AKOFF

One would have assumed that Carnegie would have followed in the
footsteps of Maudslay, and employed a staff of first-rate photographers
and artists whose only task would have been to publish every known
inscription which had not already appeared in Maudslay’s Biologia
Central^ Americana.
Yet neither Morley nor Thompson, Carnegie’s two leading epigra-
phers, felt any obligation or necessity to get such a program under way.
As I have said earlier, Morley’s Inscriptions of the Peten is a sad comedown
from the high plateau reached by Biologia. Maler’s fine photographs,
published by Peabody at the beginning of the century, proved to be of
great use to Proskouriakoff when she worked on Piedras Negras and
Yaxchilan, but there really is no substitute for a graphic presentation
that includes a detailed, accurate drawing of a relief inscription side-by-
side with a photo at the same scale.
If one were ungenerous, it could be surmised that the Morley/
Thompson failure in this line was linked to their continuing inability to
make much headway with decipherment; in dog-in-the-manger style,
they may have felt that if they couldn’t crack the script, they were not
going to make it easy for anybody else to do so. Certainly Thompson
would not have relished the thought of present or future Kelleys or
Knorosovs with ready access to the entire written record of his Maya.
The phone rang at my New Haven home one summer evening in 1969.
It was my old friend Stanton Catlin calling from New York’s Center for
Inter-American Relations. Stanton had been Assistant Director of the
Yale Art Gallery when I first came to New Haven in 1960, with a strong
interest in the art of Latin America. His message was that the Stella and
Charles Guttman Foundation was interested in a major financial
commitment to the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphics, and in
particular felt that high-speed computers were the answer. What did I
think about this, and did I have any suggestions?
It did not take me long to react: “Going into computers now would be
money down the drain. It was tried in the Soviet Union and it doesn’t
work, as Knorosov made clear. Anyway, it’s putting the cart before the
horse, because the one thing now holding up progress is the lack of a real
Corpus of Maya Inscriptions. Why don’t you set up and finance a
program which will put into usable form all those inscriptions which are
yet to be properly recorded?”
Stanton went back to the Guttman people, and it was agreed that an
advisory committee would be set up, which would meet in New York.
At my suggestion, this included Tania Proskouriakoff (naturally), Yale’s
Floyd Lounsbury, and Gordon Ekholm, curator at the American
Museum of Natural History. "We met, and there was no disagreement as
to who (to repeat Morley’s phrase) would “bring back the epigraphic
 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF 183

bacon”: Ian Graham, a British explorer and aficionado of all things

Maya. Graham’s credentials were excellent, since he had discovered and
published a host of new sites and monuments as a result of a number of
exploratory journeys he had made by foot and muleback through little'
known regions of the Peten. Most importantly, the quality of the record
he had brought back, which reached the standards set by his countryman
Alfred Maudslay, clearly pointed to him as the person to undertake the
Corpus.26
Graham submitted a proposal to the Foundation that September and
it was accepted. The Corpus was on its way. Given that Graham lived in
Cambridge and had space to work in the Peabody, and moreover was
closely associated with Tania, it seemed to the committee that the
Peabody should be the headquarters of the project; and it was there that
Carnegie had deposited its vast archives of photographs and notes after
its bureaucrats in Washington decided to fold up all archaeological
operations in 1958. What with the excellent visual record being
prepared by the University of Pennsylvania’s massive program at Tikal,
and with the magnificent drawings of the Palenque reliefs that would
soon begin appearing, Mayanists were at last beginning to have a body of
material for analysis comparable to the Description de VEgypte which had
made possible so many of Champollion’s decipherments.

There is a Chinese curse which goes, “May you live in interesting times.”
For an American academic like myself, the 1960s and early 1970s were
certainly just that. They were marked by a more-or-less continuous
turmoil as students demonstrated for civil rights for blacks in America,
and against our involvement in Vietnam. Even at a campus like Yale,
which was relatively untouched by the violence which gripped other
universities, it was not easy to concentrate on ivory-tower pursuits such
as the study of a people who had lived in the Central American forests
over a thousand years ago.
At one time, I was in the eye of the storm, since the leader of the
student strike which paralyzed Yale in May 1970 was a student in the
Anthropology Department, and I was its chairman, with direct
responsibility for three highly inflammable buildings. On May Day,
thousands of demonstrators poured into New Haven, some of them
threatening to burn the whole place to the ground, and the National
Guard took up positions around the campus.
And yet for me, as for many other colleagues, this was in some ways
the most intellectually stimulating period I had ever experienced,
harrowing though it often was. Those long-haired students could be
obstreperous, indeed, but they had truly inquiring minds.
184 THE AGE OF PROSKOURIAKOFF

Through the latter part of the 1960s, I was immersed in the pre-Maya
Olmec, and had a major archaeological dig on my hands at the site of San
Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. But I didn’t entirely
lose touch with the Maya field, and it was clear to me that exciting things
were going on. Through my students, particularly an undergraduate
named David Joralemon, I was drawn deeply into iconography, both
Olmec and Maya, and it seemed to me that this study, like that of Maya
epigraphy, was about to take off.
In other words, the time was ripe, not for the political revolution that
so many of our more idealistic students were confidently predicting
(they got Watergate instead), but in my own narrow intellectual world,
for a revolution in the understanding of the hemisphere’s most advanced
pre-European culture: the Classic Maya. With Thompson’s influence
waning and Knorosov’s star rising, particularly among the linguists, with
linguistics and art history about to join hands with epigraphy, with the
endless possibilities opened up by the discovery of the historical nature
of the inscriptions, something was bound to happen.
And happen it did, just before Christmas 1973, in the most beautiful
of all Maya cities: Palenque.
21 Left, Sylvanus G. Morley (1883-1948) and his
wife Frances; right, J. Eric S. Thompson (1898—
1975) and his wife Florence. Taken at Chichen Itza
in 1930 during the Thompsons’ honeymoon.

22 (right) Sylvanus Morley beside Stela F at

Quirigua, Guatemala, about 1912. Morley’s
publication of the inscriptions fell below the
standards established by Maudslay and Maler.

23 Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941),

brilliant American linguist whose attempt at
a phonetic decipherment met with failure.
24 Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov in
Leningrad, about 1960.

25 Sir Eric Thompson in his English

garden, 1974- Until his death the
next year, Thompson remained a
bitter enemy of the Knorosov
approach.

26 David H. Kelley in 1991, the

principal American champion of
Knorosov’s work on the Maya
hieroglyphs during the fifties and
sixties.
27 Tatiana ProskouriakofF’s reconstruction of the
Acropolis at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. She proved that
the Maya stelae lined up before pyramids were dynastic
records.

28 (right) Stela 14 from Piedras Negras. In her 1960 paper,

Proskouriakoff showed this to be an accession monument.

29 Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985), from a group

picture of the Carnegie staff at Mayapan, Mexico, 1952.
Eight years later she published the paper which
revolutionized Maya research.

30 Heinrich Berlin (1915—1987), at Mayapan in 1954- This

German-born grocery wholesaler and part-time epigrapher
discovered Emblem Glyphs.
31 The Temple of the Cross sanctuary at Palenque, reconstruction watercolor by
Proskouriakoff. At the back of the sanctuary is a tablet showing Pacal and Chan-
Bahlum worshiping a world tree.

Opposite

32 Crypt and sarcophagus in the Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, the burial
chamber of the great ruler Pacal (ad 603-683).

33 Merle Greene Robertson at Palenque; artist-photographer and organizer of the

Palenque Mesas Redondas.

34 Linda Scheie at work in Washington, D.C., 1985. Artist, epigrapher, and

teacher, she has been one of the chief architects of the new vision of the Maya
based on decipherment.

35 Floyd G. Lounsbury at Copan, 1988. Yale anthropologist and linguist, he was

the theoretician of the modern decipherment.
 36 Late Classic Maya polychrome vase from the Chama area, Guatemala. Shown
here is one of a pair of twin lords, probably the Maize God and his brother.

37 Pages from the Grolier Codex, a Toltec-Maya book dealing with the planet Venus.
 38 David Stuart aged eight, drawing a monument at Coba, Mexico.

39 David Stuart at home in Washington, D.C., 1986. The following year he was to
bring out his path-breaking Ten Phonetic Qlyphs.

40 Inscription in Naj Tunich cave, Guatemala, eighth century ad.

41 Y.V. Knorosov in Leningrad, 1989.

42 The last page of the Dresden Codex, depicting

the destruction of the universe. The sky dragon
(Itzamna) and the old creator goddess release
floods, while the war god (God L) hurls darts.

43 The Monkey-man Scribe from the Scribe’s

Palace at Copan, Honduras.
 8 PacaPs People

Palenque, the most enigmatically moving of all Maya sites, has held its secrets for
over twelve hundred years. The location is imbued with a quality that reaches out
and draws one irresistibly. Enigmatic though it might be, its architecture sings out
to us with a Mozartian sort of richness and classical elegance - not mute like the
heavier, more richly conservative architecture of most other Classic Maya sites.
Originality and harmony shine out of the mellow Palenque limestone. The
presence of its builders is felt across the centuries by those who give themselves
completely to the Palenque experience.1

Princeton’s Gillett Griffin, who wrote this emotional description, is an

emotional person, but it is no exaggeration. For over two centuries the
incomparable beauty of this Classic city, located on the western edge of
the lowland Maya realm, has continued to inspire this kind of prose in its
visitors.
Set in the lower foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas, and surrounded by
high, tropical forest, the city occupies a commanding position looking
north over the great Usumacinta plain. By some time early in the seventh
century, its architects had learned how to span large, airy rooms with
lightly built vaults and mansard roofs, giving the city’s structures a
spaciousness that is missing in the massively-constructed palaces and
temples of other Maya sites. And under the aegis of its two greatest
kings, Palenque artists reached heights of elegance in carved relief and
molded stucco seldom achieved elsewhere in the land of the Maya.
It was these reliefs with their sophisticated scenes and long glyphic
texts that so entranced Antonio del Rio and his artist Almendariz; the
romantically eccentric Waldeck; Stephens and Catherwood, those
founding fathers of Maya archaeology; and Alfred Maudslay. Remem¬
ber that long before Maudslay’s magnificent record was compiled
towards the end of the last century, Constantine Rafinesque had linked
the inscribed texts of Palenque (then called “Otulum” after the stream
that runs through the site) with the writing in the Dresden Codex - a kind
of writing that he suggested would one day be translated since the Mayan
language which it recorded was still spoken in the “Otulum” area.
Prophetic words.

193
194 pacal’s people

While no map of the entire city has ever been published, we know that
it is large, although the center of the site, which is what today’s tourist
hordes see, is relatively compact. Set among a conglomeration of
buildings is the Palace, a vast labyrinth of range-type structures enclosing
interior courtyards, built over a period of time by successive rulers; it
was the richly stuccoed pilasters of these buildings that so gripped
Stephens and other early travelers. Rising above it is Palenque’s strange
tower, from the top of which one can have a stunning view of the site and
the surrounding countryside.
To the southeast of the Palace is the Cross Group, dominated by the
Temple of the Cross, so named because of the cruciform world-tree
found at the center of the relief in its temple-top sanctuary. The Maya,
both ancient and modern, have had many curses laid upon them, and
fantastic theorizing by the lunatic and near-lunatic fringe is one of them.
The Temple of the Cross relief has been a frequent target of crackpot
notions; back in 1956, my wife and I sat in a Merida cafe next to an
American who first identified himself as an Apostle of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Reorganized), and then assured us that
Jesus had returned to Earth after the Crucifixion and preached to the
multitudes from the Temple of the Cross.
Fantasy and science fiction aside, the three temples of the Cross
Group have a common pattern: each has an inner, mansard-roofed
sanctuary with a large, limestone relief at the back, on which two
costumed figures (always the identical ones, one tall and one short) face
in towards a cult object. The accompanying glyphic texts are very long
and complex, with lots of dates. Who are these personages, and what do
the texts say? Generations of epigraphers had failed to provide an
explanation.
To my way of thinking, the two greatest archaeological discoveries
ever made in the Maya area were the murals of Bonampak (brought to
light by Giles Healey in 1946) and the tomb inside the basal pyramid of
Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions.2 No really large-scale excavations
had been undertaken at Palenque before 1949, when the Mexican
archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier was chosen to lead an intensive
digging program by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia
(INAH). This was financially backed by Nelson Rockefeller in line with
his interest in cultural interchange between the United States and Latin
America. In those days, Ruz was among the brightest of the younger
generation of Mexican anthropologists, not at all the crusty, xenophobic
autocrat that he later became; whatever I or anyone else eventually came
to think about him, that he was a great discoverer in a class with King
Tut’s Howard Carter cannot be denied.
The great moment in Ruz’s life took place on Sunday, 15 June 1952.
 pacal’s people 195

On that day, after several seasons spent clearing the fill blocking a secret,
corbel-roofed tunnel reaching from the floor of the upper temple to
ground level of the Temple of the Inscriptions, Ruz and his workers
gazed into an underground crypt surpassing an archaeologist’s wildest
dreams: in the midst of the chamber was a mighty limestone sarcophagus
covered by an enormous carved slab, while around the walls of the crypt
were nine stuccoed reliefs of lords or gods in archaic costume. On raising
the massive slab with jacks, Ruz encountered the remains of a great ruler
lying in a fish-shaped cavity. Over the face had been placed a mosaic
mask of jade, the fingers had been covered with jade rings, and in fact
almost the entire body had been festooned with jade, the most precious
substance the Maya knew.
It was clear to Ruz that this great personage (whom Ruz came to call “8
Ahau” from the supposed birth date carved on the edge of the
sarcophagus lid) had ordered the construction of this sepulcher and the
huge pyramid which covered it in his own lifetime, much in the manner
of those pharaohs of ancient Egypt. But it was not left to Ruz to discover
who this man really was, and what he meant to Palenque’s history.

A new dawn for Maya studies, and a leap forward for the decipherment,
began in the small town of Palenque (not far from the ruins) on a hot
August afternoon in 1973, on the back porch of a comfortable, thatched-
roof house owned by a wiry, white-haired artist and her husband.
Merle Greene Robertson, the owner-artist, was born and raised in
Montana,3 and speaks both English and Spanish with a strong Western
twang (with Merle, “Palenque” comes out as “plenky”). Merle has been
painting since childhood - her parents encouraged her talents by
allowing her to embellish the blank walls of her room. She majored in art
at the University of Washington, but finished her college education at
the University of California in Berkeley. After a stint of teaching art and
architecture at a military academy in the Bay area, where her husband
Bob was headmaster, Merle and Bob Robertson moved to the Robert
Louis Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California.
By the early 1960s, Merle was taking students on tours of Mexico,
where she became smitten with Mexican culture and archaeology.
Before long, she was applying her artistic talents to recording Maya
monuments in the lowland jungles, and exploring previously unknown
(or little-known) ancient cities in the headwaters of the Usumacinta.
Merle proved to be an incredibly resilient jungle traveler, accomplishing
long journeys by foot, mule, and jeep in search of stelae to photograph or
take rubbings from. As David Joralemon remarks, “When Merle is off
in the jungle, she can survive on leaves and a thimble of water.”
196 pacal’s people

So entranced was Merle by Palenque, that she and Bob built their
second home in the town, and this became an obligatory stopping point
for countless foreign archaeologists and aficionados of Maya culture,
and above all a Mecca for “Palencophiles.” From 1964, Palenque
became Merle’s obsession — to record it all before its delicate stucco and
limestone reliefs, under attack from air pollution caused by Mexico’s
petrochemical industry, crumbled into oblivion. Merle applied for, and
got, INAH’s permission to record the sculpture of Palenque; hanging
from rickety scaffolding, or spending long, hot hours in the steamy,
stygian interior of the Inscriptions tomb, Merle came up with a
documentation in photographs, drawings, and rubbings that surpassed
Maudslay’s in detail and accuracy.
On that day in August 1973, a small group of friends sat on Merle’s
porch and chatted about Palenque. Present at that moment of creation
were fellow artist Gillett Griffin, Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at
Princeton’s Art Museum; Linda Scheie, whose story we will shortly
come to, and her husband David; David Joralemon from Yale; and Bob
Robertson. Gillett suggested that a “round table” on Palenque might be
a good idea, bringing together all those interested in the art, archaeology,
and epigraphy of the city. Opinion was unanimous: let’s do it as soon as
possible, and let’s call it (as David Joralemon had suggested) a Mesa
Redonda.
Merle is a born organizer, an incurable optimist, and a warm human
being liked by almost everybody in the field — a rarity in a study currently
so rife with interpersonal nastiness. The invitations went out. This
would prove to be the most important Maya conference ever held.
The Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque opened on 14 December of
that year, and closed eight days later.4 We held a working session each
morning, usually under the thatched roof of a spacious salon or champa
owned by Moises Morales, a short, intense man who looks rather like
Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa. Moises had come with his family to
Palenque from northern Mexico, after a stint in the Mexican air force.
For many years the chief guide to the ruins, Moises is fluent in at least
four languages, and is intimately acquainted with the Lacandons and
with the rain forest that they inhabit (although most of it has now been
cut down, courtesy of the Mexican government). Through him the
people of the village, many of them Choi Maya, learned what we were up
to, and it was not long before we were holding special afternoon sessions
for them, at times with as many as fifty local residents present.
For the very first time epigraphers were brought together with art
historians, astronomers, dirt archaeologists, and just plain enthusiasts.
There was a Yale flavor to the meeting, with not only three faculty
members in attendance but also three of our most brilliant students: Jeff
 pacal’s people 197

Miller (whose promising career was soon to be cut short by his death a
few years later), Larry Bardawil, and David Joralemon. In particular,
David’s paper on Maya blood sacrifice and blood symbolism revealed a
whole world of elite behavior and paraphernalia that had been
overlooked: the Classic rulers of cities like Yaxchilan and Palenque,
assisted by their wives, regularly perforated their penises with horrific,
deified bloodletters fashioned from stingray spines.
During the afternoons we could go right to the ruins to test many of
the exciting ideas that had been raised in the course of the morning
presentations and discussions - we could go directly to the tablet of the
Temple of the Foliated Cross, for instance, and see that in fact one of the
figures was brandishing Joralemon’s ornate, deified penis-perforator.
Led by Linda Scheie, we made long exploratory hikes to parts of the city
that few of us had seen; I can remember that we were sometimes
accompanied by a balding American tourist whom we had dubbed
“Daddy Warbucks” from his striking resemblance to a comic-strip
character, plus his large, mongrel dog which kept trying to trip everyone
up on the often-slippery trails.
There is some mystic chemistry that produces those rare conferences
that generate true intellectual excitement, that prove to be turning points
in the understanding of a major body of knowledge. The Primera
Redonda de Palenque was one such, but most of the chemistry seems to
have been concentrated in the meeting of three persons who had never
even heard of each other before they met in Moises’ champa: Floyd
Lounsbury, Linda Scheie, and Peter Mathews.

Floyd Lounsbury’s interest in languages began early, for, as he says,

“coming off a farm in Wisconsin, in an atmosphere that really belonged
to a century ago, I had the notion that you weren’t really educated unless
you could read both Greek and Latin.’’5 He did take Latin in high school;
and studied Greek, too, once he had reached the University of
Wisconsin in 1932. Floyd’s family was dirt poor, having lost their farm
at the start of the Depression; he had borrowed fifty dollars from his high
school English teacher to go to the university, and he had hitchhiked all
the way to Madison.
Floyd’s major in college was mathematics, and his dream was to go on
to a higher degree in the subject in Gottingen, in Germany (few in
Wisconsin at that time had really heard of Hitler). But he began to take
philological courses as well — High German, Norse, and other Indo-
European languages - and even a phonetics course. It was the brilliant
linguist Maurice Swadesh who interested Floyd in Amerindian lan¬
guages, and Swadesh landed the financially strapped student a WPA job
198 pacal’s people

with the Oneida Indians at Green Bay, Wisconsin, which began Floyd’s
lifelong involvement with the complex Iroquoian languages of North
America. As his colleagues and students know, Floyd is not only a
linguist but also a polyglot; there are probably no tongues more difficult
than Oneida and its relatives, but Floyd mastered them.
When he was drafted after Pearl Harbor, his mathematical back¬
ground got him placed in meteorology. During his four years in the
Army Air Force, he was a weather forecaster in the Territory of Amapa,
Brazil. One day, a letter arrived in Brazil, offering him a Rockefeller
Foundation fellowship; he took it with him in 1946 when he went on to
graduate work at Yale in anthropology and linguistics.
Initially, like most other linguists at the time, Floyd had no interest
whatsoever in writing systems; to him, all real intellectual excitement for
a linguist was to be found only in spoken language, not in scripts, and he
wrote his dissertation on Oneida verbs. He read a bit about Mesoamer-
ica, and took a superficial glance at the Maya script, “but it just didn’t
interest me at all, because everything I read seemed to me like a morass. I
thought, if you’d ever step into that field, it would be like one of those
pools of quicksand - you’d just step in, and down you’d go, and that
would be the end of you!’’ About the only work that tickled his curiosity
was Whorf’s 1942 Smithsonian article - understandable enough for a
fellow linguist.
Yet the seed had been sown on fertile ground, and when he was hired
by Yale as an instructor in the Anthropology Department, Floyd took
up the study of Sumerian cuneiform; and he had always been intrigued
by Chinese characters. Then he received a letter from Dick Woodbury,
editor of American Antiquity, asking him to review two translated articles
by a young Russian who had made some claims about deciphering the
Maya hieroglyphs. These turned out to be Knorosov’s papers in the
1952 and 1954 volumes of Sovietskaya Etnografiya, and they so fired his
interest that he got the Villacorta edition of the codices out of the
library. “This was the first thing that made any sense,’’ Floyd has told
me.
At first, Floyd took up the glyphs as a hobby: “What really got me
hooked was not the decipherment, but the mathematical puzzles of the
Dresden Codex.”
After a few years of studying the Dresden, Floyd thought that he might
venture teaching a graduate course on it. At first, he gave this in alternate
years, but it finally blossomed into a full-year course. On coming to Yale
as a young faculty member, I sat in on this course not once, but twice. It
was an extraordinary experience. It was like being in the presence of a
thinking machine: on being asked a difficult question, Floyd would
pause with a slight smile on his face, while the computer in his brain
 pacal’s people 199

worked out the puzzle, and its answer. It is small wonder that both
faculty and students held Floyd in a mixture of awe and affection.
Back in the Age of Thompson, it wasn’t considered necessary to know
any Mayan language to be a glyph expert. Thompson, for example, could
neither speak nor read Yucatec or any other member of the Mayan
language family; he relied on Ralph Roys, Carnegie’s authority on
Yucatec, when he thought he needed some linguistic expertise, which
given his conviction that the glyphs had little or nothing to do with
spoken Maya, was seldom indeed. Even today there are Maya
epigraphers (none of them exactly in the forefront of decipherment) who
haven’t mastered the language, or at least picked up a working
knowledge of it. Contrast this with those who work on Old World
scripts - it would be unthinkable for a cuneiform specialist not to know
Akkadian or some other early Semitic tongue, or for a Sinologist not to
speak Chinese. But Maya studies have been a world apart for over a
century.
Convinced, like his linguist colleague Arch Hill, that the glyphs did
reproduce speech, Floyd took advantage of his course to bring native
speakers of Yucatec and Chorti Maya to New Haven to act as informants
for his students in field linguistics, and from them he absorbed a fairly
complete grasp of the lowland languages - Yucatec and Cholan - in
which the ancient scribes had worked. It is by no means easy to learn any
Mayan language, but the difficulties pale when compared with the task of
mastering Oneida.
In 1971, Elizabeth Benson - then Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at
Dumbarton Oaks - and I put together a conference on Mesoamerican
writing systems at “D.O.” in Washington.6 It was a curious conference.
We had asked Floyd, then a Fellow at D.O., to chair it and give a paper;
and Tania Proskouriakoff presented important new findings on glyphs
for bloodletting rituals on the Yaxchilan lintels, but characteristically
denied that much progress was being made on the decipherment! Yale’s
art historian George Kubler argued that the glyphs were mere aides-
memoires, and approved Thompson’s claim that they had nothing much
to do with the spoken word. But Floyd’s presentation was what made the
whole conference worthwhile: it provided the methodology for most of
the progress of the next twenty years.
Floyd’s paper was about the so-called “Ben-Ich” affix.7 Although
Tania had shown that in combination with a number coefficient (never
more than “five”) this expressed the current katun of a ruler’s life,
beginning with his birth, this said nothing about the reading of “Ben-
Ich.” The compound’s first component is the day-sign Ben (as it is read in
Yucatec), while the second seemed to earlier researchers to look like an
eye, on very shaky grounds, and therefore got the label ich, “eye” or
200 pacal’s people

ahau - u(a)

43 Lounsbury’s reading of
the “Ben-Ich” affix, a. The
ah po reading, b. pom,
“incense.” c. ahau, “ruler,’
“king.”

“face” in Yucatec. In his methodical way, Floyd examined these and

other possible hypotheses, and noted three things:

(1) “Ben-Ich” usually functions as some kind of title for both men and
gods (Thompson had once suggested the male proclitic ah as a reading).

(2) The day-sign Ben is actually Ah in several highland Mayan

languages.

(3) The supposed “ich” sign was used by Landa, in reduplicated form,
as an apparent phonetic reinforcer for his glyph for Pop, the first month.
Following Knorosov’s Theory of Synharmony, this combination would
have to be read pO'p(o), and therefore “Ich” must be po.

(4) Copal incense is pom in all Mayan languages. The glyph accompany¬
ing pictures of incense balls in the codices is a combination of the inner
device of the po sign with the dotted-line surround of Knorosov’s mo.
This conflation of elements represents the word po-mfo), confirming the
po reading for “Ich.”

(5) ah po is a title recorded in a Cakchiquel Maya dictionary from the

highlands, as well as in the Quiche epic, the Popol Vuh. In the lowlands,
ahpop (“he of the mat”) and ahau (“king”) are also titles, and could have
been lowland readings of the original ah po. In fact, it was Floyd himself,
at a much later date, who provided the proof that “Ben-Ich” was read as
ahau in many lowland cities, by proving that the reading for a frequent
postfix in the compound was final -u(a); this served as a phonetic
complement to ahau.8

It was hard for anybody to refute Floyd’s analysis, based as it was on

the hard evidence of linguistics, epigraphy, ethnography, and iconogra¬
phy; it was also presented in the most logical, no-nonsense way. The
lesson here was that Maya glyphs, as Knorosov had claimed, really did
match the spoken word. At one point during that weekend, Tania visited
Floyd’s apartment near D.O. When Floyd expressed his conviction that
Knorosov was on the right track, Tania said that she thought he was
probably right, and urged Floyd to “keep going with it.”
 pacal’s people 201

On the final day of the D.O. conference, Floyd gave a brilliant

summary of everything that had been said, and gave an eloquent
discourse on the early history of writing, showing that what Knorosov
had found out about Maya script fitted perfectly with what was known
about early scripts in the rest of the world.
It was David Joralemon who told Floyd about the upcoming Mesa
Redonda planned for Palenque, and urged him to go. Floyd, one of the
most modest and unassuming people of my acquaintance, demurred,
saying that while he might know something about the codices, he had
done little work with the inscriptions. He finally gave in to our
persuasion, but he had no intention of presenting anything. But Don
Robertson, pre-Columbian art historian at Tulane, whom Merle had
gotten as program chairman, put pressure on him to give something, so
Floyd began reading up on Palenque, and especially an article by Berlin
on the inscription of the Temple of the Cross, with its discussion on
dates and the intervals between dates. This appealed to his mathematical
instincts, and he thought he might do something on that.
But what he ended up doing was not that at all.

The minute I met Linda Scheie at the Palenque conference, I thought,

“Here’s somebody who would never have made the Carnegie ‘Club’
with shirttails hanging over her faded jeans, her then-chubby face
wreathed in smiles, her salty Southern speech, her ribald sense of
humor, she would have horrified Eric Thompson, Harry Pollock, and
the rest of the Carnegie crowd.9 I knew nothing about her, except that
she was an artist who had drifted into Palenque with her architect
husband David, and fallen in love with the place. Merle thought very
highly of her and liked her, but then Merle likes everybody. Quite a few
of us were wondering, who in blazes is this person?
Linda is a product of west Tennessee. She was born in Nashville in
1942 to a traveling salesman of food-processing machinery and his
commercial artist wife; the family milieu was right-wing Republican and
“essentially redneck,” according to Linda. When she was a girl, she
developed a crush on the preacher in their Methodist church and wanted
to be a missionary, “but then I got smart.” By the time she was of college
age, Linda had let her parents know that she wanted to be an artist, but to
them that could only mean commercial art, “for the main point in life
was to be commercially successful.”
The closest college offering commercial art courses was in Cincinnati,
Ohio, and that is where Linda went in 1960. To her horror, she found
herself having to share a bathroom with two black girls; “my parents
were bigots, I was a bigot,” but she soon got over all of that. For one year
202 pacal’s people

she stayed with commercial art, but the College of Design, Art, and
Architecture had its own humanities faculty, and she was deeply
influenced by a young English teacher; it was he who introduced her to
the world of ideas and to English literature. Shaken, she switched over to
Fine Arts in her second year, and graduated in that field in 1964.
The experience with her undergraduate mentor had been “a rare,
unreproduceable, intellectual journey into magic/’ In contrast, her
subsequent experience studying in literature in the graduate school of
the University of Connecticut was “nitpicking bullshit.” After six weeks
of this, she decided that was not what she wanted to do, and retreated to
Boston, where she spent “the worst year of her life” working as a piping
draftsman in the Electric Boat Company, trying to correct the fault in the
piping system which had just led to the tragic loss of the submarine
U.S.S. Thresher. Then, back to the University of Cincinnati, where she
eventually got a master’s degree.
Meanwhile, Linda was painting, in a style that she calls “biomorphic
surrealism,” vaguely resembling the work of artists like Gorky, Miro,
and Klee. Her working methodology came from her Cincinnati painting
teacher, who inspired her with the “philosophy of the happy accident” -
in place of having a preconceived plan, (1) know your craft very, very
well; (2) get your first mark on paper or canvas; (3) go on from there,
“keeping yourself in an alpha state, so that when a happy accident
happens, you are prepared to follow it wherever it will lead you.”
That s what I do when I do research,” Linda says. “I just set out a very,
very large sort of vacuum-cleaner, trying to pattern all of the data that I
can, without any predisposition of what is going to come, and then let
the damn stuff pattern on me, and I start following the patterns wherever
they lead me.” Not Floyd’s - or Tania’s - methodology by a long shot,
but it has led to truly important results.
By this time, Linda had married, and in 1968 she and David Scheie
moved to the University of South Alabama in Mobile, where she took
up a job teaching art. Although she had sworn she would never go back
to the South, both liked Mobile right away.
The turning point in her life came in 1970, when they decided to spend
Christmas vacation in Mexico. They drove down that December in a
van, with three students aboard. On arrival in Villahermosa, the
Tabasco capital along the lower reaches of the Grijalva River, they were
told about a nearby Maya site called Palenque, and about an interesting
person named Moises Morales. They got to Palenque, and stayed twelve
days, camping in the van in the site’s parking lot. She did meet Moises,
and she met Merle, who was making a rubbing of the magnificent tablet
which had been found in the ruins of the Palace. “I was just goggle-eyed -
Palenque hit me in the gut.” So much so, that after she had gone with the
 pacal’s people 203

students to see the Yucatan sites, she came back with David and the
students to spend another five days at Palenque. “They couldn’t get me
away. I just had to understand what those Palenque artists were doing.’’
The following summer saw her once again in Palenque, “walking
through the architecture,” as she puts it, trying to work out the sequence
in which the Palace complex had been built. She saw much of Merle and
encountered the ever-enthusiastic Gillett Griffin for the first time; Gillett
had just rediscovered the extraordinary, towered ruins of Rio Bee, a
Maya site which had been lost to the outside world since its initial
discovery in the early years of this century. And there Linda was again in
the summer of 1973, this time as Merle’s assistant for the lighting of
Palenque’s myriad stucco reliefs so that they could be photographed. As
a result, she was able to spend four whole days in the dank burial vault of
the ancient ruler responsible for the Temple of the Inscriptions, closely
examining the figures and the glyphs carved on his sarcophagus and on
the surrounding walls.10

Being on sabbatical leave in England, Dave Kelley could not make it to

Merle’s Mesa Redonda. In his stead he sent one of his undergraduate
students at the University of Calgary, Peter Mathews. For a few of us, the
quiet Australian who arrived the first day with heavy suitcase in hand
was an odd sight: apart from his moustache and long, dark hair, the mark
of the undergraduate in those days, Peter wore a tee shirt hand-stenciled
with the sinister figure of God L taken from the pages of the Dresden.
What he had in that suitcase would change the course of the conference:
a blue notebook annotated in Peter’s minuscule hand with every
Palenque date, the associated glyphs, and what anybody had ever written
about the meaning of those dates.
Peter was a “faculty brat,” the son of an economics professor at
Australian National University in Canberra.11 In high school he had
concentrated on geology, and actually spent two and a half years doing
geological field work in Australia, but he had always been interested in
archaeology. In those days, the only archaeology taught on a university
level was Classical; when Peter went off to the University of Sydney to
study ancient Greece and Rome, he found himself in an excruciatingly
boring course taught by a fuddyduddy professor. After a month of this,
he went back home to Canberra.
Unhappily for him (and a lot of other young men) the Vietnam War
was then on, and he was called up by the draft. But happily, the medical
examiner was a sympathetic, anti-war intern who certified that he was
unfit “because his father had asthma.” Just the same, it seemed safer to
be in a Canadian university, and so he went to the University of Calgary,
204 pacal’s people

justly famed for its archaeology program. For a whole academic year, he
never had the temerity to introduce himself to Dave Kelley, but at the
end of the year he screwed up his courage enough to ask Dave whether he
might take his course next semester. Characteristically, Dave straight¬
away asked him home to dinner that very night.
In the next year or so, Peter spent nearly every evening at the Kelleys,
absorbing Maya hieroglyphic writing. To really learn the glyphs, Dave
set Peter the task of going through all of the published Palenque texts, in
Maudslay and elsewhere, and transcribing them into the Thompson
catalog numbers. It was immensely tedious, but a wonderful way to learn
the glyphs. Then he worked out all the dates, with their glyphs, in his
notebook. That is what he brought with him to the Palenque Mesa
Redonda the following year.

Linda and Peter met at Palenque as complete strangers, but they soon
began to put their heads together. Linda had already prepared a paper on
the iconography and texts of the Cross Group, and knew about Berlin’s
isolation in those texts of four individuals whom he could designate only
as A, B, C, and D since he had no idea of their names.
I was moderator at one morning session in Moises’ champa. At one
point, Linda put up her hand to ask, “Can Peter and I see if we can find
more rulers?” My answer was “Sure, why not? Linda, you know every
stone in Palenque, and Peter knows every glyph - why don’t the two of
you see if you can put together a dynastic history of Palenque? No one
has attempted that yet.”
That afternoon, I flew off by light plane with my students for a brief
visit to Bonampak (which has what must be the world’s worst and
scariest airstrip). Linda and Peter retreated to Merle’s house, working on
a kitchen table with Peter’s notebook. Floyd joined them, bringing with
him a little card that contained his own mathematical formulas for
getting Long Count positions for dates in the Calendar Round (most
Palenque dates are given only by Calendar Round). Floyd was later to
commit these formulas to memory so he could dispense with the card!
The first thing they did was to find all occurrences of a certain glyphic
prefix which the ever-observant Berlin had noted as introducing the
names of protagonists in the Palenque texts, but which he made no
attempt to read as he had no interest in this problem.12 This prefix had
Landa’s ma, a kin “sun” sign, and flanking elements previously identified
by Knorosov as syllabic na\ a few years later, Floyd was able to pin this
prefix down as a title of highland origin to be read as makina (“Great
Sun,” or similar).13 The identification of the royal prefix enabled them to
find many or most rulers’ names in the Palenque inscriptions.
 pacal’s people 205

44 The makina title. The

complete glyph shown here reads
Makina Kuk, “Qreat Sun
Quetzal,” one of the last rulers
of Palenque.

They worked with another hypothesis, drawing upon Floyd’s

knowledge of Mayan linguistics: that a time expression (date) would be
followed by a verb, and that in turn by the subject of the sentence - a
royal name plus titles which would most likely include the Palenque
Emblem Glyph. Then they got involved in the name business - “What
will we call these guys?” they asked of themselves.
“Two and a half hours later,” Linda says, “we had it!”
That night, after dinner, the Linda and Peter show began, with Floyd
acting as moderator and commentator. They held their audience in thrall
as they presented their results, complete with big charts drawn by Linda.
What they came up with was nothing less than the history of Palenque
from the onset of the Late Classic period, at the beginning of the seventh
century, through the city’s demise - the span covering almost all of its
architectural and artistic glories. History had been made before our very
eyes. They had laid out the life stories of six successive Palenque kings,
from birth to accession to death (an “event glyph,” i.e. verb, identified
by Floyd), the most complete king list for any Maya site.
What about their names? The first ruler on the list they had merely
called “Shield,” since that is what the logograph in his name depicted.
To the rest they assigned Yucatec Maya names, depending largely on the
nominal logographs; Shield’s successor they decided should be called
Can-Balam, or “Snake-Jaguar,” since his sign combined the heads of
these two beasts. When they had sat down, Moises immediately jumped
to his feet: why should the names be in Yucatec, when the Palenque
inscriptions were surely in Choi, the Mayan language still spoken in the
area today? It was a sticky political moment, but reason prevailed. As
Mayanists, the epigraphers realized that they had used Yucatec only out
of habit, and that the language spoken by most of the Maya inhabitants
of the southern lowlands was surely a form of Cholan.
Accordingly, we all adopted the Choi form of Can-Balam — Chan-
Bahlum- and followed suit with the rest of the names. As a kind of ironic
footnote to this decision, in recent years an inscription has turned up
which indicates that Chan-Bahlum’s name was, in reality, pronounced in
Yucatec.14 So the linguistic picture is a bit more complex than we had
assumed back in 1973.
206 pacal’s people

Makina “Shield,” who headed Linda and Peter’s list, was the great
potentate buried in the spectacular tomb under the Temple of the
Inscriptions. After 1960, Ruz came to call him “8 Ahau,” since that
seemed to be the ruler’s birth date recorded on the sarcophagus lid, but
what was his real name in Maya? That his name had to mean “shield’ ’ was
not in doubt, for the logographic main sign was clearly the kind of small
shield that Classic Maya warriors wore strapped to their wrists. But it
was Dave Kelley in Calgary who had discovered that the Palenque
scribes had alternative ways of spelling the great man’s name: he found a
purely phonetic-syllabic version consisting of a variant of Knorosov’s pa
sign, followed by ca, and terminated by the “inverted Ahau” or la sign of
Knorosov. Hence, pa'cad(a), or “Pacal.”15
On my return to New Haven, I came across the same reading, without
knowing that Dave had already hit on it. The next thing I did was to
search for the word pacal in my extensive collection of Mayan-language
dictionaries, and lo and behold, there it was on page 97 verso of the
sixteenth-century Vienna dictionary (one of the earliest Yucatec
dictionaries), glossed as escudo, “shield.”
Looking at the different ways Pacal’s name was written, one can see
that the Palenque scribes liked to play around with their script, juggling
logographic (semantic) with syllabic signs. Pacal could be written purely
logographically, with a picture of a shield; purely syllabically; or
logosyllabically, adding the “inverted Ahau” la sign as a phonetic
complement to tell us that this shield-object ends in a final -L All this was
familiar to Floyd, with his first-hand knowledge of Old World
cuneiform scripts, and would have been familiar to Egyptologists from
Champollion on.
Who was Makina Pacal? His records are in several places, notably on
the three great tablets which give their name to the Temple of the
Inscriptions and which were set in the back wall of the upper structure.
But the most obvious place to look for his history and forebears was on
the edge of the sarcophagus lid, since it was already known that the text
opened with his birth date on 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahau 13 Pop (26 March 603),
and there are other names and dates. After the Mesa Redonda, Floyd
began working on the lid text, publishing his findings in the conference
proceedings the next year.16 One problem was that Pacal’s predecessors
were still unknown, since it had been only the later part of the dynasty
that had been worked out that afternoon in Merle’s kitchen. The other
problem was that two of the names — Pacal and one other — appeared with
an assortment of dates and what seemed to be “event glyphs” in what
seemed to be a jumbled manner.
Floyd solved the whole business by showing that “event glyphs” that
had a five-dotted quincunx as main sign went with “terminal dates,” that
 pacal’s people 207

45 Variant spellings of Pacal’s name. Logograms in upper case, phonetic signs

in lower case.

is, they recorded the person’s death. In one stroke, he resolved that
dilemma: there were tivo Pacals, not one, as well as two other characters
sharing the same name. So the other individuals named on the lid turned
out to be Pacal’s ancestors: his mother Lady Zac-Kuk (“White
Quetzal”), his maternal grandfather, the first Pacal; and other forebears
going back as far as ad 524.
Maya autocrats were as proud of their blue blood as any European
king. To demonstrate his claim to legitimacy even in the afterlife,
Makina Pacal had commissioned reliefs of some of his precursors to be
placed around the outer surface of his stone coffin; each ancestor appears
before a different species of tree or plant. Neither of his parents actually
ruled the city-state of Palenque, notwithstanding the fact that Lady Zac-
Kuk was the daughter of Pacal I, but they are found at either end of the
sarcophagus.17 The entire funerary chamber is the analog to the ancestral
portrait galleries of England’s stately homes.
Thanks to the careful architectural work of Merle and Linda, we know
a good deal about the building programs of various rulers at Palenque,
something that one still cannot say for other Maya cities. Pacal “the
Great” began his career as a builder in ad 647, and went on to order the
construction of most of the “houses” or range-type structures of the
Palace, but his greatest achievement was his funerary monument, the
Temple of the Inscriptions. The architectural works of Chan-Bahlum,
his son and successor, are equally astonishing, above all the Cross
Group, but his story comes later.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction to the
Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque began even before it opened. The
storm signals were only too clear when Ruz failed to attend, even though
he had been invited. Not only that, but there was not one INAH
archaeologist there, and not one student from either the University or
208 pacal’s people

the huge School of Anthropology in Mexico City. Admittedly, Maya

studies had never been a Mexican forte; almost all the great Mexican
anthropologists of the past hundred years had concentrated on the
Zapotec, Mixtec, and Aztec, and left the Maya to foreign investigators.
But this kind of boycott was indeed unusual. There can be little doubt
that it was organized by Ruz.
Alberto Ruz Lhuillier was originally not even a Mexican.18 He was
born in France of a French mother and a Cuban father (he was cousin to
Fidel Castro Ruz, which may explain something of his political
orientation). He arrived in Mexico in 1935, and eventually was
naturalized. By the early 1940s, he had become the most promising Maya
archaeologist among the younger Mexicans, and eventually organized
the Seminario de Cultura Maya at the University; as editor of its
publication Estudios de Cultura Maya, he brought out some of the best
material ever written in the field, not the least of which was David
Kelley’s paper defending Knorosov’s approach. There can be no
question that he was for many years a positive force in the advancement
of Maya studies, especially with his great excavations at Palenque.
That was an age of international scientific cooperation, as far as the
Mexican anthropological establishment was concerned. Powerful,
politically well-connected scholars like Alfonso Caso and Ignacio Bernal
fostered a climate that made this possible.
But all that changed, beginning in 1970. On 1 December of that year,
Luis Echeverria Alvarez was inaugurated as President of Mexico. For
over six decades, Mexico has been a one-party state in which a President
is something close to a god-king, and his policies carry down through
every level of the political pyramid for six whole years. Widely held to
be the architect of the terrible massacre of dissident students among the
Aztec pyramids of Tlatelolco, just before the 1968 Olympics, Echeverria
was nevertheless left-leaning and determinedly anti-American. I have
been reliably told that one of his decrees ordered INAH to clear the
gringo archaeologists out of Mexico.
While Echeverria, the “Supreme Leader,” was no Communist, much
of official cultural life in Mexico came under the direction of true
believers in Marxism, the opiate of the intelligentsia throughout Latin
America, and that included anthropology and archaeology. Stock
Marxist phrases like “modes of production,” “class conflict,” and
inner contradictions began to clog the Mexican archaeological
literature, ironically at the same time that Soviets were beginning to free
themselves from this particular intellectual straitjacket. As a result of
Echeverria s anti-gringo edict, permits for Americans to dig in Mexico
almost totally dried up during the next two decades, and scientific
cooperation between the two neighboring countries became a thing of
 pacal’s people 209

the past. Tourist ads boosting Mexico as the amigo country struck an
ironic note among Yankee archaeologists.
Ruz was as orthodoxically Marxist as any of the rest, as a posthumous
paper on the ancient Maya delivered in Merida shortly after his death in
1979 testifies.19 Yet he and Eric Thompson remained close friends and
scholarly allies, surely a contradiction in classic Marxist thinking. At any
rate, he and INAH turned a cold shoulder on this and every subsequent
Mesa Redonda de Palenque. The loss was theirs.
But Ruz obviously nurtured a deeper grievance against these upstart
foreigners at Palenque. In that same year, 1973, his magnum opus on the
Temple of the Inscriptions was issued by INAH, containing what he
thought was the final, definitive study on the burial of his “8 Ahau” in
the Inscriptions tomb.20 When the two papers, the one by Floyd and the
other by Linda and Peter, appeared in 1974 in the Mesa Redonda
proceedings, Ruz exploded in a paroxysm of rage; as Linda puts it, “He
saw his life’s work going down the drain,” for Ruz had contended that
the sarcophagus lid text backed his assertion that the man inside, “8
Ahau” a.k.a. Pacal, was not more than fifty years old - but the three
Mesa Redonda epigraphers had shown that he died at the age of eighty.
In spite of his close association with Thompson, Ruz had little
knowledge of the glyphs, and his reading of the text on the edge of the lid
was hopelessly wrong, conflating, for example, the dates and events in
the two Pacals’ lives, leading to wrong conclusions about the Long
Count positions of the thirteen Calendar Round dates.
Ruz struck back as soon as he could, calling Linda, Peter, and Floyd
fantasistas, “fantasists,” in sarcastic articles published in 1975 and
1977.21 He showed up at the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, the
second round table, in December 1974. Linda tells the story: “He came
to debunk us. He took old drawings of the Sarcophagus lid; he cut them
up into individual glyphs, gave each researcher in the Centro de Estudios
Mayas one glyph, and told them to find everything they could in the
literature on it. He picked up the parts that he liked, and put them
together to make his own reading — which is about what it sounded
like.”22
For Ruz, the “shield” glyph which the three had identified as Pacal’s
name was not that but a symbol of high status which had been given to
his supposed “8 Ahau.” In the discussion that followed, it turned out
that Ruz was unable to sight-read glyphs, a necessity for this sort of work.
Linda then stood up. “I tried to be as respectful as I could, I took Ruz step
by step through our reading - date, verb, name, and Emblem Glyph.”
Then Ruz, seconded by a young American student of Tania’s, asked,
“How do you know it’s a verb?” Linda had no answer, and sat down - “I
was utterly shot down. Right then and there I decided I was going to find
210 pacal’s people

out why it had to be a verb, and nobody was going to ask me that question
again!” The happy outcome of this unpleasant confrontation was that
Linda went on to graduate school at the University of Texas, learned
Mayan linguistics, and wrote her ground-breaking Ph.D. dissertation on
the verbs in Maya hieroglyphic writing. She finally answered the
question.
As for Pacal’s dates, Linda says, “his birth, accession, and death are
attached to dates millions of years into the past and thousands of years
into the future - if you want to move his dates around, you have to move
all of those dates as a body.”

When Betty Benson and I shared a taxi from the Villahermosa airport to
that first Mesa Redonda in Palenque, we had already been working
together for over ten years, she as the curator of the pre-Columbian
section at Dumbarton Oaks, and I as an advisor to that part of D.O.
Between us, we had put together the exhibit in Philip Johnson’s
stunningly beautiful wing at D.O., but more importantly, an intellectual
program of fellowships, conferences, and publications that would unite
art history and archaeology in one enterprise.
Betty is a lady, in the dictionary sense: “a woman of refinement and
gentle manners.” Her tact and unflappability made her the perfect
person to bring together Latin Americans, Europeans, and Americans in
the kind of international symposia and programs that D.O. specialized
in. Having previously had charge of the great Bliss collection of ancient
New World art when it was on display in Washington’s National
Gallery, she has a fine appreciation of the artistry of many cultures, but
the Maya were and are her first love. I don’t think that we disagreed on
any important matter in all those years that we collaborated at D.O.
Betty was as euphoric as any of the rest of us with the success of
Merle’s Mesa Redonda. In the early spring of 1974, she realized that
there was “money left over in the kitty” at D.O.23 It struck her that it
might be good to invite to D.O. all those people who had ever worked on
the Palenque inscriptions for a conference. Heinrich Berlin sent his
apologies, saying that he “was no longer involved with those things with
which I used to toy of yore, ’ ’ but on one weekend in early April there was
a gathering of Palenque specialists in the pre-Columbian seminar room
in the basement of Johnson’s wing at D.O.
The meeting began disastrously. I was present as an observer, and can
testify that resentment and enmity hung in the atmosphere. The whole
business got off to a bad start with George Kubler’s bolt from the blue,
“How do you know this is writing at all?” Tania, sitting there with Joyce
Marcus, her student from Harvard, was being very Russian, i.e. very
 pacal’s people 211

contrary. One obstacle was, as Floyd pointed out, that Tania “had her
own theory about dynastic history, and ours were coming out a little
different.” But the main sticking point was that she just did not take to
the somewhat rough-hewn and earthy Tennessean; to Linda’s dismay,
this one-sided antipathy was something that Tania never lost. So
negative did Tania become about what the Palenque team had been
doing that I began to think that Betty had made a ghastly mistake in ever
convening such a group.
I couldn’t take much of this, and left by Saturday noon for New
Haven. By late the next afternoon, most of the participants, including
Tania and Joyce, had also departed. Five die-hards stayed on, besides
Betty: Linda, Peter, Floyd, Merle, and Dave Kelley. As Betty puts it, “at
first they were in little two by two groups, engaged in desultory
conversation. And suddenly there was a moment when Floyd and Linda
and Dave and Peter were all down on the floor around a copy of
Maudslay, and they’d got a new glyph. It was all because each of them
knew something the others didn’t. I thought, aha! - this is my group, and
I will get them back together again.”
What Linda had brought with her was what she had been working on
since the Mesa Redonda. Back in Mobile, she had laid out and glued
together all the Palenque texts published in Maudslay and elsewhere.
She had then analyzed these not merely using dates alone, but whole
sentences, finding patterns. Floyd had with him Merle’s rubbings of the
sarcophagus texts, Peter had his notebooks. They were “almost in a state
of trance - from time to time Betty’s arm would appear, delivering back¬
up reference material.” In the three and a half hours that they had
worked at Palenque in 1973, they had gotten the last two hundred years
of its history; now, from 6:30 to 10 o’clock that night, they got the first
two hundred years.
“All of the kings,” exclaims Linda, “bam-bam, boom-boom, one after
the other! And nobody who wasn’t on the floor that night was ever invited
back.”
It was a true meeting of minds. Floyd said later that it was the only time
he had ever worked with anybody — he had always worked by himself.
Betty had piled up on one table all the Mayan-language dictionaries from
D.O.’s excellent library, and they went back and forth to these. The
meaning of a key glyph that looked like a leaf came up, in a context that
suggested “lineage.” Dave said that there ought to be a linguistic
reference, and lo and behold! in the dictionaries there was the word le
glossed as “leaf” and “lineage.”
Betty did in fact have “her group,” and she got them together for four
more Mini-Conferences, three in Washington and one in Dave’s home
town of Jaffrey. They turned into more than just weekend meetings: the
212 pacal’s people

four epigraphers would arrive on a Wednesday, and not leave until the
following Tuesday.
I asked Linda, who looks on them as the turning point in the modern
history of decipherment, what the real contribution of Betty’s Mini-
Conferences had been. When they began, Linda explained, Knorosov’s
method of phonetic analysis was already in place; Proskouriakoff and
Berlin’s work had proved beyond any doubt that the inscriptions were
historical. But even though the syntax of these texts was implied,
everybody who had worked on the texts had examined only individual
glyphs.
The Mini-Conference people went at particular inscriptions as whole
texts. “Knowing that it reflected the real language, it had to have the
syntactical structure of Mayan languages: there had to be verbs, there
had to be adjectives, there had to be subjects. Even if you didn’t know
what the verb was, you knew where it was because of its position in the
sentence.” Floyd supplied the needed linguistics, but Linda was getting
good at this, too. They used Distance Numbers—discovered years earlier
by Thompson - to count forward to and back from dates to tell how
verbs related to each other in time.
“We began dealing with full texts. We might translate a verb, say, as
‘he did something on such-and-such a date.’ We knew how old he was,
and we knew what context it was being done in, so we could get - for the
first time - eighty and ninety percent translation levels on texts.”

When the Mini-Conferencers were not actually meeting, they were

exchanging long letters with new findings and inferences, and publishing
papers, often in Merle’s Mesa Redonda series. Floyd had cracked the
makina title by 1974, and went on to solve a mind-boggling mystery on
the tablet on the back wall of the Temple of the Cross.
It will be remembered that like the tablets in the other two temples of
the Cross Group, this one shows two figures facing in towards a cult
object, in this case a cross-shaped tree surmounted by a fantastic bird.
Exactly who these two characters were has puzzled Mayanists ever since
del Rio’s explorations were published in London, but the Mini-
Conferencers (or Palencophiles as they called themselves) quickly
concluded that the bundled-up, smaller individual on the left was none
other than Pacal himself, and the tall figure on the right was Chan-
Bahlum, his son and heir, the ruler who had built all three temples in the
Cross Group.24 And the tree? That was surely a world-tree, probably the
one that in both ancient and modern Maya thought stands in the center
of the universe and sustains the heavens. It was to the very long text that
flanks this scene that Floyd turned his attention.25 If one calculates the
 pacal’s people 213

Long Count date which begins it at the upper left, this falls on 7
December 3121 b c, about six and a half years before the beginning of the
present Maya era: clearly a mythological date. What transpired at that
remote time was the birth of an ancestral goddess whom the epigraphers
could only call “Lady Beastie” from the birdlike head which forms her
name glyph. At the Methuselan age of 761 years she gave birth to a triad
of gods who became the tutelary divinities of the Palenque dynasty. The
inscription then travels down in time to describe the history of the
Palenque kings through Pacal to his successor Chan-Bahlum.
What Floyd, always the mathematician, discovered was that the
interval between “Lady Beastie” ’s birth and that of Pacal — 1,359,540
days — is a multiple for no less than seven different time periods of
importance to the Maya, and thus the birth of “Lady Beastie” is a totally
contrived date, invented by the Palenque astronomer-scribes to give
Chan-Bahlum and his distinguished father a divine ancestry. Now, one
of the intervals in this magic number is the synodic period of Mars, thus
confirming what Dave Kelley had been telling all of us since his student
days, that many of the dates in the Classic inscriptions have an
astronomical significance, above and beyond “real” history - an
approach that has turned out to be established again and again in more
recent research.
Floyd followed this up in 1980, when he showed that mythological
birth expressions in the same Temple of the Cross text follow the rules of
Mayan syntax, in which word order bears no resemblance to what we are
used to in either English or Spanish.26 He also identified a pattern of
parallel couplets, a rhetorical device widespread in the indigenous
cultures of the Americas, and in the Old World as well; the Psalms are
filled with such literary devices, for example:

He turneth the wilderness into a standing water,

and dry ground into water-springs.

It is much used in modern spoken Maya, especially in ritual discourse,

prayers, oratory, and other formal uses of language, but Floyd was a
pioneer in matching it with Classic hieroglyphic texts. The lesson was
that epigraphers had better start studying Mayan linguistics and
Colonial-period literature - thumbing through dictionaries would not
be enough.
Linda, smarting from Ruz’s jibe at the Segunda Mesa Redonda, took
this to heart, and her 1980 doctoral dissertation at the University of
Texas not only established the meaning of specific “event glyphs” or
verbs in dynastic statements - such as chum, “to be seated” (i.e.,
enthroned) for a picture of what Linda characteristically identifies as “an
ass sitting down” - but she also showed how verbal affixes were used
214 pacal’s people

46 The “seating” glyph: chumuan, “he was seated.”

syllabically to write the grammatical endings to these verbs.27 For

instance, in Mayan, chum belongs in a special category of verbs that
describe the position in space of the subject, and these have their own
inflectional endings. With Floyd’s establishment of the true phonetic
readings for the syllabic signs T. 130 (ua) and T. 116 (ni), Linda was
eventually able to read the all-important “seating” glyph combination as
chumuan(i), “he was seated” - in perfectly grammatical Cholan, by now
generally accepted as the language of the Classic inscriptions.
By the latter part of the decade of the 1970s, progress was being made
on several fronts. A major breakthrough in figuring out dynastic history
was a paper that Christopher Jones of the University of Pennsylvania
published in American Antiquity in 19 7 7.28 Jones is the epigrapher for the
Tikal Project, and he had noted in various places on the Tikal
monuments that a ruler would be named, and then his name would be
followed by the name of a woman and that of a previous ruler. His
suggested explanation was that this was the ruler’s mother and father.
When Linda read the article, she was inspired to make up a sheet of
similar examples from other sites, and she brought this to the final
Mini-Conference.
According to Linda, when Peter Mathews and Dave Kelley saw this
sheet, which included parentage statements for Yaxchilan, their reaction
was “My god. Do you know what this says? It says that Bird-Jaguar was
the son of Shield-Jaguar!” The result was that with these newly identified
parentage glyphs, which said, in effect, “X, child of Z,” firm genealogies
could be worked out for every city where they occurred. In the next
decade, the exact phonetic reading of these glyphs would begin to come
in, with a new generation of epigraphers.
In those exciting days, discoveries came at the pace of a raging prairie
fire. Hardly a day or week seemed to pass without some amazing new fact
coming to light, or a new reading being made for a glyph, or someone
coming forth with a revolutionary new interpretation of older data. For
the first time in nearly one and a half centuries of Maya research, a band
of scholars had been able to associate temples, palaces, and monuments
with real people placed in a historical framework. They began to make
 pacal’s people 215

u nichin? uhuntan
“child of (father)” "the cherished one”

47 Relationship glyphs.

some kind of sense out of the often weird scenes pictured on the stelae
and reliefs, so much of which seemed to involve lineage rites and the
drawing of royal blood.
Now one could clear up mysteries that had intrigued scholars since the
end of the eighteenth century. The oval tablet set in a wall of the
Palenque Palace now turned out to be the back to a throne whose seat
and legs had been removed by del Rio and sent to his king, Charles III;
and the scene on the tablet turned out to be Pacal the Great, seated on a
Jaguar throne, receiving a royal headdress from his mother Lady Zac-
Kuk on his accession. And it became evident that this was where all
subsequent Palenque kings had been invested with power, until the end
of the dynasty and Classic Maya civilization itself.29
Likewise, the Palace Tablet, a great slab discovered by Ruz, could be
seen from its now-readable text to depict the accession of Makina Kan-
Xul, the younger child of Pacal and Lady Ahpo-Hel (Pacal’s principal
wife), who succeeded to the rulership upon the death of his elder brother
Chan-Bahlum; the royal parents had long since been dead, but they are
shown handing to Kan-Xul the symbols of power which he was to don
during the ceremony. Ill luck later struck the unfortunate Makina Kan-
Xul, for he was captured by Tonina (as a captive monument at that site
with his name and Emblem Glyph clearly indicate) and almost surely
suffered death by beheading far from his native territory.30
All those iconographic details that had long eluded explanation now
216 pacal’s people

began to make sense, and in Mesa Redonda after Mesa Redonda, articles
of clothing worn in rituals and ceremonially-manipulated objects all
assumed meaning in the context of elite power and prestige.
The kinds of interpretations that were coming out of the Palenque
conferences and Mini-Conferences spilled over to research in other
parts of the Maya lowlands, particularly in Guatemala and Belize where
xenophobia had not stifled ongoing excavations by foreign investigators,
and where new hieroglyphic texts, tombs, and caches were being
discovered constantly. It was at Tikal in Guatemala that the extra¬
ordinary Burial 116 was uncovered below the skyscraper-like Temple I
on the main plaza of that huge city, and epigraphers could now
understand that this was the tomb of a great king whose name was
perhaps Ah Cacau, “He of the Chocolate,” written with the Maya
phonetic-syllabary.31

48 The “hel” or “change of office” glyph, a. the 8th in

succession, b. the 10th in succession.

It was found that the Tikal kings, like those of Yaxchilan, employed a
glyph (which Thompson, on not very secure grounds, read as hel,
“change”) to tell one which particular ruler in a numbered succession he
was.32 Regardless of how one reads hel - and there is little agreement even
now on this point - the meaning of the numbered hel glyphs is well
established, which makes the working out of dynastic lines a simpler
task than it used to be.
During the latter part of the 1970s the word began to spread about
what was going on at Palenque, and the annual Mesa Redonda began to
grow beyond all expectations, like a snowball racing downhill. In 1973,
only thirty-five of us had been gathered in Moises’ champa, but only five
years later, there were no fewer than a hundred-and-forty-two partici¬
pants from seven countries, and this figure continued to grow over the
years. An even wider audience was eventually reached by the marvelous
Maya Hieroglyph Workshops, which were begun in 1978 at the
University of Texas in Austin, and have been held on an annual basis
ever since.33 These are basically one-woman performances by the
 pacal’s people 217

charismatic Linda, a born showwoman if there ever was one, taking her
rapt audience effortlessly through the most difficult material, from
Knorosovian phoneticism to parentage statements. The ultimate tribute
to her success has been the proliferation of similar workshops around
the United States.
Naturally, there were (and are) those who did not take kindly to all of
this, least of all the died-in-the-wool, true-blue, dirt archaeologists who
began to feel that their kind of nuts-and-bolts research among the house
mounds and cooking pots of the ancient Maya peasantry had been
overshadowed by all this attention to the concerns of the Classic elite.
With a few exceptions, they were notably absent at the Palenque Mesas
Redondas and the glyph workshops, and continued to lecture and
publish without giving any indication that the Classic Maya were a
literate people. Their exasperation would begin to surface a decade later
at (of all places) Dumbarton Oaks.
But no one could really deny that Sylvanus Morley, writing in 1940,
had been totally wrong when he stated, “The ancient Maya indubitably
recorded their history but not in the stone inscriptions’’;34 or that
“Pacal’s people,” that small, dedicated band of “Palencophiles,” had
brought us much closer to a complete reading of ancient Maya history
and mental life.
 9 Down into Xibalba

It was 4 August 1968, and it was the feast day of Saint Dominic, patron of
Santo Domingo Pueblo, southwest of Santa Fe. At one end of the hot,
dusty plaza, a Dominican priest watched nervously as several hundred
dancers arranged in two long rows pounded the earth with their
moccasined feet as a mighty, collective prayer for rain, accompanied by
the powerful baritone singing of a chorus and the beat of drums. As my
family and I viewed this, the largest and in some ways the most
impressive Native American public ceremony, a tiny cloud over the
Jemez Mountains to the northwest got larger and larger, eventually
filling up the sky; at last the storm broke, and the sky was crisscrossed by
lightning, and the pueblo resounded with peals of rolling thunder.
On that memorable day, we came across Alfred Bush and Douglas
Ewing, old friends of mine from the East. Both were officers of the
Grolier Club of New York, a staid organization dedicated to the
collection of rare old books and manuscripts. They had a proposal,
which we discussed right then and there: would I be interested in
organizing an exhibit at the Grolier on Maya hieroglyphic writing, using
original documents?
I was, but cautioned that the European institutions would certainly be
reluctant to loan the three known codices for a show in New York, and
that on practical grounds alone, large stelae brought in from Mexico or
Guatemala would be an unlikely proposition. We could always borrow
a few smaller stone inscriptions - lintels or panels - from museums and
private collections in the United States, but that would really not suffice
if one wanted to say something about Maya writing and the “state of the
art” regarding decipherment (remember we were in the post-Proskour-
iakoff-breakthrough but pre-Primera-Mesa-Redonda era).
But I had an idea. If we had to rely on U.S. sources only, then the
majority of original Maya texts available to us were not on stone or
paper, but on pottery. Sometimes these texts were remarkably long, as
extensive as many monumental inscriptions. In the introduction to his
1962 Catalog,1 Eric Thompson had pretty much dismissed ceramic texts

218
 DOWN INTO XIBALBA 219

as unworthy of study, concluding that they were mere decoration by

basically illiterate artists choosing certain glyphs to put on their pots
because they looked attractive - they reflected “the artist’s wish to
produce a well-balanced and aesthetically pleasing arrangement.’’ And
as a result this was naturally what the majority of Mayanists then
believed.
I was led to question this untested assumption, since I had been among
those who showed that Thompson had been wrong about the antiquity
of Olmec civilization, and I was thoroughly satisfied that his views on the
nature of the Maya script were untenable. I thought that if I could get
enough Classic Maya pots and dishes with hieroglyphic writing on them
under one roof, I would be able to see if Thompson was right or wrong.

Our plan for the exhibit got bogged down, as I was busy with my
colleague Dick Diehl in getting our joint excavations at the huge Olmec
site of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan written up; we had been there for three
field seasons, and like any other archaeological excavation, the actual
digging was just the tip of the iceberg - it took years of analysis and
writing to get it all into print.2 But by early April 19711 was ready to go to
work on the Grolier show.
Before 1960, neither bona fide archaeology nor the antiquities trade
had been able to come up with a sufficient number of elite Maya ceramics
for anybody to make much sense of them. But after that date, changing
political conditions in Guatemala had led to large-scale looting of lesser
known - or still unknown - Classic sites in the Peten. Left-wing
guerrillas, the right-wing army, local politicians, and a mass of landless,
destitute peasants all got into the act. The more efficient, and therefore
the more dangerous, of the despoilers had high-tech chainsaws at their
disposal, and began slicing up Maya stelae for easy removal and sale.3
Apart from Guatemalan private collections, the major market for this
material was New York, and, to a lesser extent, European capitals like
Paris and Geneva - at least that is where the most reputable dealers were.
Although it is easy to castigate these individuals as the primary culprits
in the rape of the Peten, probably considerably more destruction was
caused by a cabal of collectors, unscrupulous appraisers, and low-level
dealers who imported planeloads of poor-quality material via Miami to
donate to naive museums as tax write-offs. Be that as it may, there was an
amazing number of Maya vases of the utmost beauty and scholarly
interest available for study. Ironically, I found that these New York
dealers, the target of much righteous indignation on the part of
archaeologists, were a great deal more generous with material in their
possession than those same archaeologists had been with theirs.
220 DOWN INTO XIBALBA

The public has the impression that it must take months or even years
to install a major exhibit. I have learned that most shows are hurriedly
mounted at the eleventh hour. In point of fact, I installed the Grolier
show, entitled The Maya Scribe and His World,4 on 17 April, the day on
which it opened. Unpacking box after box of Maya ceramics, in the
club’s elegant halls, I began to note a very strange pattern emerging with
the scenes painted on these vases: pairs of identical young men with very
similar garb showed up again and again. The word ‘ ‘twins’ ’ flashed across
my mind. That immediately triggered another neural linkage: “twins -
Popol Vuh.” I had read the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the highland
Quiche Maya, a number of times and twins are all-important to it.
The Popol Vuh was transcribed in Latin letters some time in the
sixteenth century, most likely from a lost hieroglyphic original.
Rediscovered by Brasseur de Bourbourg in the last century, and
generally considered to be the greatest work of Native American
literature, it has been translated many times.5 The book begins with the
creation of the world out of a primordial chaos, and ends with the
Spanish Conquest. But it is the second part, immediately following the
creation, that is of most interest to the student of Maya mythology and
to the iconographer. Basically, it is a “harrowing of hell” involving two
sets of divinely-born twins. The first pair, 1 Hunahpu and 7 Hunahpu (1
Ahau and 7 Ahau in the lowland Maya calendar), are handsome young
men who enjoy playing ball on the surface of the Earth, but their noisy
game outrages the lords of the Underworld or Xibalba (“place of fright”
in Quiche Maya), who summon them to their dread presence. After
subjecting them to horrifying and disabling trials, they are forced to play
a ball game with the sinister Xibalbans, which the twins lose and suffer
death by beheading.
1 Hunahpu’s head is hung in a calabash tree. One day, the daughter of
a Xibalban lord passes by the tree and is spoken to by the head; when she
holds up her hand to it, it spits in her hand and she is magically
impregnated. Expelled to the surface of the world, she eventually gives
birth to the second set of twins - the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and
Xbalanque, Hunter and Jaguar Sun.” W’hile they are yet boys, they
perform various heroic acts — destroying monsters, and turning their
obstreperous and jealous half-brothers into monkeys, an episode that
led me later to an unforeseen discovery.
The boys shoot birds with their blowguns and otherwise divert
themselves, but again their noisy ball-playing results in a summons to
Xibalba. Rather than suffering the fate of their father and uncle,
Hunahpu and Xbalanque defeat the Xibalbans through trickery, and rise
up to the sky to become the sun and the moon.
I soon came to see that many of these vases and plates, as I put them in
 DOWN INTO XIBALBA 221

49 Rollout of a Late Classic vase. At the top is the Primary Standard Sequence and the
owner I patron’s name and titles. The scene below and the vertical text concern an assembly
of the gods at the first moment of creation.

their exhibition cases, had remarkably specific pictorial references to the

Xibalba episodes in the Popol Vuh, and all further studies I have made of
this sort of material have confirmed and even extended that interpre¬
tation. What does all this mean? Here we have to consider the function of
these elite ceramics: although it is obviously impossible to be one
hundred percent sure given the lack of records for most of these pots, the
published archaeological evidence suggests that the ultimate destination
of pictorial Maya ceramics, whether painted or carved, was to be placed
- filled with food or drink - with the honored dead in a tomb or grave.
When my artist Diane Peck rolled out these scenes for publication in the
catalog of the show, I found that they were replete with Underworld,
death imagery; they were peppered with the gruesome symbolism of
death-skulls, crossed bones, disembodied eyes, vampire bats, and the
like.
This by no means suggests that everything on the pots was taken lock-
stock-and-barrel from the Popol Vuh - some of it was more historical -
but it does imply that the Underworld section of the Quiche epic was
shared by the Classic peoples of the lowlands, for use on pottery
222 DOWN INTO XIBALBA

destined as funerary offerings. In fact, the Popol Vuh Hero Twins-

Xibalba story is only a surviving fraction of what apparently was once a
huge Underworld mythology: there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
weird, Xibalban deities on the vases and plates, in a complex
scenography. But this crowded Underworld was an ordered place: as
Edith Sitwell’s Sir Joshua Jebb admonished his daughters,

For Hell is just as properly proper '

As Greenwich, or as Bath, or Joppa!

I was able to see that there were two ruling gods in Xibalba, usually
depicted enthroned in their own palaces; these were Schellhas’ Gods L
(whom we have seen on the Temple of the Cross at Palenque) and N. In
spite of the advanced years of these gods, they enjoyed the services of
harems and evidently the attentions of the young Moon Goddess.
While Thompson considered God N — who functions as the deity of
the end of the year in the Dresden Codex - as a Bacab,6 a quadripartite
deity who holds up the heavens, I saw that his glyphic name often
contained Knorosov’s pa sign over a logographic tun, and read it as
“Pauahtun,” an important god connected by Landa with end-of-the-year
ceremonies. Only a few years ago, my former student Karl Taube has
confirmed the reading by showing that the little “corn-curl” element that
I had overlooked in the god’s nominal glyph is the uah syllable - thus, pa-
uah-tun. We shall find Pauahtun later at Copan.
One can be wrong for the right reasons (a specialty of Thompson’s)
but, conversely, right for the wrong ones. I saw twins on these pots, and
jumped to the conclusion that these had stepped from the pages of the
Popol Vuh. But the set of twins whom I identified with Hunahpu and
Xbalanque, and whom I referred to as the “Young Lords,” has turned
out to be the sacrificed father and uncle of the Hero Twins. This again
was the work of Taube, who has made the outstanding discovery that the
father, 1 Hunahpu, is none other than the young Maize God of Maya
iconography.7 Just as every Maya farmer, in the act of planting, “sends”
the maize seed to the Underworld, so was 1 Hunahpu - the Maize God -
ordered to descend into Xibalba; there he suffered death, and then
resurrection by his offspring Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
Now, all of this may seem unconnected to the story of Maya
decipherment, but painted and carved Maya ceramics from beyond the
grave eventually came to play their role. And the new iconographic
horizons that were opened up by the Grolier exhibit entered into that
mix of art history and epigraphy that became the Mesa Redonda series at
Palenque.
The real work on the Grolier exhibit began after it was over. This was
the preparation of a catalog,8 which as far as I was concerned should try
 DOWN INTO XIBALBA 223

to reach the same standards of accurate documentation as Maudslay had

achieved with his Biologia. This meant rolling out all of the scenes - with
glyphic texts - on those cylindrical vases. Years before, I had read in the
Illustrated London News that the British Museum had invented a camera
that would take continuous photographs of objects slowly rotated on a
turntable, and asked Justin Kerr, the New York photographer engaged
to work on the catalog, if he could devise a camera which would do this.
Justin thought that it was possible, but it would take too long for him to
create a prototype, so we settled for multiple shots of each vase. Justin’s
nowTamous, “continuous rollout” camera materialized, but too late for
the book.9
So it transpired that almost every vase was laboriously unrolled by my
artist Diane Peck in black-and-white drawings, but this still gave me an
accurate corpus on which to work. From this, and from dozens of
published and unpublished Classic Maya vases, bowls, and plates, I put
together a compendium of ceramic texts on 5 by 7 cards; I ended up with
several hundred entries. That summer, I took all this material with me to
our summer home in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, to work in
peace and quiet.
With the distraction of five children, it was not always easy to get
one’s research done, or so I thought. Every warm day, they demanded to
be taken to our swimming hole on the icy-cold Green River, near the
Vermont border. They would bathe in the bone-chilling waters for
hours, but twenty minutes was usually enough for me, so I would spend
the rest of the time waiting for them to emerge while sitting with my 5 by
7 cards. Now, my mind is in many ways the reciprocal of Floyd
Lounsbury’s, and I suspect that each of us is under the control of a
different cerebral hemisphere. While I have no ability to remember
numbers and names, and certainly not much in the way of mathematical
ability, I have almost total visual memory: once I see something, I never
forget it, either in toto or in detail. Once stored into memory, these
visual cues often sort themselves out into patterns. One such pattern
began emerging as I sat listening with one ear to the gleeful shouts and
splashes of my children.
It was already apparent to me that there were different kinds of texts
on pictorial pottery, depending on their placement on the object. What I
called “Primary” texts usually appeared in a horizontal band just below
the rim of a vase, or in a vertical panel set off from the scene; while
“Secondary” ones were actually within the scene, and connected to the
actors in whatever drama was being portrayed. My guess, based on
comparison with the way stone lintels worked, was that the Secondary
texts contained the names and possibly the titles of the principal
characters, often the unearthly denizens of Xibalba. Later research has
224 DOWN INTO XIBALBA

b. c. d. e. f. 9-

50 A Primary Standard Sequence text. a. Initial Sign. b. Step (substitutes for Qod N).
c. Wing-Quincunx, d. Serpent-segment, e. lL-Face. f. Muluc. g. Fish. h. Rodent-Bone,
i. Hand-Monkey. All these are nicknames, not decipherments.

shown that this guess was correct, as it became apparent that specific
gods could be linked with specific name glyphs, and even with Emblem
Glyphs - the gods had their cities, too.
I began to notice a sameness about many of the Primary texts, that the
same glyphs, with minor variations, showed up over and over, and in the
same order. This aroused my curiosity, so back in our 1810 farmhouse I
cut these texts up into individual glyphs, and then lined up identical
glyphs in vertical columns. It turned out that I was dealing with some
sort of standard formula, which I christened the Primary Standard
Sequence (or PSS), and which almost always began with a glyphic
combination (a main sign and two affixes) to which I gave the name Initial
Sign. The order in which the twenty-one or so signs appeared was
absolutely fixed (I gave them all nicknames for mnemonic purposes, like
“Wing-Quincunx” and “Hand-Monkey”), but no one text ever
contained all of them. There might be only a few of the PSS glyphs on
some pots; in such abbreviated statements, the ones usually written
down were usually Initial Sign, God N, and Wing-Quincunx, in that
order.
And there were also interesting substitutions, which would make
possible a new interpretation of what at least part of the PSS was all
about. But the epigraphers who would open up these new vistas were still
in grade school when the PSS was discovered.
What was the meaning of this formula? I was sure that it had little or
nothing to do with the actions of individuals, sacred or secular,
portrayed on the vessels - that was the task of the Secondary texts. As
the PSS was often followed by what surely were names, Emblem Glyphs,
and the title ba-ca-bfa) (bacab, frequent on the monuments), I felt sure
that those terminal glyphs named the owner or patron, and his (or her)
city. Keeping in mind my Underworld interpretation of Maya funerary
ceramics, it is no surprise that I suggested that the PSS might be the
written form of a stock funerary incantation, perhaps like the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, meant to inform the soul of the defunct what he was to
encounter on his journey into Xibalba. The whole Hero Twins tale was a
 DOWN INTO XIBALBA 225

kind of Death and Transfiguration parable for the Maya elite, so why not
a formulaic text or spell to assist the honored dead?
This was but a working hypothesis, and hypotheses can be altered or
even demolished when other explanations become more plausible;
during the 1980s, this is what happened, at least in part, to my “funerary
chant” hypothesis about the PSS.

The Grolier was but the first of several exhibitions of Maya pictorial
ceramics that I organized; a second was in Gillett Griffin’s Princeton Art
Gallery10 and a third at the Israel Museum of Jerusalem.11 By that time,
Kerr’s rollout camera was in full use. My feeling was then, and still is,
that all of these materials, even though looted (like the majority of Greek
pots or Chinese bronzes), ought to be put out in the public domain so
that scholars could study them.
One whole class of vases was new to Maya studies; these were painted
with calligraphic delicacy in black or brown on a cream or light tan
background. They seemed to me to have been produced by the same
artist-scribes who might have painted the Classic Maya codices, so I
called them “codex-style vases.” It was not long before the dirt
archaeologists declared them all to be fake, since none of them had ever

51 Qods of the scribes on Classic vases, a. Rabbit Qod writing a codex,

b. the Monkey'man Scribes.
226 DOWN INTO XIBALBA

found such an object in their excavations. Since codex-style vase

fragments have now been found on a bona fide dig at the site of Nakbe in
the Peten, that particular canard can be laid to rest.12
I was impressed by the fact that a number of these vases showed pairs
of individuals with monkey-like faces engaged in painting folding-screen
codices which had jaguar-skin covers; these gleefully manic individuals,
as well as other scribal gods, held brush pens in one hand and paintpots
in the shape of halved conch shells in the other (fig. 51).13 Again the Popol
Vuh connection struck me with force. To go back to the story of the
Hero Twins: when they were yet young boys perfecting their skills as
blow-gunners and shooting birds out of the trees, their quite mean
grandmother (the aged Creator Goddess of Maya cosmology) favored
their spoiled half-brothers, 1 Batz and 1 Chuen (“One Monkey’’ and
“One Artisan”). One day, the boys, always great tricksters, persuaded
these two nasties to climb a tall tree to retrieve some birds that had
become lodged in some high boughs, but the half-brothers became stuck
up there. By magical means, the Twins gave their two adversaries long
tails and pot bellies - in other words, turned them into monkeys - and
they were unable to get down. The old woman laughed uproariously at
the comic sight when they came back to the house. But, says the narrator
of the Popol Vuh,

So they were prayed to by the flautists and singers among ancient people, and the
writers and carvers prayed to them. In ancient times they turned into animals, they
became monkeys, because they magnified themselves, they abused their younger
brothers.

There is good evidence that the cult of monkey or monkey-man

scribes was widespread over ancient Mesoamerica, and was found not
only among the highland Maya but also in Yucatan at the time of the
Spanish Conquest. Likewise, among the Aztec, the monkey was patron
god of the artisans, musicians, and dancers. And why not? Our close
relatives the monkeys were the most intelligent of the non-human
animals encountered by people like the Maya, and so the Maya elevated
them to a godlike status, just as the Egyptians took the baboon-god
Thoth as patron of their scribes and the art of writing.
I will return to the Maya scribes and their gods in the next chapter.

The discovery of a new Maya codex is an exceedingly rare event. The

Dresden, in all likelihood picked up by Cortes in Yucatan and shipped
by him to Europe in 1519, only came to scholarly notice in the eighteenth
century. The Madrid appeared in two sections at about the mid-point of
the nineteenth century, and the Paris at about the same time. Dozens of
 DOWN INTO XIBALBA 121

claimants have reached collectors and museums since then, and all have
proved to be fake. I keep a picture file on falsified codices, painted on
both bark paper and, more usually, on untreated leather. They are truly
inept and ugly - all of them, without exception. The modern “scribes”
who turn out such spurious junk have not even a nodding acquaintance
with the rudiments of the Maya calendar, let alone the iconography and
the non-calendrical glyphs.
Just before the opening of the Grolier exhibit, I was told by a friend
about a codex which might just be real. It was owned by the Mexican
collector Dr. Josue Saenz, and I went to see it in his home in Mexico City.
The purported codex was on bark paper coated with gesso (like the three
real codices, but also like some phonies), but it looked real to me, with
convincing calendrical signs and deity figures drawn in a kind of hybrid
Toltec-Maya style, slightly similar to the reliefs of Chichen Itza.
How had it reached the hands of Dr. Saenz? One day, it seems, a
person had approached him with a proposition: they would fly him to an
airstrip, and he would be shown a recently discovered group of pre-
Columbian treasures. And so he went with them in a light plane to the
secret landing spot; they had covered the compass with a cloth so he
wouldn’t know where he was, but Dr. Saenz is widely traveled and knew
that he must be in the foothills of the Sierra de v>hiapas, not far from the
Gulf Coast plain. After landing, they brought him the pieces, which he
was told had just been found in a dry cave in the area. They included a
mosaic mask (certainly Late Post-Classic Maya); a small box carved with
glyphs, including the Tortuguero Emblem Glyph (they were probably
not far from this site, a satellite of Palenque); a flint sacrificial knife with a
wooden grip in the form of a hand; and a codex. He was allowed to take
these back with him to Mexico City “on approval, meaning that he
would check their authenticity with his consultant, a person who makes
a living doing this sort of thing for Mexican and foreign collectors, for a
large fee.
The expert pronounced the mask14 a fake (it ended up as one of the
treasures of the Dumbarton Oaks collection). The verdict on the codex
was also thumbs down, but Saenz was so intrigued by it that he bought it
anyway, along with the little box (which I later published in the Mesa
Redonda series15).
I returned to New Haven with a very good set of photographs which
Dr. Saenz had given me. On showing them to Floyd Lounsbury, we both
concluded that what we were looking at were ten pages of a twenty-page
Venus Calendar; it was structurally similar to the Venus pages in the
Dresden Codex, in that in its complete form it would have covered 65
cycles of the planet. There are many differences from the Dresden,
though, the most important being that there are pictures of gods
228 DOWN INTO XIBALBA

accompanying all four phases of Venus and not just its appearance as
Morning Star. In Mesoamerican thought, Venus was an exceptionally
malevolent heavenly body, and the Venus deities in the Grolier are
shown hurling weapons and otherwise making themselves unpleasant, as
in the Dresden. Unlike the Dresden, however, the intervals covered by
each phase (reckoned as 236, 90, 250, and 8, totalling 584 days) were
expressed by “ring numbers,” that is, bar-and-dot coefficients tied up
like bundles.
Floyd and I were convinced that Saenz indeed had the fourth known
Maya codex. Even though its text was purely calendrical, I asked him to
lend it to the show, which he did, suggesting it could temporarily be
called the “Grolier codex.” Shortly after I had installed it in its case, a
New York Times reporter arrived with a photographer, and the next day
“the Grolier Codex” was splashed across one section of the paper, with a
somewhat blurry shot of three of its pages, taken at an angle.
Before long, I got a friendly letter from Linton Satterthwaite in
Philadelphia, asking for more details on the codex. A little later, he sent
me a copy of a letter he had received from Thompson, who had seen the
Times article (but who never once looked at the original or asked me for
photographs). Briefly, Thompson gleefully announced that I’d been
“had” - the so-called “codex” was a clearcut fake.
By the time the catalog, which I called The Maya Scribe and His World,
came out, I had a radiocarbon date on a fragment of bark paper from the
codex: ad 1230 ± 130, just about perfect for the style and iconography,
which is a kind of hybrid Maya-Toltec.16
Now, the very conservative Grolier Club had never handled anything
like my catalog, and they were convinced it was not going to sell. So, at
their insistence, Doug Ewing and I were obliged to sign a document
accepting full financial responsibility for the volume (incidentally, I had
paid for all of the line drawings out of my own pocket). When they asked
me who should receive (free) review copies, my answer was “Nobody!”:
I saw no reason why free copies should be sent to orthodox Mayanists
whose negative reactions I could predict with some accuracy, certainly
not if Doug and I were going to foot the bill.
But, the Directors protested, we have always sent a copy to The Book
Collector in England for review; so off went The Maya Scribe to end up in
the hands of Eric Thompson, that most predictable of Mayanists. Eric’s
parting shot at me was let fly from beyond the grave. In 1975, after his
knighthood, he had gone as guest lecturer on a tour of Bolivia, where he
was severely affected by the altitude. By the time he returned to his Essex
home he was a very sick person, and soon died.
His posthumous review in The Book Collector17 paid no attention to the
main theme of my book — that the. scenes on pictorial Maya ceramics and
 DOWN INTO XIBALBA 229

the pottery texts were not mere decoration by a bunch of illiterate artists,
but meaningful statements made by artists/scribes as conversant with
the concerns of elite Maya culture as anyone else (it was only later that it
was discovered that Maya scribes were elite). Nor was there any mention
of the Primary Standard Sequence, something new to Maya epigraphy.
Briefly, I got the same treatment that had earlier been meted out to
Whorf and Knorosov: ignoring the main argument while concentrating
on some detail where he thought the chances of a quick kill were best.
What Thompson went after was the Grolier Codex. I won’t repeat all
of his arguments, since they are only peripheral to the story of the
decipherment, and each one of them can be refuted; but stacked up
together, they made a pile which impressed his followers. Saenz’
Mexican “expert,” a friend of Thompson, contributed his bit which was
an unsubstantiated rumor that the fakers had used some old bark paper
which had been found somewhere in a cave; this would explain the
radiocarbon date (I suppose they would have first dated the paper
themselves so they would know in what style to paint the codex).
The denouement of the Grolier Codex affair was that it is now
considered authentic by almost all those Mayanists who are either
epigraphers or iconographers, or both; that the archaeoastronomer John
Carlson has shown that it contains concepts about the planet Venus
which have come to light only after it was exhibited in New York;18 and
that it is probably the earliest of the four known codices, the Dresden
having been shown by Karl Taube to have Aztec-influenced iconogra¬
phy.19 Dr. Saenz has donated the manuscript to the Mexican govern¬
ment, but it presently languishes in a Mexico City vault.
The irony of the whole business is that if Brasseur de Bourbourg had
come across the Grolier while rummaging around in archives during the
mid-nineteenth century, it would be accepted by even the most rock-
ribbed scholar as the genuine article.

I make no pretensions to be a great decipherer. Rather, I look at myself as

more of an enabler, bringing advances in one area to the attention of
people working in other areas. Occasionally, I am lucky enough to open
some interesting vistas which had previously remained undetected. One
of these vistas was into the macabre world of Classic Maya ceramics;
here was an untouched area of iconography, with supernatural beings
engaged in activities hitherto undreamed-of in Maya research. Who
would have hitherto dared to suggest that Classic rulers - and gods -
took hallucinogenic or inebriating enemas with special syringes? Yet
such shocking behavior is recorded over and over again on the vases and
bowls. Who would have thought of monkey-man scribes?
230 DOWN INTO XIBALBA

The pictorial ceramics revealed that Schellhas’ simple picture, largely

based on the codices, of a sparsely inhabited pantheon, falls far short of
the mark: there are hundreds of Maya gods, most of them denizens of the
Underworld. No alphabet in the world could ever provide enough
letters to label them. A few of the Schellhas gods - D (Itzamna), L, and N
(Pauahtun) - reign in Xibalba, but there is a bewildering variety of
animals, monsters, and men, often in composite form.20 Art historians
came to realize that most Maya iconography appeared in two places: on
the costumes of royal personages as recorded on the stone monuments
(these are virtual iconographic symphonies) and on the pottery.
For the decipherment, it became possible for the first time to take the
texts on ceramics seriously. They did say something, even if the PSS
resisted all attempts to crack it for more than a decade. Names and titles
of actual personages did appear painted on pottery surfaces as well as
carved in stone. And many of those outlandish supernaturals were
named in the Secondary texts. For epigraphers, the universe of Mayanist
research was definitely expanding.
But there was much muttering and grumbling from the wings. In
reaction to the uncontrolled, and seemingly uncontrollable, looting that
had produced all these pots, and in particular the sawn-up, mutilated
stelae, there was a powerful lobby of Mayanists who were taking the
position that one should not even study this material, as this would in
effect be condoning the pillage. As most Europeans have come to realize,
there is a powerfully puritanical streak in American culture which comes
over our public life in waves. As an example, one field archaeologist has
more than once been heard to express the hope that every Maya pot
brought to light by non-archaeological hands be ground into fine dust.
These are people who would have smashed up the Rosetta Stone because
it had not been excavated by one of Napoleon’s archaeologists.
I have no intention of getting mired in this problem, which is
exceedingly complex and often awash with Pecksniffian hypocrisy. A
further complication was that a definite rift began to open up between
the epigraphers and iconographers, on one side, and the field archaeo¬
logists on the other, a split which was not merely over the looting issue,
but much more profound: is the proper study of the Maya world the
world of the elite rulers, or is it the everyday life of “ordinary Maya,’’
whoever they might have been? By the end of the 1980s, this rift had
begun to look like the Grand Canyon.
 10A New Dawn

Some decipherers begin young. It is said that the great Jean-Fran^ois

Champollion began his career at the age of nine, when he embarked on
the study of eastern languages in Grenoble, and he was only seventeen
when he published his first learned paper, a study of the Coptic
etymology of Egyptian place-names recorded by the Greeks.1
But Champollion has nothing on David Stuart, the young Mayanist
whose career must set a new record in epigraphic precocity.2 In a way,
David was preadapted to a life in Maya studies: his parents have co¬
authored a book on the Maya,3 and his father George has long been the
National Qeographic’s expert on the subject and its archaeological editor.
David was born in Washington in 1965. Most of his early schooling,
though, was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where George was earning
his doctorate in anthropology.
In 1968, at the tender age of three, David was taken on his initial trip to
the archaeological wonders of Mexico and Guatemala. His very first
memories are the ruins of great Mesoamerican cities like Monte Alban,
Chichen Itza, and Tikal, and he “cried his eyes out” when he was not
allowed to climb to the top of Tikal’s Temple I with his sister and older
brothers.
The turning point in David’s life came in the summer of 1974, when
the entire Stuart family went to the Maya city of Coba for five months.
Coba is unique among Maya sites: situated in the forests of Quintana
Roo, in the eastern part of the Yucatan Peninsula, it is built among a
cluster of waterlily-covered lakes, and its various suburb complexes are
connected to the center by a network of sacbe’ob, or raised causeways.
The eight-year-old boy found himselt living in a thatched Maya hut
among people who spoke largely Yucatec. The Stuarts were at Coba for
two summers, while George was engaged with a large-scale mapping
project. As David was really not old enough to help with the
cartography, he was left to his own devices. He had a lot of time, and
would wander out on his own in the forest, coming across fallen
sculptures from time to time.

231
232 A NEW DAWN

During the 1975 season, two new stelae were found by the project, and
George dropped everything to draw them; but David himself was always
drawing when he was a child, so he did his own sketches of these reliefs
and began wondering what all that writing meant. Luckily, at Coba there
was a small library which included Thompson’s Introduction, and he
began copying the drawings of glyphs in the back of the book, “just for
the fun of it.’’
It was also a chance to experience the life of the present-day Maya.
Although he didn’t learn to speak the language, he managed to pick up an
extensive Yucatec vocabulary while playing with the workers’ children.
The high point of the Coba experience for the young David came in
1975, when there was a prolonged drought - not uncommon in the
northern lowlands - and a cha-chaac ceremony was held in the ruined
city’s main plaza. A shaman or h-men (“he who does things’’) was
brought in from the town of Chemax; under this man’s supervision, an
altar was built with four arches of green boughs tied at the top, and
offerings were made to Chac, god of rain - offerings of balche (the native
mead), cigarettes, and Coca-Cola. By this time, the boy was convinced
that he should be a Mayanist.
It was during that summer of 1975 that Eric Thompson (by now Sir
Eric) came to Yucatan for the state visit of the Queen, which included a
tour of Uxmal. Afterwards, Thompson visited Coba for the first time
since 1930, when he and Florence Thompson had honeymooned in the
ruins while Eric studied the site and its monuments. For the next week,
the Stuarts drove the great man around Yucatan; for the young and
impressionable David, “it was quite an experience to meet the man who
had written the book.’’

David met Linda Scheie in 1976 in Washington as a direct result of his

parents’ work on their National Qeographic book The Mysterious Maya
(the Qeographic likes alliteration in its titles). Linda was a consultant for
the project, and they invited her out to dinner at a Washington
restaurant. The topic of conversation was the Maya script, and Linda
was busily drawing glyphs on a pad. It was some time before she noted
that the eleven-year-old boy at the table was looking over her shoulder;
when he remarked, “Oh, that’s a Fire glyph,” she turned around in
astonishment. Linda is a very lucky player of hunches: later on that same
evening, she invited David to come down the following summer to
Palenque, to spend several weeks helping her correct drawings of the
Palenque inscriptions.
And so it came to pass. David did arrive at Palenque in the summer of
1976, along with his mother Gene. Linda tells me that David was “very
 A NEW DAWN 233

self-contained, not wanting to be the center of attention, not wanting to

bother anyone - quiet and withdrawn.” They stayed in Merle’s house,
and, according to David, “I had a ball. Linda would give me a drawing of
an inscription and say, ‘OK, you go read this.’ And I would go into
Merle’s library for an afternoon, and try to struggle with the dates, and
figure out patterns, or anything that I could. And then I would come out
and ask her a few questions. It was really drawing the glyphs rather than
reading books that helped me the most. You just sort of brand the glyphs
in your mind, even if you don’t know what these things are.”
What Linda handed the boy that first day was the tablet from
Palenque’s Temple of the Sun, in the Cross Group - one of Chan-
Bahlum’s great monuments. As she tells it, ‘‘In eight hours, with a little
consultation, he had read the whole thing. In eight hours, he had gotten
to the place it had taken us five years to get to!”
David’s method was to take a legal-sized pad of paper and write down
everything he could find out about every Palenque glyph, using books in
Merle’s superb library; each line would be a separate glyph block from a
particular text. Sitting afterwards with Linda on the back porch (the
birthplace of the Mesa Redonda series), he went over the texts with her.
One of the things he noted was a particular compound glyph that often
occurred on the Cross Group tablets with the names of gods and mortal
rulers. His mentor Linda liked the idea and suggested that he write it up
and give it at the next Mesa Redonda, to be held in June 1978.4
This he did, and the great ones of the field must have been amazed to
hear a boy not yet turned thirteen hold forth with insight and accuracy
on a very complex subject. It was an astonishing performance - even
Champollion had attained the ripe age of seventeen before presenting his
first.paper at Grenoble!
It was not all glyphs, however, for the young epigrapher, for he was
beginning junior high school back in Chapel Hill; but he was able to
work on them whenever he had spare time.

All three Stuarts were in attendance at the great conference “Phoneti-

cism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing,” held in June 1979 at the State
University of New York at Albany.5 Like the first Palenque Mesa
Redonda, this was a watershed in Maya studies and the decipherment of
the script. The linguist Lyle Campbell set the tone when he stated at the
outset: “No Mayan linguist who has seriously looked into the matter
any longer doubts the phonetic hypothesis as originally framed by
Knorosov and elaborated by David Kelley, Floyd Lounsbury, and
others.”6 The Maya script was logographic - that is, a combination of
logograms expressing the morphemes or meaning units of words, and
234 A NEW DAWN

phonetic-syllable signs. In other words, exactly what Knorosov had been

telling us ever since 1952.
Yuri Valentinovich had been invited, and the State Department had
notified the organizers that he was actually coming (my wife would have
been interpreter), but this, as usual with the Soviets, proved to be a
chimaera. Years later, Knorosov told us why he failed to appear. The
problem, he told us, was not the Iron Curtain, but what he calls the
“Golden Curtain”: in the pre-Gorbachev era, the Party apparatchiks
demanded exorbitant sums of money before any exit visa was granted,
and Knorosov just didn’t have it.
What made this meeting a “first” was the heavy participation of the
linguists. Thompson’s sharp tongue had consigned them to outer
darkness, but things were different now. With Thompson gone, and
with Knorosovian phoneticism now established, they saw new horizons
ahead. On the one hand, the fact that for more than twelve centuries the
Mayan languages had been written with a partially phonetic script gave
them the opportunity for the first time to study an indigenous New
World language family as it evolved over time. On the other, the
linguists could contribute significantly to the decipherment, in several
ways. One of these would be by reconstructing the vocabulary and
grammar of the Cholan and Yucatec branches of Mayan as they were
spoken in Classic times,7 while another would be to bring their
unparalleled knowledge of the structure of Mayan languages to bear on
the analysis of hieroglyphic words and sentences.
Early on in the conference, Dave Kelley stood up and pinned a large
chart to the wall. Essentially, this was a grid of all those syllabic signs that
Knorosov and others had proposed which had been largely confirmed
by later research; to the left side of the grid was a vertical column of
consonants, and along the top a horizontal row of vowels, giving one in
the boxes an array of CV (consonant-vowel) combinations. Grids of this
nature had long ago been generated for the syllabic systems of early
scripts elsewhere in the world - for Linear B in the Aegean, and
Hieroglyphic Hittite in Turkey, for example - but this was an innovation
for Maya studies. “We’ll start with this,” Dave told them, “now where
do we go from here?”
One new path was provided by polyvalence, the writing principle long
recognized by students of Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian
hieroglyphics, but until explored by the linguists James Fox and John
Justeson8 in the Albany conference, not really fully grasped by
Mayanists; it was certainly not taken into account by Knorosov in his
pioneering work. To recap, basically polyvalence is present (1) when a
single sign has multiple values, and (2) when a sound is symbolized by
more than one sign.
 A NEW DAWN 235

We find the first kind of polyvalence in English script - in fact, it is

quite common. An example raised by Fox and Justeson is the compound
sign ch in English: it has totally different values in the words chart, chorus,
and chivalry. Just look at the sign & on your typewriter: this can be and,
ampersand, and et- (in &lc for “etcetera”). Cuneiform specialists call this
kind of polyvalence “polyphony.” Mayanists have known about
polyphony for a long time. Take, for example, the well-established sign
for the next-to-last in the list of twenty days: this is Cauac, given by
Bishop Landa, but in Maya hieroglyphic writing it can also be tun or haab
with the meaning “year,” as well as acting as the phonetic-syllabic cu.
So how do the readers of this script know which of these polyphonic
sound values is the right one? Exactly as they do with English-script
polyphony - by context. To reduce further any possible ambiguity, the
Maya scribes, just like their Mesopotamian and Egyptian counterparts,
often added phonetic complements to reinforce the proper reading of
the sign in question; for example postfixing the syllabic sign n(i) to show
when the Cauac sign was to be read as tun and not haab or Cauac.

52 Polyvalence: polyphony. Logograms are in upper case, phonetic signs

in lower case. a. Cauac (day-sign), b. haab (365-day year), c. tun (360-
day cycle), d. cu (syllabic sign).

The converse of polyphony is homophony, by means of which multiple

signs have the same sound value. This sometimes comes about
historically when signs which once had distinctive pronunciations
converge over time on the same sound — a situation well attested in
Egyptian. Five years after the Albany meeting, Steve Houston presented
a superb example of Maya homophony: the signs for four, snake,
and “sky” all freely substituting for each other as logographs whenever
the sound can (Yucatec) or chan (Cholan) was called for.

53 Polyvalence: homophony. These glyphs are interchangeable.

236 A NEW DAWN

The significance of homophony was not lost on the young David

Stuart. In future years, he would search out such substitution patterns to
come up with many new readings that previous investigators, including
Knorosov, had missed. This was the genesis of his important publica-
tion-to-be, “Ten Phonetic Syllables.”
Fox and Justeson’s paper proved to be enormously productive over
the years. They themselves established several new glyphic decipher¬
ments, such as the glyph combinations standing for uinic, “man” in
almost all Mayan languages, and u bac, “his prisoner,” frequent on war
monuments of the Classic period.

UINIC u ba

54 Readings by James Fox and John

Justeson. a. uinic, “man,” “person.”
b. u bac, “his captive.”
b.

The report on the Albany conference came out in 1984. In one

appendix, Peter Mathews laid out - in published form for the first time -
a reasonably complete syllabic grid for the Maya script, one in which the
syllabic value of each sign was agreed upon by several speakers. This has
been added to and modified over the subsequent years, but there was
now little doubt at all that the Maya could and did write anything they
wanted to with this syllabary. The logograms would prove a tougher nut
to crack, but substitutions with purely phonetic signs would lead to their
decipherment, too.
David Stuart didn’t actually give a paper in Albany, but by this time he
was already beginning to toy with the enigmatic Primary Standard
Sequence, and submitted a short study of the second glyph in the
sequence - a head of God N, which he felt was some kind of verb. In
retrospect, we now know that he was right, but he was persuaded to
withdraw it in favor of a short article on the reading of the bloodletting
sign on Classic Maya reliefs.10 David now disavows this reading, but in
the paper (which came out with the volume in 1984), he made the
important point that the ornate band which flows down from a ruler’s
hands during Period Ending rites is actually blood drawn from his own
penis with a bone or stingray-spine perforator, an instrument previously
identified by David Joralemon. It appeared that it was no light task to
take on the kingship of a Classic Maya state.

I should imagine that being the son of a National Qeographic editor, with
endless possibilities for travel and adventure in foreign lands, would be
 A NEW DAWN 237

every adolescent boy’s dream. The reality is probably far from this, but
it cannot be denied that David had an exciting youth as compared with
mine (until I was of college age, I had never been to any place more exotic
than Montreal).
Over Christmas vacation in the winter of 1980—81, the fifteen-year-old
David had the opportunity to participate in a truly electrifying discovery
that combined exploration, danger, and discomfort in about equal
proportions.11 It came about this way. The previous year, two Mopan
Maya farmers had discovered an underground cavern in the south¬
eastern Peten, near the border with Belize; it was subsequently visited by
several Americans, including a young Yale graduate student, Pierre
Ventur, who gave it its name: Naj Tunich, “the house of stone.”
Limestone caves are found in many parts of the Maya lowlands and in
the hilly country of the Verapaz region, and everywhere they are
venerated and feared by the . Maya as the entrance to the dread
Underworld. To enter them is considered an act of bravery, with the
possibility of incurring the wrath of its Xibalban denizens, the lords of
death - in fact, it was shortly after he had engaged on an extensive
program of exploring Maya caves that the brilliant young archaeologist
Dennis Puleston was struck down by a bolt of lightning atop the Castillo,
the main pyramid of Chichen Itza. The Maya would not have been
surprised.
Reports had reached the National Qeographic that Naj Tunich had a
true treasure: its walls were covered with realistic drawings and long
hieroglyphic texts of Classic age. The magazine decided that this would
be a good story, and David flew down to Guatemala with his father, the
chief editor, and a friend, reaching the cave site by helicopter.
Establishing a small tent camp, they explored the cavern for several days,
but even this was not sufficient time to survey all 1,200 meters of the
cave’s tortuous passages.
David was the expedition’s epigrapher, and revelled in the several
dozen long texts that were drawn in black pigment in single and double
columns on the damp walls. There was much phonetic writing, and
several dates in the Calendar Round which could be linked to the Long
Count (one fell on 18 December ad 741, at the height of the Maya Late
Classic). For him, the high point was when he came across a new way to
write the month-sign Pax. The usual form is logographic, and seems to
resemble a drum emitting sound {pax means “drum” in some Mayan
languages); in its place, David found that the scribe had used two signs,
the first being the well-known netted pa glyph used back in the sixteenth
century by Bishop Landa as a phonetic indicator for his version of Pax,
and in the name of God N or Pauahtun, while the second was a sign that
had never been read, an oval containing two parallel diagonal lines. Ergo,
238 A NEW DAWN

following Knorosov’s Principle of Synharmony, the second sign must be

xa, and together with the first, the reading would be Pa-x(a). David had
deciphered his first phonetic sign — the first in a long series — thanks to the
fact that the ancient scribes had enjoyed playing with their script,
shifting back and forth between logographic and phonetic writing,
balancing sound and meaning.

55 Phonetic spelling of the

month Pax in Naj Tunich
cave.

The cavern walls, lit by their flashlights and photographic equipment,

had many other surprises, not the least of which were realistic
homoerotic encounters. But it was quite in character that there would
have been a depiction of Hunahpu, the great Hero Twin, engaged in
playing ball, for this cave was after all an extension of Xibalba itself.
What had brought the artist-scribes to Naj Tunich in the mid-eighth
century? Today, throughout the lowlands, Maya shamans use the
caverns for their most secret rites and divinations; but until the Naj
Tunich texts have been fully deciphered and analyzed — this is now being
done by Andrea Stone12 - we can only guess what went on here by the
light of pine torches.

All this took place while David was in high school. During summers he
continued to go to Merle’s Mesa Redonda conferences in Palenque.
After his graduation in the spring of 1983, he gave a paper at the Mesa
Redonda on the “count-of-captives” glyph, which he had discovered.13
This is actually a complex of signs which previous generations of
epigraphers had vainly attempted to make into something calendrical,
since it always included a bar-and-dot number. David was able to show
that it really meant “he of x captives,” in line with the usual vainglorious
claims of these warlike rulers. The phrase opened with the proclitic ah,
“he of-,” then expressed the number, and concluded with the
“bone” logograph which he showed was to be read hac, either “bone” or
(in this case) “captive,” a fine example of rebus writing in the Maya
script. In a political milieu in which the taking of important prisoners
validated royal power, Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, a militarily successful
king, often had the scribes interpose the phrase “he of the twenty
captives” between his name and the Emblem Glyphs of his city.
By this time, David was becoming widely known in the Maya field,
and had a large circle of acquaintances and friends who were working on
 A NEW DAWN 239

ah
\

56 The “count'of-captives” j
glyph, a. ah uuc bac, “he of f
the seven captives.’’ b. ah kal r
bac, “he of the twenty J
captives.”

some of the same problems that he was. In spite of his youth, and
regardless of the fact that he was not even a freshman in college, he was
awarded a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks for the academic year 1983—
84. This meant that he could work in absolute tranquility in the beautiful
setting of what is generally considered to be a scholar’s paradise, with
access to D.O.’s superb library and to its remarkable archive of
photographs of Maya ceramics.
David then lived at home in Washington. One February day in 1984,
he received a telephone call from Chicago; it was a representative from
the MacArthur Fellowship: in recognition of his achievements as a
Mayanist, he was to be made a Fellow and given an award of no less than
$128,000. The wire services picked this one up right away, and the fairy¬
tale story that a boy of eighteen just out of high school had won a genius
prize” — as the journalists like to call this fellowship — was on the front
pages of newspapers and in newsmagazines all across America. All of this
publicity failed to turn his head, and it is generally agreed in the field that
the MacArthur Fellow of eighteen was not much different from the self-
contained, self-effacing small boy who had sat at Linda s elbow that long-
ago summer in Palenque.
Between them, the two fellowships gave the young epigrapher two
complete years to do nothing but to “play around with the glyphs,” as he
puts it. The MacArthur money was wisely invested, after setting aside
part to fund travel to the Maya area and to buy a personal computer. Flis
old mentor Linda came to Washington for two months during this time.
“Those two years after high school were so productive, working with
Linda. I really felt like I was in this for good.”

It will be remembered that, thanks to the early research of Eric

Thompson, we know that there are glyphic expressions associated with
Distance Numbers that tell one whether one is to count backward (the
Anterior Date Indicator or ADI) or forward (Posterior Date Indicator or
PDI) from the base date to reach another date.14 With considerable logic,
Thompson had convinced most of his colleagues that the main sign in
both the ADI and PDI, the head of a ferocious fish, was a rebus, playing
 240 A NEW DAWN

on the homonyms xoc, “shark” and xoc, “count”; thus, he argued that
one meant “count back to-” while the other was “count forward

During his idyll at D.O., David noticed that the more abstract variant
for this fish head could substitute for Landa’s u-“bracket,” the third
person possessive pronoun, and he began entertaining the notion that
perhaps both variants were really u. Since both the ADI and PDI were
often followed by Landa’s phonetic ti, he began to suspect that the fish
head might even be ut, with ti as a phonetic complement. “I was pretty
reluctant about this, because everybody was talking about xoc. I felt like I
was being a heretic.” But when he looked up ut and its Yucatec cognate
uchi in dictionaries, he saw that it meant “to happen or to come to pass.”
He was obviously on a productive track.
David’s decipherment of this glyph compound has been refined by
several colleagues over the years, but the basic reading still stands. Four
linguists — John Justeson, Will Norman, Kathryn Josserand, and
Nicholas Hopkins - have found grammatical evidence in the Cholan
languages (most Classic inscriptions are proto-Cholan) that the ADI
reads ut-ry or ut-ix, “it had come to pass,” and the PDI reads iual ut, “and
then it came to pass.”15 This has recently allowed Linda Scheie to
paraphrase a text such as Lintel 21, a monument of Bird-Jaguar, ruler of
Yaxchilan, as follows:

(On) 9.0.19.2.4 2 Kan

G8 [Lord of the Night] ruled, Glyph Y
7 days ago it arrived (the moon)
Three moons had ended.
3X [was the name] of the 29 [days of the lunar
month].
2 Yax he dedicated the 4-bat place,
it was his house
“sky god lord,” Moon-Skull
the 7th successor, the lord of the title, Yat-Balam, Holy
Lord of Yaxchilan.
(it was) 5 days, 16 uinals, 1 tun, 15 katuns
and then 7 Muluc 17 Zee came to pass
he dedicated the 4-bat place
“sky god lord,” Bird-Jaguar, 3 Katun Lord
He of 20 Captives.

I find it ironic that even Maya calendrics have started yielding to the
onslaught of phonetic analysis, considering that so many long-dead
scholars (Seler, Goodman, and Morley, among others) had utterly
 A NEW DAWN 241

57 Readings by David Stuart, a, b. iual ut, “and then it came to

pass” (Posterior Date Indicator), c. utiy, “it had come to pass”
(Anterior Date Indicator). d, e. uitz, “mountain, f. pitzil, play
ball.” g, h. dzib, “writing.”

rejected phoneticism while holding to the view that there was little else
than calendrical statements in the Classic inscriptions.

David’s work on the ut glyph “really nailed home to me one of the

important workings of this writing system - the huge amount of free
substitutions. Despite all this graphic complexity, much of it was just
repetitive.” The terrible morass that Floyd Lounsbury had found when
taking up Thompson’s Introduction just didn’t exist. During those
productive years from 1984 through 1987 (David entered Princeton as a
freshman in 1985), all sorts of new phonetic readings, he says, “exploded
right in front of me.” To reiterate, this is homophony - phonetic signs
substituting for other phonetic signs or for logograms. The results of his
extraordinary findings, resting in part on collaboration with others like
Linda Scheie, saw the light of day in a new series edited and published by
his father, Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Number 14 in the
242 A NEW DAWN

series was David’s remarkable “Ten Phonetic Syllables,” in which the

kind of methodology pioneered by Floyd and continued by Fox and
Justeson reached fruition.16 The phonetic grid first presented in the
Albany Conference was beginning to lose some of its blank spaces.
David’s decipherments opened up many new lines of research. For
me, the most significant was pinning down the glyph for the syllable dzi
(written ts’i by linguists); with already identified signs for final -b - either
b(a), b(i), or b(e) - this led to the stunning identification of the glyph
compound for “writing” itself, dzib, and for the scribe, ah dzib, “he of
the writing.” The implications of this finding for our view of ancient
Maya society and culture were enormous, as we shall see.
Puzzle after puzzle was solved in this slim, modest, carefully argued
publication. The identification of the sign for the CV syllable tzi led
David not only to the reading of the glyphic combination utzil, “good” (a
frequent prognostication in the codices), but also to the discovery of the
hieroglyphs for uitz or “mountain.” When I was writing the Grolier
catalog, I had noticed that a monstrous head with fringed eyes and Cauac
markings on clay vessels had often served as a base or throne for
individual gods, or had surrounded them like a cave; I called this the
“Cauac Monster,” for want of a better term. What David found was that
the Cauac Monster logograph could have a phonetic substitute
consisting of two signs, one to be read as ui (or wi), and the other as tzi;
applying Knorosov’s principles, this would be uitz(i). Q.E.D.! As will
later be seen, the uitz reading helped identify the toponyms or place-
names within and without some Classic cities.
There was another dividend for the tzi reading: in conjunction with a
sign deciphered by David as pi, it spelled out the name for “to play ball,”
pitz in the dictionaries. The great sacred game of the Maya elite had at last
received its hieroglyphic name, and the title ah pitz, “he of the ballgame,”
began turning up among the titles or epithets of these Classic period
emulators of Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
And one other god received his proper name in “Ten Phonetic
Syllables.” This was Schellhas’ God K, a serpent-footed deity with a
smoking tube or axe-blade protruding from his forehead. Ever since Late
Pre-Classic times, before the beginning of our era, God K had functioned
as a patron of royal lineages and royal power. His image was held in the
right hand of the king as the so-called “mannikin scepter,” the emblem
of divine rulership, during Period Ending ceremonies. So who was he
really? In a wonderful display of scholarship, around the turn of the
century the formidable Eduard Seler had shown, by comparing the New
Year ceremonies in the Dresden with those described by Landa for late
pre-Conquest Yucatan, that God K must be the deity called Bolon
Dzacab (“Nine Lineages”) by the bishop’s informants.17 This seemed
 A NEW DAWN 243

reasonable, but David found a phonetic substitution for the god’s name
when it was used in nominal phrases of important chiefs in the
inscriptions of Chichen Itza: ka-ui-l(a), or Kauil, a supernatural
mentioned in Colonial sources.
I should mention one further advance made by the young Stuart in
this remarkable tour-de-force. So far, we have been dealing with words
of the CVC or CVCVC sort, for which the final consonant is expressed
by a syllabic sign in which the final vowel is silent. But the grammar of the
Cholan and Yucatec languages often calls for a final vowel or weak
consonant, such as in the Yucatec ooc-ih, “he entered,” or hantabi, “was
it eaten?” How was the reader to know when the final vowel was actually
to be pronounced, rather than left mute? David came up with two signs,
one of which was to be read as hi and the other as yi, which could be
tacked on to grammatical endings to show that this vowel, indeed, had a
sound.

By the mid'1980s, the trickle of decipherments that had started in the

1960s had increased to a mighty flood. A pilgrim attending one of
Linda’s Austin workshops might find him- or herself among not just a
few dozen, but hundreds of eager participants, at least some of whom
were beginning to make discoveries of their own. Yet among all these
enthusiasts scattered across the land, there was a small handful of truly
brilliant epigraphers, including David, who were on the very crest of the
wave. They were all young, all were competent artists (a necessity for
drawing the glyphs), and all had a working knowledge of at least one
Mayan language. Their decipherments began to far outstrip possibilities
for speedy publication, so they kept in touch by letter and word of
mouth, only occasionally meeting at conferences or in the field. The
hard core of these Young Turks consisted of Peter Mathews, David
Stuart, Steve Houston, Karl Taube, Barbara MacLeod, and Nikolai
Grube; all but Peter and Nikolai were Americans. Presiding over this
closely-knit band were Linda and Floyd. About them, Floyd once wryly
commented to me:
They’re young and they just go too fast for me. I’m the slow type to begin with, and
I don’t have good visual memory, and that’s a definite disadvantage for me. They
can retain so much data in their heads, and this enables them to see things and
make leaps ahead that just leave me trailing in the dust; whereas my pace would be
to see just one such thing, and before going on to anything else, track it down and
publish a proof, utilizing all the available occurrences of it anywhere. But if you go
after it that way, you deny yourself the opportunity to learn as fast as possible.18

Like Peter Mathews, Steve Houston is a “faculty brat,” born in 1958

in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to a college professor and a Swedish
244 A NEW DAWN

mother. After his graduation summa cum laude from the University of
Pennsylvania, he came to Yale for his doctorate, studying under Floyd,
myself, and the young art historian Mary Miller. Karl Taube is also the
son of an academic, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist; only a year older
than Steve, he came to us from the University of California. Having once
been a graduate student myself, I am only too aware of the fact that as a
whole graduate students are far more difficult to teach than undergra¬
duates: at one and the same time, they are your colleagues and your
subordinates. With students like Karl and Steve at Yale, I found myself
in a reversed situation - it was they who were teaching me, and not the
other way around. I always learn from students (this is why I prefer being
in an academic department rather than a pure museum curatorship), but
I doubt if I have ever learned so much as from these two.
The other two members of this extraordinary network - Barbara
MacLeod and Nikolai Grube - were not in the Yale orbit like Peter,
Steve, and Karl. Barbara was at the University of Texas as one of Linda’s
burgeoning crop of graduate students, and Nikolai occupies a post at the
University of Hamburg, where there is a long and honorable tradition of
Mesoamerican studies. Nikolai’s qualifications are unique in a way: for
several months of each year, he stays in a remote Maya village in
Quintana Roo and studies the esoteric language of a Maya h-men or
shaman; needless to say, he is as fluent in Yucatec as Champollion was in
Coptic.

Great epigraphic breakthroughs sometimes come from seemingly

insignificant decipherments, like the biblical storm that grew from a
cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. It came about this way. My friend
David Pendergast of the Royal Ontario Museum was looking for an
epigrapher to handle the brief texts that he had found on jade and other
artifacts from Altun Ha, a small but rich site in Belize that he had
excavated.19 I immediately suggested Peter Mathews, and he was hired.
While it did not take Peter long to find on an inscribed jade plaque that
Altun Ha had its own Emblem Glyph, of far greater import were the
glyphs that he found incised on a pair of beautiful, ground obsidian
earspools from a royal burial at the site.20 The first glyphic compound on
each of these began with u, the familiar 3rd person possessive, then went
on to a tu sign (long ago pinned down by Thompson as tu through its use
as a numerical classifier in Yucatecan inscriptions), with Landa’s netted
pa sign below. Peter read this as u tup(a), “his earspool” in Maya;
following it were several glyphs of what seemed to be the owner’s name,
presumably the man in the tomb. Thus came about the first attested case
in Maya epigraphy of “name-tagging.”
 A NEW DAWN 245

u tu ruler’s name

58 Name-tagging. a. u tup, “his earspool,” incised on an

obsidian earspool from Altun Ha. b. u bac, “his bone,”
incised on a bone from the tomb of Ruler A at Tikal.

It was not long before David, on looking at the delicately incised texts
on a collection of bone strips placed with the body of the great king
under Tikal Temple I, noticed that several of them began with the phrase
u bct'c(i), that is, u bac, “his bone,” followed by the king’s name and the
Tikal Emblem Glyph.21
Here was an incredibly prosaic use of a script that Thompson and
others had always considered the domain of the purely esoteric and
supernatural. It was almost as though a communion cup would have a
large label, “the chalice of the Rev. John Doe.” Thompson would have
been horrified, but name-tagging has turned out to be ubiquitous in the
world of the Classic scribes. The ancient Maya liked to name things, and
they liked to tell the world who owned these things. We shall find that
even temples, stelae, and altars had their own names.

That repetitive, almost ritualistic text that I had found on Maya pictorial
ceramics at the beginning of the 1970s, and which I thought might be a
funerary chant, lay dormant for many years, but at last began to attract
the attention of the young epigraphers - after all, the Primary Standard
Sequence was the most commonly written text in Classic Maya culture;
but it seemed impervious to decipherment. That is, until this new
generation came on the scene.
While working on the Grolier catalog, I had already noticed that there
were substitutions in the PSS, not only in what epigraphers call
“allographs” (minor variations in the same glyph), but substitutions in
246 A NEW DAWN

C.

59 Qlyphs for vessel shapes in the Primary Standard Sequence, a. u lac,

“his plate.” b. u hauante, “his tripod dish.” c. Wing-Quincunx,
representing cylindrical vases and round-bottomed bowls (beverage
containers).

whole signs which at times indicated polyvalence, and at times seemed to

change the meaning. This meant that the PSS could be subjected to
“distributional analysis,” a study of the patterns of substitution between
signs in this highly codified, almost formulaic text. This is exactly what
Nikolai Grube set out to do in his Ph.D. dissertation, and what David,
Steve, and Karl began to work on at Yale and Princeton, and Barbara
MacLeod at the University of Texas.22 Invaluable help was provided by
the ever-generous Justin Kerr, who made available to them hundreds of
rollouts of unpublished Maya vases, shot in his New York studio.
The results were extraordinary, and not exactly what I had expected. I
will take up later how David Stuart located the glyphic compound for
dzib, “writing,” on these vessels, and the implications of this discovery.
What the PSS turned out to be, as Steve and Karl have pointed out, is a
gigantic case of name-tagging.23 What they noted was that the compound
 A NEW DAWN 247

I had nicknamed “Wing-Quincunx” could alternate in some texts with

another compound that was surely to be read as u ia-c(a). In many Mayan
languages, and in reconstructed proto-Cholan, lac means “dish,” and u
lac would thus be “his dish.” Confirmation comes from the fact that the
phrase only occurs on wide pottery dishes. “Wing-Quincunx,” on the
other hand, occurs only on vessels that are higher than they are wide;
their argument is complex, but Brian Stross, Steve Houston, and
Barbara MacLeod have convinced their colleagues that this must be read
■y-uch’ib, “his drinking vessel.”24
Maya archaeologists love to study pottery vessels. They revel in
potsherds, which they dig up by the hundreds of thousands in their
excavation trenches. But very few of them have thought about the
function of all these ceramics. Iconography and epigraphy have begun to
tell us what they were used for, at least as tomb furniture: elite Maya
ceramics were containers for food and drink. Many palace scenes on
painted pottery show that dishes or laco’ob were stacked high with maize
tamales, and the tall vases were filled with a frothy liquid. This might
have been balche, the native mead flavored with the bark of the balche
tree, but it might have been something else.
What that “something else” was became clear with David Stuart’s
work on the PSS. I had called a glyph compound which follows the
Wing-Quincunx glyph “fish,” since that was its main sign. In a rush of
inspiration, David saw that this fish, which is known to have the syllabic
value of ca, was preceded by Landa’s “comb” sign for ca, and followed
by final -u, leading him to conclude that the compound must be read ca-
ca-u - clearly cacao or chocolate.

ca ca

SAC

u(a)

60 Qlyphs for beverages in the Primary Standard Sequence,

a. cacau, “cacao (chocolate).” b. sac ul, “white atole.”

An extraordinary confirmation of this reading came in 1984, when

archaeologists found and excavated an Early Classic tomb in the heavily
looted site of Rio Azul in the northeastern Peten. In it was a strange
vessel, finely painted over a layer of stucco; the lid of the pot could
actually be screwed onto the vessel like a “lock-top” jar. Included in the
hieroglyphic text were the owner’s name or names and the j'Uch’ib, “his
drinking vessel” compound, as well as the newly identified cacao glyph.
248 A NEW DAWN

Scrapings from the residue left inside the pot were sent to the Hershey
Foods Corporation for laboratory identification. The verdict: it was
chocolate!25
It now looks as if every cylindrical vase with glyphic texts was used to
hold cacao, and the magnificent Princeton Vase unmistakably shows a
female attendant — perhaps one of God L’s harem — pouring the
chocolate drink from a height from one vase into another, to raise a good
head of froth, which was highly prized among the Aztec and probably
among the Maya as well. Yet there is one more beverage drunk by the
Maya elite, for on rounded-bottom, open bowls, the chocolate “fish”
glyph is replaced by another compound which reads ul; this is atole, a
refreshing white gruel made from maize still imbibed today in Maya
villages.26
So to whom did these dishes or these drinking vessels for chocolate or
atole belong? The question must be asked, for we have seen this is a kind
of name-tagging. The answer lies past the end of the PSS, in a position
where names, titles, and Emblem Glyphs appear. This is where the noble
owner comes in. Was he or she the one who had commissioned the
vessel? And was it specifically potted and embellished, to go along with
food and drink into the grave and Underworld with the body and soul of
its patron or patroness (as I had long thought)? Or had the vessel had an
existence of its own in the palace before its distinguished owner died?
These are questions which have not yet been fully answered.
And what about the remainder of the PSS? The glyphs for vessel shape
and the vessel’s contents are only a fraction of the entire sequence, which
might, if fully written out (it never is), contain up to thirty-five glyphs.
One very large problem is that the PSS is an ancient formula, first
appearing on carved stone vessels dating to the Late Pre-Classic. Much of
its language, which is probably proto-Cholan, must be very archaic; one
is reminded of the e pluribus unum written on American coins in a long-
dead language, Latin. Nevertheless, in a 560-page Ph.D. thesis on the
subject, Barbara MacLeod27 has shown that the PSS falls into five parts:
(1) a presentation or invocation, which calls the vessel into being; (2) a
description of the surface treatment, whether painted or carved; (3) a
naming of the shape of the vessel; (4) what she calls “recipes” - what is in
the vessel; and (5) “closures,” names and epithets relating to the
individual in the afterlife. So is the PSS just a glorified case of name¬
tagging, of labeling an object and naming its owner? If so, then my older
hypothesis that the PSS was some kind of funerary chant was downright
wrong, as the Young Turks were quick to point out when they found y-
uch’ib, lac, and cacau on the ceramics. But Barbara’s findings suggest that
both schools were right: this formulaic sentence served to dedicate the
pot and its food or drink to the patron’s soul on its journey to Xibalba.
 A NEW DAWN 249

Most of the indigenous art of the Western Hemisphere prior to the

European invasion seems quite anonymous and impersonal to us, and
we have little or no information on who the artists were who produced
all these masterpieces, or on what their status was within pre-Columbian
societies. Throughout much of human prehistory and history, in fact,
artists rarely signed their names. As the late Joseph Alsop made clear in
his pioneering book, The Rare Art Traditions,28 prior to the Greeks, only
in ancient Egypt do we find signed works, and these rare examples have
only architects’ signatures. Yet, as Alsop has said,
In the larger context of the world history of art... a signature on a work of art must
be seen as a deeply symbolic act. By signing, the artist says, in effect, “I made this
and I have a right to put my name on it, because what I make is a bit different from
what others have made or will make.”29
Apart from the modern world (where even motel art is signed), the
widespread use of signatures has generally been confined to only five art
traditions: the Greco-Roman world, China, japan, the Islamic world,
and Europe from the Renaissance onwards.
That the Classic Maya were an exception to this rule began to be
apparent from David Stuart’s reading of dzib compounds on the clay
vessels; the word means both “writing” and “painting,” the Maya not
distinguishing these perhaps because both were executed with a brush
pen (there is evidence that the monumental texts were originally laid out
on the stones as ink drawings, as in ancient Egypt). Ah dzib is “he of the
writing,” in other words “scribe.” My own analysis of the scenes on the
pots had already shown that the supernatural patrons of Classic Maya
scribes and artists were the Monkey-man gods - One Monkey and One
Artisan of the Popol Vuh - busily writing away with brush pens and
conch-shell paint pots.30
U dzib, “his writing (or painting),” was revealed by David to occupy
two positions in the PSS. The first was in Barbara’s “surface treatment”
section; David proved that this alternated with a compound in which
syllabic yu preceded Landa’s lu and a bat head. If the pot and its texts
were painted, u dzib appeared; if it was carved or incised, “lu-Bat” was
the appropriate compound. It was obvious that one compound referred
to painting, while the other - still unread - had to do with carving.
The second position of u dzib is in the nominal phase section on some
vases, where it is followed by a personal name. Since there is excellent
reason to believe that one and the same person painted the pot and wrote
the text, this can only be the artist’s signature: “the writing of X.” The
question of the social status of these artists and scribes was answered by
David in a study that he made of an extraordinary vase published in my
Grolier catalog. This is a tall, white-background cylinder which almost
surely comes from Naranjo, in the eastern Peten. The PSS appears in its
 250 A NEW DAWN

name of artist/scribe son of Woman from Yaxha

u dzib idzat Yaxha Emblem Glyph

“his writing” “artist”

son of king of Naranjo

Naranjo Emblem Glyph

61 Text from a cylindrical vase from Naranjo, giving the artist/scribe’s name
and royal parentage.

usual place in a horizontal band just below the rim, but continues below
in a band near the base. The u dzib glyph appears in the text at bottom,
immediately followed by a personal name, then by a compound which
David has deciphered as hdza-t(i); idzat is glossed in the dictionaries as
“artist, learned one,” a title that he has found elsewhere in signed works.
Most astonishingly, after a compound which may give the artist’s “home
town,” his mother and father are named in the glyph blocks which
precede and follow his name: his mother is a lady from the city of Yaxha,
but the father is none other than a well-known ahau, a king of the mighty
city of Naranjo.31
So, this artist-scribe not only signed his vase, but he was a prince, of
royal descent on both sides. The Thompsonian view that these painters
and carvers of ceramics were mere decorators, peasant-artists outside
the orbit of the intellectual world of the Maya, has been consigned to
oblivion by epigraphy (as it has been by archaeology). The ah dzib, the ah
idzat, belonged to the very highest stratum of Maya society. Generations
of Mayanists have claimed that the ancient Maya civilization was a
theocracy, a culture run by priests, even after the discoveries of
Proskouriakoff. But now the supposed priests have all but disappeared,
to be replaced by warlike dynasts. The real repository of Maya learning
in Classic times, then, may well have been the corps of these elite artists
and calligraphers. As we shall see, the lofty status of the Maya scribe has
been reaffirmed by the most recent excavations at Copan.
In the spring of 1989, David graduated from Princeton. His senior
honors thesis was an epigraphic and iconographic study of the Maya
artist.32 Here he was able to delve much further into the implications for
62 Sculptors’ signatures on Stela 31, El Peru, Quatemala. Each begins with the “lu-Bat”
expression, and each is in a different “handwriting.”

Maya art and culture of the “to carve” glyph - “lu-Bat.” As far back as
1916, Spinden had noted that this compound occurred with some
frequency on Maya carved monuments, and he made the suggestion,
astonishing at the time, that the glyphs written after it might contain
personal names. But David knew from ceramics that “lu-Bat” introduces
names of carvers, as dzib does for painters.
Thompson once jokingly told me that one of the texts on a stela from
Piedras Negras might say “Epstein me fecit”; with the meaning of “lu-
Bat” unraveled, this has turned out to be close to the truth, with a
vengeance! For on Piedras Negras Stela 12, no fewer than eight artists
claimed credit for the carving, each signing his name in a different
“handwriting.” One of these artists, Kin Chaac, put his signature on
other monuments at Piedras Negras, such as the magnificent Throne 1,
but he seems to have been as wide-ranging as some artists of the Italian
Renaissance, for his signature appears on a panel in the Cleveland
Museum of Art believed on good grounds to have been looted from a
site located elsewhere in the Usumacinta drainage. This was a
remarkable discovery, and ample testimony to the individuality which
characterizes Classic Maya civilization. But the signature phenomenon
252 A NEW DAWN

is, to be frank, relatively restricted in time and space: it is confined

mainly to the western part of the Maya lowlands, and to a time-frame of
only about a hundred and fifty years, in the Late Classic. Yet it is a fine
example of how the decipherment has let us at least in part lift the curtain
of faceless anonymity which has shrouded the ancient Maya, to at last
see some real people.

I can think of only two large-scale archaeological projects in the Maya

lowlands in which epigraphy and art history have been an integral part
from their inception. One of these is the program being directed by
Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University (the same Arthur Demarest
who wrote the youthful attack on Knorosov, but now repentant), in the
Petexbatun region of the western Peten.33 The other is at Copan, directed
by William Fash of Northern Illinois University, one of the few dirt
archaeologists whom I know who is able to read Maya hieroglyphs.34 Bill
has been at Copan for fifteen field seasons, having begun there even
before finishing his doctorate at Harvard. As a consequence of his team’s
work (and that of his predecessors, to be sure), no other Maya city’s
history is so well known.
The site is located on the Copan River (which has over the years cut
away part of its great Acropolis) and has been famed since Stephens’ day
for the beauty and deep carving of its trachyte monuments. David
Stuart’s introduction to the site, Stephens’ “Valley of romance and
wonder,” came in the summer of 1986, following the Palenque Mesa
Redonda. Linda, who was by then Bill’s epigrapher and art historian,
had invited David to join her for two weeks at the site, and he “had a
blast with the Copan material,” making many drawings of the
inscriptions. While in Palenque, David had met the German epigrapher
Nikolai Grube — “the only person significantly younger than Linda and
the other people I had worked with.” They hit it off right away, and these
two, along with Linda, were to make significant strides with the
decipherment using Copan data. Nikolai passed through Copan later
that summer, and again the next year, by which time he was added to the
epigraphic team. He and David, Steve Houston, and Karl Taube often
interacted during those two years and, as David says, “the four of us
became a new school of thought, or something like it.”
In 1987, the tolerant Princeton authorities gave David the spring
semester off, and he was back at Copan where he stayed for six months. It
was then that he got his first real experience of field excavation, under the
careful tutelage of Fash, a dark-bearded figure held in high esteem by his
colleagues and by the local Copanecos. Now, some archaeologists can
dig away for most of their lives without finding anything of note, but
 A NEW DAWN 253

David must have been born under a lucky star, for on 15 March (the Ides
of March as he likes to point out) he hit upon a spectacular cache; placed
as a dedicatory offering underneath the altar that forms the base of
Copan’s mighty Hieroglyphic Stairway, it included three finely chipped
“eccentric flints,” two heirloom jades, and paraphernalia used in
ceremonial bloodletting.
The epigraphic team began putting out their findings in a new series,
Copan Notes, which although occasionally showing the marks of undue
editorial haste, nevertheless has made significant contributions to the
decipherment. A major achievement was a complete list of Copan rulers
with vital statistics for each, beginning with the founder of the dynasty,
one Yax Kuk Mo’ (“Green Quetzal-Macaw”), who flourished in the fifth
century, and ending with the final great ruler, Yax Pac (or “New Dawn”)
who died in ad 820.35 It was another German glyph specialist, Berthold
Riese, also of the University of Hamburg, who had recognized that the
famous, square Altar Q - thought by earlier Mayanists to depict an
astronomical congress engaged in correlating the lunar and solar
calendars - actually represented all sixteen dynastic rulers or ahauo’ob
seated on their own name glyphs.36 The details on their reigns unearthed
by the epigraphers allowed Fash’s archaeologists and art historians
(including Mary Miller of Yale) to associate individual rulers and events
of their reigns with specific monuments and architectural programs.
Much light has been thrown on the political history of the Copan
kings and their relationship with the far smaller Quirigua, a relatively
small city over the hills in the Motagua Valley of Guatemala, well known
since the visit of Stephens and Catherwood for its gigantic sandstone
stelae and zoomorphic sculptures.37 For much of the Classic, Copan had
hegemony over its smaller neighbor, but on 3 May ad 738, the tables
were turned, at least temporarily, for on that date one of Copan’s most
distinguished kings (18 Rabbit) had his head cut off by Quirigua
following his ignominious capture.
Yet this book is not about politics but decipherment. Which brings
me again to the subject of name-tagging. It turned out that the Maya
bestowed proper names not only on portable items like jewelry and
ceramics, but on just about everything the elite considered important in
their lives. In the very first Copan Note,38 Linda and David showed that
stelae were named as te tun, “tree stone,” and demonstrated that the texts
describing their erection said that they were “planted” (the Maya verb is
dzap', “to plant”); even further, individual stelae at Copan had their own
proper names, just like people. By the time the next Copan Note39
appeared, David Stuart had pinned down the Maya name for the stone
incense burners uncovered by the archaeologists: sac lac tun, “white
stone dish.” As if this were not enough, he discovered the hieroglyphic
254 A NEW DAWN

63 Decipherments at Copan. a. dzapah tetun, “he planted

the tree-stone (stela).” b. sac lac tun, “white stone dish
(stone incense burner).”

name of one of Copan’s altars, Altar Q;40 the stone represents a monster
head with kin (“sun”) signs in the eyes, and the yet incomplete reading
for the proper name is, fittingly, kinich + unknown sign + tun, or “sun-
eyed-stone,” “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare asked; the Maya
would have answered “Lots!,” for so serious were they about
nomenclature that it now seems probable every building, pyramid, and
perhaps even plaza and tomb had a name in a major city like Copan.
David picked up the names of temples in association with the verb for
“house” (otot) dedication; such phrases read u kaba y-otot, “the name of
his house is-.”41
These Young Turk epigraphers have raised again the whole question
of what Emblem Glyphs represent — are they the names of lineages or of
places (Heinrich Berlin had left this question open)? While it is now
generally accepted that Thompson’s so-called “water group” prefix to
the Emblem Glyphs is to be read as kul or ch’ul, “holy” — with the Ben-
Ich and ua affixes, the Copan Emblem Glyph would be something like
“holy lord of Copan” - it is nevertheless recognized that Emblem
Glyphs sometimes apply to polities which include more than one city,
and that there may be more than one Emblem Glyph in a particular
polity (as in Yaxchilan and Palenque).42

64 Reading of the affixes of the

Copan Emblem Qlyph as ch’ul
ahau, “holy lord (of).” There is
not yet agreement on how to read
the main sign.

David Stuart’s discovery that the reading of the main sign in the
Emblem Glyph for Yaxha, a ruined Peten city, is actually Yaxha and the
name of a nearby body of water raised the possibility that at least in
origin some Emblem Glyphs may have been place-names (toponyms).43
 A NEW DAWN 255

Bona fide toponyms have turned out to be quite common, as Steve

Houston and David Stuart’s recent research44 has shown, the name of
the place usually being introduced by David’s ut-i, “it happened (at).”

Many of the toponyms include uitz, “hill” or “mountain,” in the

expression, a trait the Maya shared with the Aztec and Mixtec. In Copan
texts, references to a mo’ uitz (“Macaw Hill”) are common; wherever it
was, “Macaw Hill” was the location of a Period Ending rite celebrated by
the unfortunate 18 Rabbit. Some place-names seem to refer to locations
within a city, some to foreign places, while some are patently
mythological. Included among the mythological names would be
matauil, a place where deities mentioned on the tablets of Palenque’s
Cross Group were born. The most mysterious of these is a place of
supernaturals translated by epigraphers as “black hole, black water,”
which may have existed at the beginning of creation.
One of the most astonishing discoveries at Copan, one that bears
directly on the position of the scribes in Maya society, was made under
the direction of William Sanders of Pennsylvania State University; this
was in a large residential group known as “Sepulturas” lying to the
northeast of the city’s center.45 The facade of the principal building (9N-
82) was embellished with sculptures of scribes holding conch-shell
inkpots in one hand, and the statue of one of my Monkey-men scribes
was found in the fill, again with inkpot and brush pen. Inside the
structure was a stone bench with Pauahtun gods carved on the supports,
and with a magnificent full-figure hieroglyphic text across the front edge.
This was in truth a scribal palace of great splendor, and its denizen was
clearly patriarch of the entire compound.
Who was this scribe? The epigraphers soon found out that his name
was Mac Chaanal, and that he had flourished during that last flowering of
Copan, when decentralization and the passing of power into the hands of
local satraps had taken place under ahau Yax Pac. So high was the status
of Mac Chaanal that he was allowed to carve a dedication honoring his
own ancestry, including the names of his mother and father.46
Equally exalted was an earlier scribe whose final resting place was a
tomb deeply buried beneath the temple fronted by the Hieroglyphic
Stairway. When this was discovered in 1989, the archaeologists thought
that they had a royal burial, but when they found a hopelessly decayed
codex next to the head, ten paint pots at the feet, and a bowl depicting a
scribe, it became clear that this was indeed an ah dzib - but one of high
rank, for he was accompanied into Xibalba by a sacrificed child.47 No
one yet knows who this man was, but he lived about a century and a half
before Mac Chaanal, in the seventh century; Bill Fash suggests he was a
brother of the twelfth ahau, “Smoke Imix God K,” but Linda deems it
256 A NEW DAWN

more likely he was the latter’s non-ruling father and the younger brother
of the previous ahau. Regardless, he was indeed a very important person.
The Classic Maya took their intellectuals seriously.

The 1980s decade saw decipherments come at a dizzying pace. Often two
or more of the new generation of Mayanists would hit upon the same
reading totally independently of one another — perhaps this can happen,
as Linda thinks, because things have now reached a “critical mass.’’ By
the end of the decade such a mass had clearly been reached as far as one
puzzling glyph compound was concerned, and light was shed on a whole
realm of beliefs and behaviors.
The main sign of this group is an Ahau glyph, the right half of which
has been obscured by a jaguar pelt. Some epigraphers, including Linda,
proposed that this should be read balam ahau with an approximate
meaning of “hidden lord.”48 The glyph often appears in Secondary
Texts on very fine pictorial vases; the texts as a whole are descriptive of
individual supernatural figures in the scenes, which are named first,
followed by the so-called balam ahau glyph with an Emblem Glyph
bringing up the rear.
Near the end of October 1989, two letters, both written on the same
day, reached Linda in Austin. One was from Nikolai Grube in Hamburg,
the other from Steve Houston in Nashville, Tennessee (home of
Vanderbilt, where he teaches). They had independently taken the affixes
securely read as ua and ya as phonetic complements to the logographic
main sign, and both proposed that it should thus be read as ua-y(a) (or
way in the orthography used by linguists and most modern epigraphers).
In his letter, after discussing a possible reading for another glyph,
Nikolai says:
I am far more sure about the “Balam Ahau” title as WAY. This is a great thing!
Way means “nagual” in all lowland languages, and “animal transformation” ...
The idea for this reading came to me when I talked with various Mayas in
Quintana Roo who told me of a sorcerer who is able to transform himself into a
cat or a spider monkey. They called the animals in which the sorcerer transformed
himself u way, “his nagual.”

For his part, Steve notes that in Yucatec, way is “to transform by
enchantment,” and in some other Mayan languages it can take the
meaning “to sleep,” “to dream.”
What is the significance of all this? Throughout the indigenous
cultures of the New World tropics, there is a widespread belief that
shamans can transform themselves at will into dangerous animals,
usually jaguars, and the anthropologist Peter Furst has been able to show
that this notion can be traced back as far as the ancient Olmec civilization
 A NEW DAWN 257

Waterlily

Jaguar

u uay

Seibal Emblem
Glyph

ahau, “lord”

65 The uay glyph. Detail from a codexstyle vase, showing the Waterlily
Jaguar floating in the sea; the text identifies him as the uay of Seibal’s king.

of Mesoamerica.49 More specifically for the Maya, ethnologists have

discovered a very similar principle in effect among the contemporary
Tzotzil of highland Chiapas. Among these Maya, every individual has an
animal counterpart called wayhel or chanul, in the form of a jaguar,
coyote, ocelot, owl, deer, hummingbird, and so on. According to my old
Harvard teacher, Evon Vogt, who has made a lifelong study of the
Tzotzil, these creatures live in a mythical corral inside a large volcanic
mountain. The kind of animal counterpart depends upon one’s status: a
high-ranking Tzotzil might have a jaguar, while a lowly one might have a
mouse for wayhel. As Vogt has said: “A person’s life depends upon that
of his animal counterpart which must be protected against evil or harm
to preserve life. All harm occurring to the wayhel is experienced by the
human body. The death of the body and that of its wayhel are
simultaneous.”50 When Nikolai was using the word nagual to describe
this “alter ego” concept, he was using a Nahuatl term, for the principle
was first described in the anthropological literature for peoples who
were once Aztec subjects; it is obviously pan-Mesoamerican.
In Classic times, as Steve Houston and David Stuart have noted in
their 1989 treatment of the subject,51 the way or uay concept is most
striking on pictorial vases, particularly ones in the codex style. On these
painted surfaces, uayo’ob might take the form of the Waterlily Jaguar; or
of various “jaguarized” animals such as a Jaguar-Dog; or such mytho¬
logical beasts as a monstrous toad, a monkey and a Deer-Monkey; or a
deer-horned, dragon-like serpent called chi-chaan in hieroglyphic texts.
258 A NEW DAWN

But uayo’ob are not confined to the vases. In royal bloodletting rites so
graphically depicted on the lintels of Yaxchilan, the Vision Serpent
(Linda’s term) that rises above the scene is identified in the texts as the
uay of the personage shedding his or her own blood, or even as the uay of
Kauil (God K). For even the gods had their own uayo’ob, and so did royal
lineages. Entire structures are identified as uaybil, a term glossed in
Tzotzil Maya as “sleeping place, dormitory.” Was this a place where a
great Yaxchilan ahau like the mighty Shield-Jaguar could commune with
his uay (surely a jaguar) in dreams?
In summary, Steve and David look upon the uay as the co-essence
of both humans and supernaturals. In a kick aimed at my own shins (in
the same way that I had once kicked Thompson’s) they claim that much
of the imagery on ceramics relates to Maya perceptions of self. As a
result, death and the afterlife can no longer be regarded as the dominant
theme of Maya pottery art.”52 Quite naturally, I don’t exactly agree with
this generalization: they admit that sleep is linked with death in the
inscriptions, and the “percentage-sign” death glyph may substitute for
the uay logograph, among other counter-arguments. Yet the discovery of
uay by these new-generation epigraphers is a large step forward in the
culminating age of the great Maya decipherment. In her reply to her
young friends’ letters, Linda spoke for many of us when she said:
“Thanks to all of you for sharing this remarkable discovery with us. I am
a little awestruck over this one.”
So were we all!
 11 A Look Backward,
A View Forward

A glory attaches itself to a person who first deciphers an unknown script

from the remote past, as Maurice Pope has told us.1 The Maya
inscriptions indeed come from the remote past, and have always been
imbued with the aura of the exotic, but who first solved their mystery?
Yes, it would have made a great story if the breaking of the Maya code
had been the accomplishment of a single individual - or perhaps even a
team of two, as James Watson and Francis Crick together discovered the
double helix structure of DNA and in a way found the secret of all life.
But there was no great race to the Maya decipherment on a par with this,
rather, a century-long series of gropings and stumblings ending, at long
last, with enlightenment.
John Lloyd Stephens had pleaded for a Champollion to materialize
and read those mute texts at Copan, but one never appeared. And why
not? As that curious “Constantinopolitan” Rafinesque had pointed out
in the early nineteenth century, the language of the script was known and
still in use; it could have been applied to the decipherment as the great
Frenchman had brought his knowledge of Coptic to bear on the
Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Unhappily, there were some almost insuperable stumbling blocks
across the path of any one person who might have thought of making the
great race, no matter how great his genius. No major decipherment has
ever been made anywhere without the existence of a major body — a
corpus - of texts, drawn and/or photographed in the greatest detail
possible. Champollion’s breakthrough was based upon really accurate
renderings of the Egyptian monuments, beginning with the Rosetta
Stone. I am far from being a Bonapartiste, but in a way it is too bad
Napoleon never got around to invading Central America, for his corps
of savants might have made the same wonderful record of Maya
inscriptions that they had produced from his Egyptian campaign. No
such corpus existed for Maya scholars until the close of the nineteenth
century. Three books or codices were available, it is true, and these
provided valuable grist for Forstemann’s mill - his forays into Maya

259
260 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

calendrics - but as far as reading the script was concerned, they were just
not enough.
The second stumbling block was equally serious, not only for the
pioneers of the last century, but for Mayanists in our own era. This is the
mentalist, “ideographic” mindset that had served in a far earlier epoch to
bog down would-be decipherers of the Egyptian monuments. Remem¬
ber the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher and his fantastic “readings”
of the obelisks? The fallacy that hieroglyphic scripts largely consisted of
symbols that communicate ideas directly, without the intervention of
language, was held as an article of faith by generations of distinguished
Maya scholars, including Seler, Schellhas, and Thompson, as well as the
multitude of their lesser followers. I wonder whether they even were
aware that this fallacy was dreamed up by the Neo-Platonists of the
Classical world.
With his usual clarity of vision, in 1841 Stephens had made a
prediction: “For centuries the hieroglyphics of Egypt were inscrutable,
and, though not perhaps in our day, I feel persuaded that a key surer than
that of the Rosetta Stone will be discovered.”2 Twenty-one years later
that extraordinary discoverer, Brasseur de Bourbourg, came across the
R elacion de Yucatan in the dusty recesses of a Madrid library, and there it
was: Landa’s “A,B,C” of the Maya script. With their characteristic
obduracy, Mayanists (excepting a few like Cyrus Thomas) spurned this
precious document as a true key to the decipherment for about one
hundred years; and this in spite of the fact that Bishop Landa actually
provided many more readings for signs than the Rosetta Stone did for
Egyptology.
For all of Eric Thompson’s important findings in many areas of Maya
studies, by the force of his character, bolstered by immense erudition
and a sharp tongue, he singlehandedly held back the decipherment for
four decades. Seler had previously crushed Thomas, and effectively
finished the phonetic approach to the glyphs for a good long time; few
ventured to resurrect Thomas’ work while Thompson was still around.
Linguists like Whorf who had the temerity to suggest that the script
might express the Maya language were quickly sent to oblivion.
It seems that Thompson never believed that there was any system at all
in what the Maya wrote down: it was a mere hodgepodge of various
primitive attempts to write, inherited from the distant past and directed
towards supernatural ends by the priests who supposedly ran the
society. If he had been the slightest bit interested in comparative
analysis, which he definitely was not, he would have found out that none
of the “hieroglyphic” scripts of the Old World worked this way. Here
he made a fatal mistake, for if anthropology teaches us anything, it is that
at a given level of social and political evolution, different societies
 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD 261

around the globe arrive at very similar solutions to similar problems — in

this case, the need by early state societies to compile permanent, visual
records of impermanent, spoken language.
Perhaps it was the terrible isolation imposed by Stalin’s Russia that
allowed Knorosov to achieve his great breakthrough, the trickle that
started a flood. That may be true, but it is also true that from the
beginning, whether as a Marxist or not, Knorosov had adopted a
comparativist approach, and was as “at home” in Egyptian hieroglyphs
and Chinese characters as he was in the signs of the Maya monuments
and codices. I have often wondered whether it was by chance that the
towering figures in the modern decipherment were both Russian-born:
throughout Mother Russia’s turbulent history, even in times of the most
rigid repression, there have always been intellectuals who have dared
challenge received wisdom. Yuri Knorosov showed that, far from being
a hodgepodge, the Maya script was typically logographic, a discovery
that eventually led to the reading of the Classic texts in the language
spoken by the ancient scribes. Tatiana Proskouriakoff revealed the
historical nature of these texts, not by linguistic methods, but by
working out the structure of “published” Maya dates that had been in
everyone’s hands for generations, but not understood.
If it is a hero you are looking for, then it is Knorosov who most closely
approximates Champollion. That being the case, then Thompson (apart
from his affinity with Kircher) would be another Thomas Young, the
brilliant innovator in Egyptology who, mired down by his mentalist and
symbolist view of the script, never did achieve true decipherment. Both
would bear this flawed burden to their deathbeds.
Well, you might say, why praise Champollion to the heavens? Didn’t
he have the advantage of the Rosetta Stone? Yes he did, but the
Mayanists had their own all along and failed to recognize it for what it
was. Champollion cracked the script in a mere two years, while it took
the Mayanists what seems an eternity by comparison.
The snail’s pace at which Maya decipherment proceeded before
Knorosov’s epochal article of 1952 also compares unfavorably with
what happened with Hieroglyphic Hittite, the Bronze Age script of
central Anatolia (modern Turkey) which is structurally almost identical
with Maya writing.3 Working without the benefit of a Rosetta Stone,
and with only a few, extremely brief bilingual seals, an international team
of scholars - all doing their research independently - had cracked the
Hieroglyphic code within the space of the two decades preceding World
War II. In contrast to the poor training of most Mayanists, these
particular epigraphers were thoroughly familiar with Old World scripts
like Assyrian cuneiform and Egyptian, and had a good idea of the
structure of early systems. Ironically, for Hittitologists the “Rosetta
262 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

Stone” came after the decipherment had been made: this was the
discovery in 1947 of the bilingual Phoenician and Hieroglyphic
inscriptions at Kul Tepe, in the mountains of southeastern Turkey,
which confirmed what this remarkable team had already found.

Is the Maya script really deciphered? How much of it can we now read (as
opposed to simply knowing the meaning)? The answer to these questions
pretty much depends on whether you are talking about the texts — on the
monuments, codices, and ceramics - or only about the signary per se. I
have seen modern estimates that about 85 percent of all texts can be read
in one or another Mayan language, and certainly there are some
monumental texts that can almost be read in toto; some of these are of
respectable length, like the 96 Hieroglyphs tablet at Palenque.4 But if one
is dealing only with the signary as it appears in Thompson’s catalog, that
is another matter.
There are about 800 signs in Maya hieroglyphic script, but these
include many archaic logograms, largely royal names, which were used
only once and then dropped from general use. Many epigraphers would
tell you that at any moment in Maya culture history, only about 200—300
glyphs were actually being utilized, and that some of these were surely
allographs or homophonic. The signary is thus a great deal smaller than
the one Egyptian scribes had to learn in school; if you glance back at the
table on page 43, you will see that it is comparable to that of Sumerian
cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Hittite. Figures of this sort should long ago
have convinced Maya epigraphers that they were faced with a
logophonemic or logosyllabic script.
More than 150 of these 800 or so signs are known to have a phonetic-
syllabic function. Their phonetic values are overwhelmingly of the
consonant-vowel sort, with the exception of signs standing for the pure
vowels. As with many other early scripts, there is a great deal of
polyvalence, including both homophony (several signs with the same
reading) and polyphony (several readings for the same sign). Polyvalence
could also result in a sign having both logographic and syllabic
functions. Admittedly, there are still some blank spaces in the syllabic
grid: out of the 90 possible boxes based on the phonemic structure of
Cholan and Yucatecan Maya, 19 are yet blank, but I would predict that
all will soon be filled.
As we have seen in Chapter 1, no writing system is really complete, in
that it expresses visually every distinctive feature in the spoken language.
Something is always left out, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps from the
context. For instance, Yucatec Maya has two tones which are phonemic,
but as far as I know these are not written in any way in the codices. Even
 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD 263

though the glottal stop is important in all Mayan languages, rather than
invent a special sign for it, the scribes wrote it by reduplicating the vowel
after which it appears: thus, for mo’, "macaw,” they wrote m(o)-o-o.
I can see no good evidence that the Maya used taxograms in their
script —the "determinatives” or "radicals” that were used by Old World
scribes to indicate the semantic class of phenomena into which their
phonetically-written words belong. At one time, I suspected that the so-
called "water group” sign prefixed to Emblem Glyphs would have
served this function, but even this has fallen to the onslaught of phonetic
analysis, and it must now be read as kul or ch’ul, “holy.” Since it was not
silent, it cannot have been a taxogram as this has been defined.
To satisfy their royal patrons - and their relatives, for they, too,
belonged to this highest social stratum — the scribes played with the
script, passing back and forth from the purely semantic dimension to the
purely phonetic, with intermediary stages between. This playful aspect
of the script is elegantly demonstrated by the different spellings for royal
names like that of Pacal of Palenque or Yax Pac of Copan. To meet
aesthetic demands, signs could occasionally be switched around within
the glyph blocks, changing their order as Egyptian scribes had done
millennia before along the banks of the Nile. And two contiguous signs
could be conflated into one at the whim of the scribe, as in the glyph for
the "seating” of a time-period. All this was predictable from Old World
writing systems.

66 Conflation of signs in Maya writing. All four examples spell chum tun,
“seating of the tun.”

The logograms, standing for entire morphemes, might have given the
Maya reader trouble, but there was extensive use of phonetic comple¬
ments before and/or behind the logograms to help in their reading, and it
has often been these "props” which have led the epigrapher into the
decipherment of these difficult signs. Phonetic-syllabic signs were also
used to express grammatical endings of logographic roots. But there may
always be a residue of logograms which will never be read, even though
we can work out their approximate meaning; most of these, one can
safely predict, will be name-signs of rulers which take the form of
264 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

67 Alternative spellings for balam, “jaguar.” According to his whim, the scribe
could write this purely logographically; logographically with phonetic complements; or
purely syllabically.

fantastic animal heads, difficult to match in nature, and which never

appear spelled phonetically or with phonetic complements. Such “one-
of-a-kind” glyphs defy analysis.
Now, the ancient Maya scribes could have written everything
expressed in their language using only the syllabic signary - but they did
not, any more than did the Japanese with their kana signs, or the
Sumerians and Hittites with their syllabaries, or the Egyptians with their
stock of consonantal signs. The logograms just had too much prestige to
abolish. And why should they have done so? “One picture is worth a
thousand words,” as the saying goes, and Maya logograms, like their
Egyptian equivalents, are often remarkably pictorial and thus more
immediately informative than a series of abstract phonetic signs: for
example, the Maya could, and sometimes did, write out balam, “jaguar,”
syllabically as ba-ia-mfflj, but by using a jaguar’s head for balam, the
scribe could get his word across in a more dramatic fashion.
In fact, among the Classic and Post-Classic Maya, writing and pictorial
representation were not distinct. Just as in ancient Egypt, texts have the
tendency to fill all spaces which are not actually taken up with pictures,
and may even appear as nominal phrases on the bodies of captive figures.
Classic texts without pictures are relatively scarce - the tablets of the
Temple of the Inscriptions and the 96 Hieroglyphs, both from Palenque,
being notable exceptions. This is true both for the Classic monuments,
and for the extant Post-Classic codices, hardly surprising when you
consider that the artist and scribe were one and the same person.
And what do the now-deciphered texts say? Bear in mind that many
thousands of bark-paper codices once in use among the Classic Maya
have perished with hardly a trace. What we have been left with are four
 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD 265

books in various states of completeness or delapidation, texts on

ceramics and other portable objects (largely the result of the antiques
trade), and monumental inscriptions, many weathered beyond recogni¬
tion. These are surely a very skewed sample of what the ancient Maya
actually wrote. Gone forever are purely literary compositions (which
must have included historical epics and mythology), economic records,
land transactions, and, I feel sure, personal and diplomatic correspon¬
dence. Books and other written documents must have freely circulated
across the Maya lowlands, for how else could Classic Maya civilization
have achieved such cultural and scientific unity in the face of such
demonstrable political Balkanization? But thanks to the vicissitudes of
time, and the horrors of the Spanish invasion, all those precious
documents are gone. Even the burning of the library of Alexandria did
not obliterate a civilization’s heritage as completely as this.
The monumental inscriptions, on stone stelae, altars, lintels, panels,
and the like, present public statements of royal deeds, descent, and other
concerns (above all, warfare), and, like such permanent “billboards” in
the Old World, tend to be quite parsimonious about what they say.
They certainly keep adjectives and adverbs to a minimum, in good
Hemingway style. Monumental statements almost always open with a
chronological expression, and then go on to an event verb, an object (if
the verb is transitive), and a subject; then, on to (or back to) another time
expression, and another statement. Fig. 68 overleaf gives an example of
such an inscription from Piedras Negras.
As for the surviving codices, all from the Post-Classic, only three have
texts of any length; these are short yet quite similar in structure to the
Classic inscriptions - although in content they are not overtly historical
but religious-astronomical. The Dresden Codex, for example, contains
77 almanacs based upon the 260-day calendar, in which specific days are
associated with specific gods and appropriate auguries; New Year
ceremonies; Venus and eclipse tables; and multiplication tables related
to the calendar and the movements of the planets.5
We now realize that the ceramic texts are in a distinct class by
themselves. Although much remains to be learned about it, the Primary
Standard Sequence seems to be a kind of dedication statement for the
vessel, naming its shape, its contents, and its owner, as name-tagging
does for other kinds of objects from stelae to items of personal jewelry.
For my part, I believe that the future study of the Secondary texts, which
are directly linked to the scenes on the pots, will one day reveal an entire
world of thought which may have been contained on the long-lost ritual
codices of the Classic lowlands. The reading of the uay glyph described
in the last chapter has indeed given Maya epigraphers, art historians, and
students of religion something to ponder.
 STELA 3, PIEDRAS NEGRAS

Reading in Choi Maya and Translation

courtesy Linda Scheie

Synopsis

On 9.12.2.0.16 5 Cib 14 Yaxkin (7 July 674), Lady Katun Ahau was born in a place
called Man, believed to lie between Piedras Negras and Yaxchil^n. When only
twelve years old, on 9.12.14.10.16 1 Cib 14 Yaxkin, she was married (“adorned”)
to the heir apparent to the Piedras Negras throne, Yo’ Acnal, who succeeded to
the rulership 44 days later. When she was 33, on 9.13.16.4.6 4 Cimi 14 Uo (22
March 708), Lady Katun Ahau gave birth to a daughter, Lady Kin Ahau, in the
Turtle lineage of Piedras Negras. Three years after this, Lady Katun Ahau, a
powerful queen throughout her life, celebrated a ceremony called “grasping the
staff”, on 9.13.19.13.1 11 Imix 14 Yax. The current katun ended, as the text notes,
99 days later on 9.14.0.0.0 6 Ahau 13 Muan (5 December 711). In the scene below,
the queen and the 3 year old Lady Kin Ahau are shown seated on a throne.

A1 tzic yaxkin Cl mi, luhum uinicihi El holuhum, uaxac

The count is in Yaxkin. 0 kins, 10 uinals, uinicihi, ux tuni
B1 bo I on pih D1 lahcham tuni 15 kins, 8 uinals, 3 tuns.
9 baktuns, 12 tuns. FI iual ut
A2 lahcham katun C2 iual ut hun chibin It came to pass
12 katuns, It came to pass [on] E2 buluch imix
B2 cha tun 1 Cib [on] 11 Imix
2 tuns, D2 chanlahum uniu, nauah F2 chanluhum yaxkin
A3 mi uinic 14 Kankin, she was 14 Yax
0 uinals, adorned, E3 u ch 'amua lorn
B3 uacluhum kin C3 na katun ahau she grasped the staff,
16 kins Lady Katun Ahau, F3 na katun ahau
A4 ho chibin D3 nana man ahau, yichnal Lady Katun Ahau,
5 Cib. Matron of Man, in the E4 nana man ahau
B4 nah company of Matron from Man.
Nah [7th Lord of the C4 makina yo’ acnal F4 homi u ho tun
Night] Great Sun Yo’ Acnal. It ended, the 5th tun,
A5 ch ’a hun D4 luhum, buluch uinicihi, E5 hun katun lati
tied on the headband. hun tuni 1 katun after
B5 uac kal huliy 10 kins, 11 uinals, F5 ti ahaule yo'
[It was] 27 days after 1 tun, his kingship, Yo’
[the moon] arrived, C5 hun katun, iual ut E6 acnal
A6 cha tzuc (?) u 1 katun. It came to pass Acnal.
two moons are worn out. D5 chan chamal F6 bolonluhum, chan
B6 ux sac uitz ku [on] 4 Cimi uinicihi
Three White Mountain God C6 chanlahum icat 19 kins, 4 uinals.
[name of the lunation], 14 Uo, E7 iual ut
A7 uinic bolon D6 sihi It came to pass
[with] 29 days. she was born, F7 uac ahau
B7 chanluhum yaxkin C7 na hun tan ac [on] 6 Ahau
14 Yaxkin. she, the Cherished One F8 uxluhum muan
A8 sihi of the Turtle [lineage], 13 Muan,
She was born, D7 na kin ahau F9 homi
A9 na katun ahau Lady Kin Ahau. it ended,
Lady Katun Ahau, F10 u chanluhum katun
A10 nana man ahau its 14th katun.
Matron from Man.
 B

10

68 Stela 3, Piedras Negras: an example of a complete text, its reading, and its
translation.
268 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

There is a Sumerian proverb four thousand years old that says, A

scribe whose hand matches the mouth, he is indeed a scribe. 6 There is
now no question that Maya hieroglyphic writing “matches the mouth”;
as linguists like Archibald Hill, Benjamin Whorf, and Floyd Lounsbury
had been saying all along, the script is as much the visual form of spoken
Maya as ours is of spoken English.
A meeting of about one-hundred-and-seventy-five linguists, art
historians, epigraphers, archaeologists, and amateurs that took place in
early 1989 at the University of California in Santa Barbara showed just
what that means, and where the future of Maya decipherment may lie.
As the monumental texts contain stories about real people and events,
reported Sandra Blakeslee in the New York Times,7 Maya linguists have
reasoned that they should reflect real language. At this advanced stage in
the decipherment, it has become clear that epigraphers are going to have
to get down to the “nit-picking details of the language recorded,” as
David Stuart has put it.
At the Santa Barbara meeting, David himself came under some well-
meant criticism from linguist Nicholas Hopkins, an expert on the
Cholan languages, for not paying enough attention in his “Ten Phonetic
Glyphs” to Knorosov’s Principle of Synharmony. Hopkins pointed out
that when the scribes apparently violate this rule, there is a good
linguistic explanation for it; for example, when they write mut, “bird” or
“omen,” as mu't(i), instead of the predicted mu-tfu), this is because the
Western Mayan languages, including Choi, have high front vowels (like
i) as echo vowels after an alveolar consonant (like t). When David wants
to read both u dzi-b(i) and u dzi'b(a) as u dzib, “his writing,” he is on target
with the former reading but in violation with the latter, which may well
be a verb, not a possessed noun: u dziba, “he wrote it.”8
This brings us to discourse analysis, a specialty of Hopkins’ linguist
wife, Katheryn Josserand. A discourse is a connected text, not just a
word or sentence, such as a conversation between two people, an oral
narration, a prayer, or even a prophecy; these are all types of discourse in
use among the contemporary Maya, and they have received increasing
attention by the linguists. In addition, the Colonial period is rich in
historical and prophetic texts from Yucatan - the famous Books of
Chilam Balam, “the Jaguar Prophet”; and from the highlands we have
such great epics as the Popol Vuh, analyzed and translated by Dennis
Tedlock, a specialist in Native American literatures.9
What Josserand presented at Santa Barbara was the application of
such analysis to long glyphic texts like those at Palenque, to “tease out
meaning” as Sandra Blakeslee says. This consists of “participant
tracking,” trying to identify the protagonists of events where the names
of the actors are not always expressed.
 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD 269

Here is how she solved the problem, according to Blakeslee:

Background information [placed chronologically by Anterior Date Indicators] is
often marked with a suffix, a glyph whose phonetic value was Ax... A verb prefix,
i-, indicates that the action relates to a main story line or new piece of information.
By dividing texts into chunks using these markers, she said, it is possible to find
the peak event in the story. When Mayan scribes get to the most important part of
the story ... they do not mention the name of the most important actor. The
reader or listener must know the name from an earlier part of the story.

We already know that monumental and codical texts follow the

peculiar (to us) rules of Maya grammar, but this kind of analysis is new
and shows great promise for the future. One application might be to the
thorny problems raised by the Terminal Classic carved lintels from
Chichen Itza in Yucatan, where as many as three actors, possibly co-
ruling brothers, may appear in a single inscription.
Now for the question of literacy. Apart from the scribes and the
rulers, who within the general population was actually capable of
reading all these texts? The general opinion among Mayanists has always
been that literacy was confined to a minute segment of the population.10
That may have been true of the late pre-Conquest Maya of Yucatan,
about whom Landa wrote, but their culture was then in a state of decline,
and it may not necessarily be applicable to the Classic Maya.
Much scholarly speculation about this comes from a time when the
script had not yet been deciphered, and from an intellectual milieu in
which the difficulties and general awkwardness of logographic writing
systems were greatly exaggerated. Epigraphers like Ignace Gelb11
consistently denigrated such systems and saw the invention of the
alphabet as the triggering mechanism for the spread of literacy around
the world, a position subsequently embraced by the social anthropolo¬
gist Jack Goody (who was convinced that the Maya had written with
“knotted cords”).12 But the rate of literacy has little or nothing to do
with the kind of writing system that you use, and lots to do with the
culture you live in. The highest literacy rate in the world is Japan’s, which
uses a logosyllabic script, and one of the very lowest is Iraq’s, which has
the Arabic alphabet.
I suspect that the Maya script was not all that difficult to learn, at least
to read: in her justly famed workshops, which last a single weekend each,
Linda Scheie has taught several thousand rank amateurs to scan Maya
texts. I simply cannot imagine that the Maya man- or woman-in-the-
street could not have looked at a carved and brightly painted stela in a
plaza, and at least been able to read off the date, the events, and the names
of the protagonists given on it, particularly when there was an
accompanying picture, as there almost always was. Of course, all scripts
are more difficult to write than to read, and there were probably precious
270 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

few who were fully literate in this sense: small wonder that the scribes,
the ah dzib, belonged to the royal caste.

Public exhibitions of pre-Columbian art have been held ever since the
1920s, but none have had the intellectual impact of the one entitled The
Blood of Kings;13 the splendid catalog resulting from this pioneering
show revolutionized the way we think about the Classic Maya. Informed
by the very latest research on the hieroglyphic script, for the very first
time it allowed the ancient elite of the Maya cities to express their own
concerns and goals through some of the most splendid objects ever
assembled under one roof. In the highly critical museum world, this
show was universally acknowledged as a blockbuster.
The exhibit was the brainchild of Linda Scheie and Mary Miller, and
opened in 1986 in Louis Kahn’s splendid Kimbell Art Museum in Fort
Worth, Texas. Just a word about my colleague Mary Miller, now
Professor of the History of Art at Yale. It was Gillett Griffin who
introduced her to the world of pre-Columbian art at Princeton, but her
graduate career was at Yale, where she gained a Ph.D. in art history,
writing her thesis on the murals of Bonampak. Thoroughly grounded in
Maya glyphs, she was just the person to collaborate on a show of this
sort, informed by the very latest advances in Maya epigraphy and
iconography.
Basically, the picture of the Classic Maya that these two presented to
the world was a series of kingly societies whose principal obsessions
were royal blood (and descent) and bloody conquest. Through a host of
the most beautiful Maya objects ever assembled under one roof, they
spoke of penitential bloodletting of the most hair-raising sort, torture,
and human sacrifice, all firmly based in what the Classic Maya actually
said about themselves. These were certainly not the peaceful Maya
about whom Morley and Thompson had rhapsodized. Thanks to
Linda’s numerous and informative drawings, the catalog is a mine of
information about the art and life of the elite who ruled the Maya cities,
while the exhibit itself, due to a tightly organized story line, was the first
ever to present pre-Columbian art as something more than a collection
of rather scary, barbaric masterpieces. The decipherment had made it all
possible.
Accolades came from all (or almost all) sides. In a long essay in the
New York Review of Books,14 in which he chastized his compatriots for
paying too little attention to the ancient Maya, the distinguished
Mexican writer Octavio Paz praised the catalog in the warmest terms. On
the other hand, one could hear the grumbling from the wings: all this was
definitely not going over well with certain art historians whose noses had
 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD 271

been put out of joint. One particularly sour reviewer even suggested that
Scheie and Miller had used the show to advance their own careers and
make life more difficult for those pre-Columbian art historians who were
not Mayanists.
But that was nothing compared to what was developing among our
friends, the field archaeologists.

You might reasonably think that the decipherment of the Maya script
would have been greeted with open arms by the archaeologists. Not a bit
of it! The reaction of the digging fraternity (and sorority) to the most
exciting development in New World archaeology this century has been
... rejection. It is not that they claim, like Champollion’s opponents,
that the decipherment has not taken place, they simply believe it is not
worthy of notice (at least overtly).
In a way, today’s Maya archaeologists are not to be blamed for their
sad predicament. At the same time as excavation permits from foreign
governments (particularly in Mexico) have become as scarce as the
proverbial hens’ teeth, sources of public funding to dig have been
dwindling. As a result, competition for these scarce resources has
reached fever pitch, and a kind of vindictive infighting has arisen among
Mayanists that never existed in the Carnegie years. Lest this be thought a
fiction on my part, allow me to mention a situation that arose a while
back at Harvard. The plum position in Maya archaeology, the Charles
Bowditch Professorship, was about to become vacant with the impend¬
ing retirement of Gordon Willey, the acknowledged leader in the field.
To fill it, a committee appointed by the President drew up a short list of
candidates, and invited written evaluations of individuals on it from
Mayanists. The results? It is widely reported that the President, shocked
by the general nastiness and scurrility of the letters, remarked that he had
never seen anything like this in his entire life. The respondents were like
sharks in a feeding frenzy, and the academic waters were red with blood.
The position was not filled, needless to say.
A situation had developed, thanks in part to an increasing number of
new Ph.D.’s being turned out by American universities, that there were
more and more archaeologists with less and less to study, and less and
less to say about the Maya past. It began to look as though the age of
archaeological discovery was over. With nothing better to do, the
diggers would speculate about the Maya collapse. The new breed of
archaeologists might control the funding process (they sat on all the right
committees), publication (they made up the editorial boards of the
journals), and academic promotions (they held tenure posts in the better
departments); but they weren’t finding much to gain public interest.
 272 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

Contrast this with what was going on in epigraphy and iconography,

and the pique of the field archaeologists is understandable. Here was a
bunch of outsiders who were getting top coverage in the daily press and
news magazines, who had never had to endure the heat, ticks, and
gastrointestinal problems endemic to field excavation, who had never
had to sort their way through mountains of drab potsherds and obsidian
chips. Here was a person like Linda Scheie, filling huge auditoriums to
capacity wherever she went, and she didn’t even have a degree in
anthropology! It was unfair.
The wielders of trowels finally got their revenge, at Dumbarton Oaks
in a conference held in early October 1989. It was called “On the Eve of
the Collapse: Ancient Maya Societies in the Eighth Century, A.D.” I
(luckily) wasn’t there, but there can be little doubt that the whole
conference was a negative reaction to the decipherment and to The Blood
of Kings. While Mary Miller and David Stuart were both put on the list
of speakers, they were restricted to giving data only, and Linda -
arguably the number one expert on the subject - was excluded from the
rostrum (she came anyway and sat in the audience).
The hostility to the decipherment, and to the not illogical notion that
the Classic Maya themselves might have had something interesting to
say on this subject, was palpable. One well-known scholar managed to
present a forty-four-page paper on ancient Maya political organization
which never once mentioned the decipherment, or indicated that
anything new had been found in the inscriptions beyond the work of
Berlin and Proskouriakoff in the 1950s and 1960s. That was the cold-
shoulder approach. But the prevalent attitude towards the demonstrable
fact that we could now read the inscriptions was slightly different: yes,
we can read the stuff, but it’s all a pack of lies! Who can trust what these
Classic politicos said, anyway?
The final blow was struck at the conference by its summarizer: the
Maya inscriptions are “epiphenomenal,’’ a ten-penny word meaning
that Maya writing is only of marginal application since it is secondary to
those more primary institutions - economy and society - so well studied
by the dirt archaeologists.
In other words, sour grapes! Even if we card-carrying diggers bothered
to learn how to read the texts, they wouldn’t say anything of importance,
and our valuable time would be wasted. But as one young epigrapher
present at this D.O. meeting wrote me later,

These people have fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated historical

and textual evidence. Haven’t they heard of historiography? Aren’t other lines of
evidence equally equivocal? Shouldn’t we be looking at how other scholars deal
with other literate civilizations, such as those of Mesopotamia and China? There
might be important lessons here.
 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD 273

These people are unable to criticize epigraphy on its own terms. Who denies
that there are problems of interpretation? Yet a blanket dismissal of an entire set of
data is both foolish and anti-intellectual. Learn first how epigraphers are reading
the glyphs; then criticize.

I believe that the problem lies even deeper than that, in the inability or
unwillingness of anthropologically-trained archaeologists to admit that
they are dealing with the remains of real people, who once lived and
spoke; that these ancient kings, queens, warriors, and scribes were
actually Maya Indians, and that their words are worth listening to.
The ultimate stage in this rejection has now been reached in the
journals controlled by the dirt archaeologists: even if all that epigraphy,
art, and iconography is not just stuff and nonsense, even if the texts are
not mendacious, they do not represent real Maya culture and social
organization - as one conference participant put it, the “vast majority”
of the Maya population is not even mentioned in the texts. Of course
not! Neither are the millions of fellahin who built the pyramids and
palaces of Egypt mentioned in the royal inscriptions of the Nile, nor do
the swarms of peasants who worked the lands of the Hittite kings show
up in their monumental reliefs.
What this populist viewpoint, so common among archaeologists,
ignores is that in pre-industrial, non-democratic societies on a state level
of organization, large chunks of the culture are indeed generated by royal
courts and by the elite class in general. A Maya ahau could say with
confidence, “L’etat, c’est moi,” and I doubt whether the Maya peasantry
would have disagreed. The concerns of a ruler like Pacal of Palenque
were everybody’s concerns, and Mayanists who choose to concentrate
on Pacal instead of such topics as rural settlement patterns or the
typology of utilitarian pottery are not wasting their time.

In my estimation, no amount of “circling the wagons,” not even a

conference like the one at D.O., is going to derail the continuing progress
of the decipherment. As Linda Scheie once told me, “The decipherment
has occurred. There are two ways to react to it. One is to embrace it, and
if you can’t do it yourself, get someone on your side who bloody well
can. The other is to ignore it, to try and destroy it, to basically dismiss
it.”
As we move into the third millennium, the way to do it properly has
been shown by archaeologists like Bill Fash at Copan, Arthur Demarest
at Dos Pilas and the sites of the Petexbatun, and by Diane and Arlen
Chase at Caracol:15 in those sites, epigraphy has been the handmaiden of
field archaeology at almost every step of the project, as it has been since
the last century in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China.
274 A LOOK BACKWARD, A VIEW FORWARD

But the kind of training Mayanists undergo will have to take a new
direction, too. At present most field archaeologists, I am sorry to report,
are almost totally illiterate in the Maya script, except for a possible
ability to recognize Long Count dates in an inscription. Few if any have
any knowledge of a Mayan tongue. Compare this with what an
Assyriologist must know before he or she gets a Ph.D.: the candidate
must have mastered both Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, and be
well-grounded in one or more Semitic languages. Imagine someone
calling himself an Egyptologist who couldn’t read a hieroglyphic
inscription, or a Sinologist tongue-tied in Chinese! How can illiterate
scholars pretend to study a literate civilization? I will predict that all this
is going to change, and for the better.
Certainly, linguistics is going to play an even greater role in the future,
as readings are fine-tuned, and as we proceed with analysis of whole texts
in place of individual glyphs or phrases. Maya epigraphers are going to
have to work more closely with contemporary Maya story-tellers,
shamans, and other specialists to better understand the ancient
inscriptions. David Stuart is surely right when he says that even a few
years ago, no one would have predicted the script was so phonetic - and
it was heavily phonetic in the very earliest inscriptions. “We’re just at
the transition stage now,” according to David, “I think we’ll be able to
read the stuff literally like we never imagined!”
My first visit to Yucatan, and my introduction to the ancient and
modern Maya, took place in Christmas vacation of 1947, when I was still
an English major at Harvard. I knew little or nothing of the Maya
civilization, just what I’d gleaned from some trashy travel books
borrowed from the Widener Library. Wandering around the ruins of
Chichen Itza, I came across the great Monjas complex to the south of the
principal group, with its many stone lintels inscribed with those (to me)
strange characters. As I was wondering in my innocence if the
archaeologists could actually read what was written on them, there
materialized an American, a movie photographer from Hollywood.
Before my very eyes, he ran his hand over the glyphs on each lintel, and
told me exactly what they said. I was dumbfounded with admiration -
what a genius he must be! Only later, when I got back to Cambridge and
actually met some real-life archaeologists, did I find out it was all
balderdash. Every bit of it. Not even the specialists could then read those
lintels.
Yet today, some forty-five years later, if you come across someone
doing just that - reading those once-mute texts in authentic Yucatec
Maya - you have no reason for disbelief. In one of the greatest
intellectual achievements of our century, the Maya code has at last been
broken.
 Epilogue

Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov’s blue eyes still gaze out across the Neva
River, but he now finds himself not in Leningrad, but St. Petersburg - a
lot of water has gone under the nearby bridge since we saw him last. His
hero Peter the Great has been given back his city and his patron saint.
And the man who let us read the Maya glyphs has at last stood in the
shadows of Maya pyramids: late in 1990, he was invited to Guatemala to
receive a gold medal from President Cerezo. After the ceremony, along
with his young colleague Galina Yershova and her Guatemalan husband,
he visited Tikal and Uaxactun. With characteristic Russian contrari¬
ness, he complained to his traveling companions that it was all no
different from what he had read about in books.
Then, shortly after Cerezo left office, a sinister phone call came to
them in Guatemala City: leave Guatemalan territory within seventy-two
hours or be killed. Knorosov and his friends immediately went into
hiding, then fled the country of the Maya - and of the right-wing death
squads who have been engaged in extirpating all remaining Maya
culture, and the Maya themselves. The man who had allowed the ancient
Maya scribes to speak with their own voice was still unable to walk freely
among the cities in which they had lived.
But who knows? Perhaps we are all headed for destruction. The Maya
wise men all across Yucatan predict that the world will end in the year
2000 y pico - “and a little.” How many years will that “a little” be? The
Great Cycle of the Maya calendar which began in darkness on 13 August
3114 bc will come to an end after almost five millennia on 23 December
ad 2012, when many of you who read this will still be alive. On that day,
the ancient Maya scribes would say, it will be 13 cycles, 0 katuns, 0 tuns,
0 uinals, and 0 kins since the beginning of the Great Cycle. The day will
be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord
of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third
lunation in a series of six. And what is to happen? A katun prophecy in
the Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin reads:16

275
276 EPILOGUE

Ca hualahom caan Then the sky is divided

Ca nocpahi peten Then the land is raised,
Ca ix hopp i And then there begins
U hum ox lahun ti ku The Book of the 13 Gods.
Ca uch i Then occurs
Noh hai cabil The great flooding of the Earth
Ca lik i Then arises
Noh Itzam Cab Ain The great Itzam Cab Ain.
Tz’ocebal u than The ending of the word,
U uutz’ katun The fold of the Katun:
Lai hun yeciil That is a flood
Bin tz’oce(ce)bal Which will be the ending of
u than katun the word of the Katun.
 APPENDIX A

Proskouriakoff’s
“ Suggested Order of Discussion”

APPENDIX B

The Maya Syllabic Chart

Notes

Glossary

Sources of Illustrations

Further Reading and Bibliography

Index
 Appendix A

Proskouriakoff s
“Suggested Order of Discussion”
Note: this outline was prepared by Tatiana Proskouriakoff for the student-run Mesa
Cuadrada (“Square Table”) held in the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, during
the 1956-57 academic year. It is remarkable for its clear view of the future of Maya
decipherment. Her “ideograms” would now be called “logograms.”

SUGGESTED ORDER OF DISCUSSION

For Mesa Quadrada (sic) on decipherment of Maya writing

Introductory remarks

The structure of hieroglyphic systems as per Knorosov:

1. Essential similarity of all hieroglyphic systems.
2. Constituent elements:
a. Ideograms: words
b. Phonograms: syllabic, phonemic
c. Determinatives: additional to above, referring to meaning only.
3. A given sign in different contexts may take on different functions.

Peculiarities of the Maya system, as per Knorosov:

1. Strong phonetic component.
2. Semantic indicator (not always present): Indicates whether sign is ideogram,
phonogram or determinative. This is specific for a sign.
3. Most common particles have constant value.
4. Order of reading from left to right and from top to bottom, with occasional
variations as follows:
a. Determinatives have no fixed position.
b. Rotation of signs 90 or 180 degrees.
c. Inversions (of order of signs).
d. Omissions of sounds (abbreviations?).
e. Ligatures (one part common to two signs).
f. Insertions of one sign in another (inserted sign to be read last).
g. Additions of phonetic complement (usually repeated final phoneme).
5. Variation of vowel value in syllables
a. Long and short vowels not differentiated.
b. Discrepancies due to phonetic shifts.
c. Apparently intrinsic interchangeability.
d. Dropping of final vowel at end of word for consonant phoneme. Usually
syllabic value repeats previous vowel (synharmonism).

Discussion '

1. Theoretical structure of other proposed or implied systems:

a. Pictographic and ideographic; no longer supported
b. Whorf’s system (phonetic emphasis) - (*Carroll)
c. Thompson’s (ideographic emphasis) - (Thompson?)
d. Barthel — (Kelley). D. Kelley (Kelley)

278
 proskouriakoff’s “suggested order of discussion’’ 279

2. Assuming Knorosov’s premise that all hieroglyphic systems are basically similar, in
what way can a knowledge of other writing (e.g. Chinese) help us in interpretation?
Does Chinese roughly correspond to the outline given? Is a Chinese character read
in one way only (linguistically)?
3. The language of the hieroglyphs.
a. In what way can knowledge of phonemics, morphology and syntax be applied
to decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphs?
b. Are there strong syntactical differences between the Mayance languages which
would tend to eliminate certain groups as inconsistent with the hieroglyphic
structure (e.g. the frequency and position of particles?) (Carroll)
c. Would such linguistic variations as between Choi and Yucatec, Yucatec and
Mam, imply systematic changes in script? (Carroll)
d. What are the specific indications the Choi or a Choloid language was the
language of the hieroglyphs? (Kelley)
4. Approaches and demonstrations in decipherment.
a. Selected examples:
Thompson (Thompson?)
Whorf (Carroll)
Knorosov (Kelley)
b. Do any or all of these fail to constitute sufficient proof? (open discussion) What
are the weaknesses of each?

‘John B. Carroll was then Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Harvard
University, and was Whorf s literary executor; David Kelley was then a graduate student in
Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, Eric Thompson refused our invitation to attend.
 Appendix B

The Maya Syllabic Chart

■
1
i e i o u

f (ED

ULrS
fW] (

b © (8
tun

ch 3 QssS © m
clY 8
rn • • •

h m ©

C II @ m1 9

k 0 (2©
O UM.
•• •v^LL
v Ir

1 ©€ge® © s 0® © s
wsr 0 009
m
fcroC

The Maya writing system is a mix of logograms and syllabic signs; with the latter, they could
and often did write words purely phonetically. This chart shows the Maya syllabary as it has
been deciphered thus far. It should be kept in mind that, due to homophony, the same sound is
usually represented by more than one sign; and that some of these signs may also act as
logograms. With the exception of the top left row of boxes, in which each sign stands for a

280
 THE MAYA SYLLABIC CHART 281

ci e i 0 u

n §
l@Qfl Ww
l€g

p
Zafl
0
£i3>
i
s y
r m 3

i mmim in:n;n:

* I1
(jTTnTni
tz ©

dz 0

(5
u ©(31

2~?.: [j
X © ®

i m jf^l (Sa) (g(@J

QGO

syllable consisting of vowel only, each box contains one or more signs representing a
consonant-vowel (CV) syllable; the consonants are at the left, and the vowels at the top. 1 hus
all signs in the top right box would be pronounced nu. ((
As an example of syllabic writing, a Maya scribe would have written the word pitz, to play
ball,” with the signs for pi & and for tzi (W) , combined thus: f§ fW]
 Notes

Chapter 1 (pp. 13-45) 33 For a full biography of Champollion,

see Hartleben 1906.
1 Tylor 1881: 179.
34 Quirke and Andrews 1989 is a complete
2 Plato 1973: 95-99.
and accessible treatment of the Rosetta
3 Pope 1975: 30-31.
Stone.
4 Pope 1975: 17.
35 Stephens 1841 (1): 160.
5 Pope 1975: 19
36 See Powell 1981 for treatment of the
6 Pope 1975: 21.
earliest Sumerian.
7 For the career of Athanasius Kircher, I
,37 Pope 1975: 136-145 and Hawkins 1986.
have drawn on Godwin 1979 and Pope
38 Pope 1975: 159—179 and Chadwick
1975: 28-33.
1958.
8 Quoted in Pope 1975: 31-32.
39 I have adapted and enlarged a similar list
9 Gardiner 1957: 11-12.
appearing in Gelb 1952: 115.
10 Sampson 1985, 26—45 and figure 3.
40 For the Indus script, see Mahadevan
11 Hill 1967.
1977.
12 Ascher and Ascher 1981.
13 Basso and Anderson 1973.
14 Trager 1974: 377.
Chapter 2 (pp. 47—72)
15 North 1939.
16 DeFrancis 1989: 9. 1 A good account of the Mayan languages
17 Kramer 1963: 40—42 can be found in Morley, Brainerd, and
18 Morley 1946: 259-260. Sharer 1983: 497-510.
19 Gelb 1952. 2 Thompson 1950: 16.
20 This script was first devised for the Cree 3 Campbell 1984: 7-11.
language by the Methodist missionary 4 Kaufman and Norman 1984-
James Evans (1801-1946). 5 My description of Mayan grammar and
21 Diringer 1962: 149-152. verb morphology is based upon Scheie
22 The best analyses of Chinese writing are 1982; Bricker 1986; Morley, Brainerd,
in Sampson 1985: 145-171 and DeFran¬ and Sharer op. cit.; and upon a Yucatec
cis 1989: 89-121. language course given by Paul Sullivan
23 DeFrancis 1989: 99. at Yale in 1989-90.
24 DeFrancis 1989: 111. 6 A very long list of classifiers is given in
25 For the Japanese script, see Sampson Pio Perez 1898; most of these have fallen
1985: 172-193. out of use.
26 Wang 1981: 231. 7 Turner 1978.
27 Pope 1975: 9. 8 White and Schwarz 1989.
28 Kahn 1967: 21-22; there are numerous 9 MacNeish, Wilkerson, and Nelken-
references to the careers of the Fried¬ Turner 1980.
mans throughout this book. 10 Coe 1968.
29 The story of Champollion and the 11 Thompson 1941.
decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs 12 Coe and Diehl 1980.
is well told in Pope 1975: 60-84 and 13 Marcus 1983.
Gardiner 1957: 9—11. 14 Earle and Snow 1985.
30 Ray 1986: 316. 15 See Coe 1976.
31 Gardiner 1957: 7—10. For good descrip¬ 16 Matheny 1986.
tions of the structure of Egyptian writ¬ 17 Coe 1989: 162-164.
ing, see Ray 1986 and Schenkel 1976. 18 This is Stela 29; see Morley, Brainerd,
32 Gelb 1952: 79-81. and Sharer 1983: 276 and fig. 4.6.

282
 NOTES 283

19 Haviland 1970. 17 Kingsborough 1830—48.

20 Scheie and Freidel 1990: 171-183. 18 Norman 1843: 198.
21 This has been detailed in Scheie and 19 Biographical and bibliographic details
Miller 1986. on this extraordinary figure can be
22 The Bonampak murals are pictured in found in Rafinesque 1987 and G. Stuart
Ruppert, Thompson, and Proskouriak- 1989.
off 1955. 20 Rafinesque 1954.
23 Haviland op. cit. 21 G. Stuart 1989: 21.
24 Trik 1963. 22 Rafinesque 1832: 43—44-
25 Harrison 1970. 23 Rafinesque, ibid.
26 Unfortunately, there are no eye-witness 24 Stephens 1841 (1): 9.
accounts for the game as it was played 25 Von Hagen 1947 is a good (although
among the Maya. occasionally inaccurate) biography of
27 Coe 1988. Stephens.
28 Speculations and hypotheses about the 26 G. Stuart n.d.: 16.
Maya collapse are covered in Culbert 27 Stephens 1843.
1973. 28 Stephens 1841 (1): 137.
29 These are stelae 8, 9, 10, and 11; see J. 29 Stephens 1841 (1): 159.
Graham 1990: 25—38. 30 Stephens 1841 (1): 152.
30 Here I have followed the arguments put 31 Vdn Hagen 1947: 187-188.
forward in Thompson 1970. 32 Stephens 1841 (2): 442—443.
31 Diehl 1983. 33 Stephens 1841 (2): 343.
32 Pollock et al. 1962. 34 Norman 1843.
33 Fox 1987. 35 Stephens 1841 (2): 457.
34 The best English translation of the 36 Haggard 1896.
Popol Vuh is Tedlock 1985. 37 Kidder 1950: 94.

Chapter 3 (pp. 73-98) Chapter 4 (pp■ 99-122)

1 Brunhouse 1973 is an excellent general 1 Brunhouse 1973: 113-135 is an excel¬
treatment of early exploration in the lent, sympathetic treatment of Brasseur.
Maya lowlands. Del Rio’s expedition to See also Escalante Arce 1989.
Palenque is described in Cabello Carro 2 Brunhouse 1973: 126—127.
1983. 3 Brasseur 1864.
2 Some of these drawings are reproduced 4 Biographical material on Landa can be
in Cabello Carro 1983, but a facsimile found in Pagden 1975: 11-17. Galina
edition has yet to be issued. Yershova has completed a Russian-
3 Del Rio 1822. language biography of Landa, as yet
4 G. Stuart n.d.: 8. unpublished.
5 For details of Galindo’s career, see I. 5 For the Franciscan Inquisition in Yuca¬
Graham 1963 and Brunhouse 1973: tan, see Clendinnen 1987.
6 Personal communication, Galina
31-49.
6 For Waldeck’s life, see Cline 1947 and Yershova.
Brunhouse 1973: 50—83. Waldeck 7 Brasseur 1864; 1869—70, T. 37—38.
deserves a full-length biography. 8 I have translated this from the original
7 Quoted in Cline 1947: 282. Spanish. The translation of this critical
passage in Pagden 1975: 124—126 is
8 Cline 1947: 283.
9 Waldeck 1838. good; but the English version in Tozzer
1941: 169-170 is unreliable since it is
10 Coe 1989.
based on a French translation of the
11 Coe 1989: 1.
12 Translated in Coe 1989: 4- Spanish.
13 Coe 1989: 4-5 9 Brasseur 1869-70.
14 The history of the Dresden Codex is 10 For a modern facsimile edition of the
given in Thompson 1972: 16-17. codex, see Codex Madrid 1967.
11 Brunhouse 1973: 130.
15 Coe 1963.
16 Humboldt 1810. 12 The Atlantis myth was to have a long life
284 NOTES

in Maya studies; among its adherents 1979. The autobiographical Thompson

was Edward H. Thompson, the turn-of- 1963 covers his early career in
the-century owner and excavator of archaeology.
Chichen Itza. 2 Thompson 1950.
13 For the life of Forstemann, see Reichert 3 Ruz Lhuillier 1976-77: 318 (my
1908 and Tozzer 1907. translation).
14 A survey of Forstemann’s achievements 4 This theme has been explored in Villela
is in Thompson 1950: 29-30. n.d.
15 Codex Dresden 1880. 5 Morley 1915.
16 Chamay 1887; many of that book’s 6 Thompson 1963a: 5-6.
engravings were based on Charnay’s 7 Kidder 1950: 93-94. Brunhouse 1971 is
own photographs. a comprehensive biography of Morley.
17 Brunhouse 1973: 136-165. 8 Gordon 1896.
18 Rau 1979. 9 This famous story is well told in Brun¬
19 Thomas 1882. house 1971: 63-78.
20 For Maudslay’s life, see Tozzer 1931. 10 Thompson 1963a: 30.
21 Charnay 1887: 435^136. 11 Roys and Harrison 1949: 218.
22 Maudslay 1889-1902. 12 Morley 1920.
23 Goodman 1897. 13 Morley 1937-38.
24 Goodman 1905. 14 Thompson 1963b.
25 Thompson 1935. 15 Teeple 1925 is the first of these. Teeple’s
26 Clemens 1924, 1: 277. findings, which have never been ser¬
27 H. Hill 1978: 206. iously challenged, were summarized in
28 Brunhouse 1975: 5-28 has an outline of Teeple 1930.
Maler’s life. 16 Morley 1910.
29 These great publications began with 17 Thompson 1929.
Maler 1901 and continued to be issued 18 Thompson 1943b.
over the next ten years. 19 Thompson 1934, 1943a.
30 Pope 1975: 64. 20 Teeple 1930: 70-85.
31 For an appreciation of De Rosny, see 21 A biographical sketch of Whorf can be
Kelley 1962a: 7; see also de Rosny 1876, found in Carroll 1956: 1-33.
a pioneering work in Maya epigraphy. 22 Carroll 1956: 17.
32 For an obituary of Thomas, see Anony¬ 23 Morley 1946.
mous 1911. 24 Whorf 1933.
33 Thomas 1882. 25 Teeple 1930: 31.
34 Thomas 1893. 26 Houston 1989: 15.
35 Quoted in Brinton 1890: 234—235. 27 Long 1935.
36 Brinton 1886. 28 Whorf 1935.
37 Kelley 1976: 4. 29 Thompson 1950: 311-313.
38 Valentini 1880. 30 Thompson 1941.
39 Pio Perez 1898. 31 Thompson 1950; this went through two
40 Thompson 1950: 31. Short biographies subsequent editions, unchanged except
of Seler are to be found in Hopfner 1949 for the addition of new prefaces.
and Termer 1949. 32 The analysis of Chichen Itza dates was
41 Hopfner 1949: 63 (my translation). first presented in Thompson 1937.
42 Schellhas 1897. 33 Thompson 1944.
43 Kelley 1976: 4. 34 Thompson 1950: 295.
44 See Thomas 1892a, 1892b; Seler 1892, 35 A. Hill 1952.
1893. 36 Thompson 1953a.
45 Thomas 1903. 37 Morley 1940: 146-149.
46 Tozzer 1919: 445. 38 Beyer 1937.
39 Schellhas 1936: 133.
Chapter 5 (pp. 123-144) 40 Schellhas 1945.

1 For Eric Thompson’s life, see Ham¬

mond 1977; I. Graham 1976; and Willey
 NOTES 285

Chapter 6 (pp. 145-166) 27 Knorosov 1963.

28 Coe 1966: 166-169.
1 Knorosov 1952. 29 Demarest 1976.
2 This section is based on my interviews 30 Thompson 1950: figs. 16-19.
with Y.V. Knorosov.
3 Knorosov 1955.
Chapter 7 (pp. 167-192)
4 Thompson 1953b (in Spanish).
5 Ulving 1955. At that time, Ulving was 1 Personal information from Y.V. Knor-
head of the Chinese section of the osov. Proskouriakoff visited the USSR
University of Goteborg; he has Slavic in the early 1970s, and was warmly
languages in his academic degree, and received by Knorosov and his
reads Russian (letter to me of 22 August colleagues.
1991). 2 For details of Proskouriakoff’s life, I
6 Barthel 1958. have relied on Marcus 1988 and I.
7 In my “Introduction” to the Scheie and Graham 1990.
Miller 1986, this date is wrongly given as 3 Piedras Negras is not only in very
March 1956. dilapidated condition, it is threatened
8 Knorosov 1954. with flooding by a Mexican-Guatemalan
9 Coe and Coe 1957; Knorosov 1958a. dam project on the Usumacinta.
10 My account of David Kelley is based 4 Satterthwaite 1947.
upon many years’ acquaintance, and 5 I. Graham 1990: 2.
upon a taped interview of 12 December 6 Proskouriakoff 1946.
1989. 7 Proskouriakoff 1950.
11 Morris 1931. 8 Proskouriakoff 1960.
12 Knorosov 1958a. 9 Proskouriakoff 1961a.
13 Kelley 1962b. 10 This theme is further explored in Pro-
14 Knorosov’s investigations were entirely skouriakoff 1961b.
confined to the codices. 11 Proskouriakoff 1961a: 16.
15 Kelley 1976. 12 Bowditch 1901: 13.
16 Thompson 1962. 13 Kelley 1976: 214.
17 These are Aztec gods. 14 Spinden 1916.
18 Cottie Burland was then a clerk in the 15 Morley 1915: 36.
Ethnographic Department of the British 16 Thompson 1950: 64.
Museum and a prolific author of books 17 Personal information from Peter
on Mexican religion. A political radical Mathews.
and eccentric mystic, he was often the 18 Berlin 1959.
butt of Thompson’s humour. I had 19 Morley 1940: 148.
previously recounted to Eric my visit, in 20 Berlin 1958.
company with Burland, to the Abbey 21 Berlin 1963.
Art Center, a decommissioned church 22 Berlin 1969.
in the outskirts of London, where 23 Berlin 1977.
former nuns and priests worshiped 24 Proskouriakoff 1963, 1964.
amidst masks from New Guinea and 25 The sahalo’ob have been established by
other exotic places. recent research as subordinate war
19 This was probably in response to our leaders, perhaps governors of subsidi¬
1957 review of Knorosov’s Diego de ary cities or towns.
26 The genesis of this project is described
Landa.
20 Piedras Negras Stela 12 depicts a ruler in I. Graham 1975: 7, but this fails to
above a group of prisoners; the body of mention how the Guttman Foundation
each prisoner is marked with glyphs. got involved in the first place. The
21 Knorosov 1958b. ongoing series, Corpus of Maya Hierogly¬
22 Thompson 1958: 45. phic Inscriptions, continues to be pub¬
23 Thompson 1959. lished by the Peabody Museum in
24 Thompson 1962: 29. Cambridge.
25 Thompson 1971a: vi.
26 Thompson 1972a.
286 NOTES

Chapter 8 (pp. 193-217) ing has been questioned by some epigra-

phers, since the glyph combination
1 Griffin 1974: 9. which begins the ruler’s name may not
2 Ruz Lhuillier 1954, 1973. be a reduplicated ca sign.
3 I am grateful to Elaine Kaplan for 32 Thompson 1950: 161-162.
biographical data on Merle Greene 33 Scheie 1978 marks the first of the
Robertson. Notebook series. These are indispensable
4 Robertson 1974- for the student of Maya epigraphy.
5 This section on Floyd Lounsbury is 34 Morley 1940: 148.
based upon a taped interview of 3
December 1989.
Chapter 9 (pp. 218-230)
6 Published as Benson 1973.
7 Lounsbury 1973. 1 Thompson 1962: 14—18 presents his
8 In modern linguistic orthography, -u(a) views on ceramic texts.
is spelled -w(a), but here and elsewhere I 2 Coe and Diehl 1980.
have held to the traditional Yucatec 3 Meyer 1977.
orthography. 4 Coe 1973.
9 For Linda Scheie’s life history, I have 5 Tedlock 1985 is the most recent transla¬
drawn upon my taped interviews of 11 tion into English, and is both readable
and 28 November 1989. and authoritative.
10 This, as we shall see, was Pacal’s tomb. 6 Thompson 1970b.
11 This and subsequent information were 7 Taube 1989; this paper also provides
provided by Peter Mathews in tele¬ confirmation for my Pauahtun reading
phone interviews. of God N’s name.
12 See Berlin 1968. 8 Coe 1973.
13 Lounsbury letter of 12 February 1974 9 Justin Kerr describes his roll-out camera
addressed to the “Palencophiles.” in Coe 1978: 138-139.
14 On an eighth century ad stone panel 10 Coe 1978.
from the Palenque region, now in a 11 Coe 1982.
regional museum at Emiliano Zapata, 12 Hanson et al. n.d.
Tabasco, Chan-Bahlum’s name is 13 Coe 1976b.
clearly preceded with the phonetic com¬ 14 Subsequently published in von Win¬
plement ca (T25); this implies that his ning 1963: fig. 333.
name was Yucatec: Can-Balam. 15 Coe 1974.
15 Kelley 1976: 181. 16 The sample was processed by Teledyne
16 Lounsbury 1974. Isotopes, Inc., of New Jersey, a highly
17 Scheie and Freidel (1990: 223) state that regarded commercial laboratory.
Zac-Kuk actually did rule the city. 17 Thompson 1976.
18 Information on Ruz was gathered over a 18 Carlson 1990: 99.
period of years through conversations 19 Taube and Bade 1991.
with colleagues. 20 Some of this complex, supernatural
19 Ruz Lhuillier 1981. world is described in Hellmuth 1987,
20 Ruz Lhuillier 1973. which is largely based upon the icono¬
21 Ruz Lhuillier 1975, 1977a, 1977b. graphy of Classic Maya ceramics.
22 Scheie interview of 28 November 1989.
23 Taped interview of 5 December 1989.
Chapter 10 (pp. 231-258)
24 The continuing debate over the identifi¬
cation of these figures is examined in 1 Pope 1975: 68.
Scheie and Freidel 1990: 470-471. 2 My information about David Stuart is
25 Lounsbury 1976. based on a taped interview of 10
26 Lounsbury 1980. December 1989.
27 Scheie 1982. 3 Stuart and Stuart 1977.
28 Jones 1977. 4 D. Stuart 1979.
29 Scheie and Miller 1986: 112, 114. 5 Justeson and Campbell 1984.
30 Scheie and Freidel 1990: 492. 6 Campbell 1984: 11.
31 Trik (1963) and Jones (1988). This read¬ 7 This was done for proto-Cholan in
 NOTES 287

Kaufman and Norman 1984. plete list of Emblem Glyphs, see Math¬
8 Fox and Justeson 1984. ews 1985: 25—26.
9 Houston 1984. 43 D. Stuart 1985.
10 D. Stuart 1984. 44 Houston and Stuart n.d.
11 For an account of the cave and its 45 Webster 1989.
exploration, see G. Stuart 1981. 46 Fash 1991: 136-137
12 Andrea Stone, personal communi¬ 47 Fash 1991: 106-111.
cation. 48 Scheie 1985.
13 D. Stuart 1985a. 49 Furst 1968.
14 Thompson 1943a, 1944- 50 Vogt 1971: 33-34.
15 Scheie 1991: 71-72. 51 Houston and Stuart 1989.
16 D. Stuart 1987. 52 Houston and Stuart 1989: 13.
17 Seler 1902-23, 1: 377.
18 Lounsbury, taped interview of 3 Chapter 11 (pp. 259-274)
December 1989.
19 Pendergast 1979. 1 Pope 1975: 11.
20 Mathews 1979. 2 Stephens 1841 (2): 457.
21 Described in Houston and Taube 1987. 3 Pope 1975: 136-145.
22 Barbara MacLeod has taught Yucatec 4 Peter Mathews does this regularly in his
Maya, and done research on Yucatec annual hieroglyphic seminars.
and Cholan verb morphology. 5 Thompson 1972 is a good description of
23 Houston, Stuart, and Taube 1989. the structure of these almanacs and
24 MacLeod and Stross 1990. tables, but as usual Thompson is mis¬
leading on the nature of the script.
25 D. Stuart 1988.
26 The atole drink also appears on ceramics 6 Green 1981: 359.
as a glyph combination reading sac ha, 7 Blakeslee 1989.
“white water,” one of its modern names 8 Hopkins n.d.
in Yucatan. 9 Tedlock 1985.
10 Cecil Brown (1991) believes that the
27 MacLeod 1990.
Maya had a low rate of literacy. He bases
28 Alsop 1982.
this opinion on the fact that a single,
29 Alsop 1982: 181.
basic word for “write” is widely dif¬
30 Coe 1976b.
fused among the Mayan language
31 D. Stuart 1989: 156—157.
groups, but the many words for “read”
32 D. Stuart n.d.
33 The early epigraphic research of this are heterogeneous and probably post-
Conquest. I have reached a different
project is described in Houston n.d.
34 Fash 1991 is a popular but authoritative conclusion.
11 See the chapter entitled “The future of
account of the Copan project.
writing” in Gelb 1950: 236-247.
35 Scheie and Freidel 1990: 311.
12 Goody 1977: 82-83.
36 Fash 1991: 142.
37 Scheie and Freidel 1990: 317-319. 13 Scheie and Miller 1986.
38 Scheie and Stuart 1985. 14 Paz 1987.
15 Chase and Chase 1987; in the last few
39 D. Stuart 1986a.
years, Nikolai Grube has been epigra-
40 D. Stuart 1986b.
pher for the Caracol Project.
41 See Scheie 1991: 42, 56.
42 Scheie 1991: 50-53. For a fairly com¬ 16 Edmundson 1982: 41.
 Glossary

In compiling this list, I have benefited from and indicating the class of words of related
the glossaries included in DeFrancis 1989, meaning to which the referent word belongs,
Kelley 1976, and Pope 1975. e.g. in the Chinese script, all characters for
objects related to “wood” take the “wood”
affix In Maya writing, a smaller, usually determinative.
flattened sign attached to the main sign (q. v.). dialects Mutually intelligible varieties of
alphabet Defined narrowly, a more-or-less spoken language; contrasted with languages,
phonemic writing system in which some which are mutually unintelligible.
signs represent the consonants of a language, Distance Number A Long Count number
and others the vowels. More broadly giving the time interval between two dates on
defined, it would include consonantal alpha¬ a Maya monument.
bets like Arabic and Hebrew. Emblem Glyph In Maya inscriptions, a
Anterior Date Indicator (A.D.I.) A glyph compound glyph which indicates that a ruler
which indicates that a following date refers or other important personage is identified
to an earlier time, in the Maya Long Count with a particular city or polity,
calendar. epigraphy The study of ancient writing
baktun In the Maya Long Count, a period of systems and texts.
20 katuns or 144,000 days (3944 years), glottal stop In speech, a consonant produced
bilingual text A text written in two lan¬ by the closing and opening of the glottis or
guages and/or two different scripts with vocal folds.
identical or very similar content. glyph A contraction of hieroglyph. In Maya
Calendar Round A recurring Maya cycle epigraphy, it indicates a logogram, a phone¬
based on the permutation of the Almanac of tic sign, or a compound sign,
260 days and the “vague year” of 365 days. grammar The study of the structure of a
Its length was slightly less than 52 years, spoken language.
cartouche An oval line, sometimes in the head variant A Maya glyph substituting for
form of a rope, surrounding royal names in a bar-and-dot coefficient in Initial Series
Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, (q.v.) texts; it takes the form of the head of
character A term used by Sinologists to the god presiding over that number,
describe a single logogram or a compound hieratic An adaptation of the Egyptian
sign in Chinese writing. Roughly equivalent hieroglyphic script, principally used for
to the term glyph in Maya epigraphy, writing on papyrus scrolls. It is not as cursive
cuneiform The “nail-shaped” script of the as demotic (q.v.).
ancient Near East, usually written on damp hieroglyphic Originally meaning “holy carv¬
clay tablets with a stylus. Most cuneiform ing, it is now generally synonymous with
scripts were logographic (q.v.) and were used logographic (q.v.).
to record Sumerian, Akkadian, and other homonym A word with the same pronunci¬
languages.
ation as another but with different meaning,
decipherment The process by which signs ideogram, ideograph An outmoded term
and texts in a previously unknown script are once applied to a sign supposedly conveying
read and translated.
meaning only; it was loosely used for logo-
demotic A late, calligraphic variety of Egyp¬ gram (q.v.) and semasiogram (q.v.).
tian hieroglyphic script, employed for every¬ infix In Maya script, an affix-like sign that can
day use, and generally written on papyrus appear within a main sign.
scrolls.
Initial Series The first Long Count date
determinative In logographic writing, an which appears on a Maya monument; it is
unpronounced sign conveying meaning only always preceded by an Introductory Glyph.

288
 GLOSSARY 289

katun In the Maya Long Count (q.v.), a just below the rim of painted and carved
period of 20 tuns or 7,200 days (slightly less Maya ceramics; it includes the name-tags
than 20 years). for classes of vessels, and labels their
kin In the Maya Long Count, a period of one contents.
day. quipu A group of connected, knotted cords
lintel A flat stone or piece of wood that spans of different colors, used for record-keeping
a doorway. by Inca bureaucrats.
logogram, logograph A written sign which reading In epigraphy, restricted to determin¬
represents a morpheme or, rarely, a whole ing the spoken equivalent of a sign or text
word. written in a hitherto unknown script,
logographic script A mixed writing system rebus The principle of “puzzle-writing,” in
consisting of logograms and phonetic signs, which a morpheme or word difficult to
or semantic signs compounded with phone¬ express by means of a picture is given by a
tic signs. Some logographic scripts incorpor¬ pictograph of a homonym (q.v.).
ate determinatives (q.v.) as semantic signs. semantic sign In scripts, signs that pertain to
Synonymous with hieroglyphic. meaning.
main sign In Maya writing, the larger sign to semasiography, semasiographic Visual
which affixes are attached; main signs may communication which indicates ideas dir¬
also stand by themselves. There is no necess¬ ectly, without being linked to a specific
ary functional difference between affixes and language. Formerly called ideographic (q.v.).
main signs. Example: the “Arabic ” numeration of the
morpheme The smallest meaningful unit of modern world.
speech. For instance, the English word cheer¬ sign In the study of writing systems, a unit of
ful consists of the morphemes cheer and ful. visual communication. For Mayanists, it is
morphology The study of how morphemes synonymous with glyph.
are formed into words in speech, signary The total number of signs in a
name-tags Maya glyphs used to label writing system.
objects; these objects may be as diverse as stela A carved, freestanding stone monu¬
ceramic vessels, items of personal wear, ment, usually slab-shaped.
monuments, or buildings, Supplementary Series In Maya writing, this
phonetic signs In scripts, signs that indicate was a series of glyphs following an Initial
speech sounds, as opposed to semantic signs Series (q.v.), and bracketed by a Calendar
that convey meaning only, Round date. It includes the glyph for the
phonetic complement Also called phonetic current Lord of the Night, and for lunar
indicator. In a logographic script, a phonetic calculations.
sign which signals the initial or final sound of syllabic script A writing system in which the
the morpheme or word represented by a signs stand for entire syllables. In most
logogram; when a given logogram is poly¬ syllabic scripts, the signs stand for CV
phonic (q.v.), it acts to reduce ambiguity, syllables, plus the vowels. Can be part of a
pictogram, pictograph A sign which logographic script, as in Maya and Hierogly-
pictures an object or thing in the real world, phic Hittite. The total list of syllabic signs
polyphony, polyphonic A form of polyva¬ comprises a syllabary.
lence (q.v.) in which more than one sound syllable A vocal sound or set of sounds
value is assigned to a given sign, e.g. in uttered with a single effort of articulation and
written English, the letter combination gh is forming a word or element of a word. It
highly polyphonic. consists of a vowel (V) alone, or a vowel and
polysemy A form of polyvalence in which one or more consonants (C).
more than one meaning is assigned to a given synharmony A principle in syllabic writing
among the Maya in which the last vowel in a
sign.
polyvalence The assignment to a written pair of CV phonetic signs will echo the first,
sign of more than one value. even though it is unpronounced,
Posterior Date Indicator (P.D.I.) A Maya syntax In speech, the way words are formed
glyph which indicates that a following date into sentences.
toponym A Maya glyph which indicates the
refers to a later time.
Primary Standard Sequence (PSS) A for¬ name of a place, a geographic feature, or an
mulaic Maya text which usually appears important location within a city.
290 SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS

translation In epigraphy, a reading (q.v.) phers to refer to the Almanac of 260 days,
which has been put into the words of another uinal In the Maya Long Count, a period of 20
language, such as English. days.
tun In the Maya Long Count, a period of 360 water group In Maya writing, affixes accom¬
days. panying the Emblem Glyph main sign and
tzolkin A modern term made up from believed by J.E.S. Thompson to refer to
Yucatec Maya, and used by some epigra- water, but now known to mean “holy.”

Sources of Illustrations

Text illustrations British Museum Publications), p. 38; by

permission. 54 M.D. Coe. 55 From D. Stuart
I Jean Blackburn. 2 From F. Guaman Poma 1987 (Washington: Center for Maya
de Ayala, Nueva Coronica y Buen Qobierno Research), fig. 39a; by permission. 56 M.D.
(Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1936), p. 360. 3 Coe. 57 Top, from Thompson 1971a (Nor¬
M.D. Coe. 4 From H.A. Gleason, Jr., An man, University of Oklahoma Press),
Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, (New figs. 30, 42, 45, 37; by permission. Middle,
York: Henry Holt, 1955), p. 307; by per¬ lower left, D. Stuart 1987, figs. 28, 34a; by
mission. 5 Vivian Wu. 6 From S. Elisseef, permission. Lower right, M.D. Coe. 58 Top,
E.O. Reischauer, and T. Yoshihashi, Elemen¬ from Mathews 1979 (Toronto: Royal
tary Japanese for College Students, Pt. I (Cam¬ Ontario Museum), p. 79; by permission.
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), Bottom, from L. Satterthwaite, “Note on
p. 149; by permission. 7-10 Jean Blackburn. Hieroglyphs on Bone from the Tomb below
II From J. Chadwick, Linear B and Related Temple I, Tikal”, Expedition 6.1:18—19; by
Scripts (Berkeley: University of California permission. 59 From Houston, Stuart, and
Press/British Museum Publications, 1987), Taube 1989, fig. 2 (with modifications); by
fig. 23; by permission. 12 Jean Blackburn. 13 permission. 60 Left, from D. Stuart 1988,
Anita Holland-Moritz. 14 Jean Blackburn fig. 2; by permission. Right, M.D. Coe. 61
and Annick Petersen. 15 Jean Zallinger. 16 M.D. Coe. 62 From D. Stuart n.d., fig. 18c;
From A. del Rio 1822. 17 M.D. Coe. 18 by permission. 63 Left, from Scheie and
From J.L. Stephens 1841, 2: 454. 19, 20 John Stuart 1985:7; by permission. Right, M.D.
Montgomery. 21 From Tozzer 1941 (Cam¬ Coe. 64 John Montgomery. 65 From Hous¬
bridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard Univer¬ ton and Stuart 1989 (Washington: Center
sity), p. 170; by permission. 22 John Mont¬ for Maya Research), fig. 3; by permission.
gomery. 23 From D. Charnay, Les anciens 66—7 M.D. Coe. 68 John Montgomery.
villes du Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1885),
p. 427. 24 John Montgomery. 25 Anita
Holland-Moritz. 26 After Brinton 1886: 9. Plates
27-9 John Montgomery. 30 From Carroll
1956 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of 1 From Godwin 1979 (London: Thames and
Technology), fig. 6; by permission. 31-2 Hudson), p. 4. 2 From Pope 1975 (London:
M.D. Coe. 33 From Beyer 1937 (Wash¬ Thames and Hudson), ill. 33. Painting by
ington: Carnegie Institute of Washington), Leon Cogniet. Archives Photographiques,
p. 38; by permission. 34 M.D. Coe. 35-7 Paris. 3 From Pope 1975 (London: Thames
John Montgomery. 38 M.D. Coe. 39-41 and Hudson), ill. 109. Courtesy of Mrs L.
John Montgomery. 42 From Proskouriakoff Ventris. 4 Trustees of the British Museum. 5
1963, fig. 1. 43 M.D. Coe. 44—8 John Mont¬ Courtesy Peabody Museum, Harvard
gomery. 49-51 Diana Griffiths Peck. 52 University. 6, 7 Nicholas Hellmuth; by
M.D. Coe. 53 From Houston 1989 (London: permission. 8 From J. Winsor, Aboriginal
 SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS 291

America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), permission. 24 Courtesy Y.V. Knorosov. 25

p. 186. 9 From W.J. Youmans, Pioneers of Courtesy George Stuart and the National
Science in America (New York: D. Appleton, Geographic Society; photograph by Otis
1896), p. 183 (engraving from Analyse de la Imboden. 26 Courtesy D.H. Kelley. 27 From
Nature, 1815). 10 Anonymous portrait, T. Proskouriakoff, An Album of Maya Archi¬
courtesy Department of Library Services, tecture (reprinted Norman: University of
American Museum of Natural History. 11, Oklahoma Press, 1963); by permission. 28
12 From Stephens 1841, 2: facing p. 158. 13 Courtesy University Museum, Philadelphia.
From J. Winsor, Aboriginal America (Bos- 29 Courtesy Peabody Museum, Harvard
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 170. 14 University. Photograph by Carnegie Institu¬
From Qlobus 90:341. 15 From Forstemann tion of Washington. By permission. 30
1880, pi. 49. 16 From A.P. Maudslay and Courtesy Peabody Museum, Harvard
A.C. Maudslay, A Qlimpse at Quatemala University. Photograph by Carnegie Institu¬
(London, 1899). Photograph by H.N. Sweet, tion of Washington. By permission. 31 From
1889. 17 From Atlantis 22:365 (Freiburg, T. Proskouriakoff, An Album of Maya Archi¬
Germany). 18 From J. Winsor, Aboriginal tecture (reprinted Norman: University of
America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), Oklahoma Press, 1963); by permission. 32
p. 202. 19 From W. Lehmann (ed.), Festsch¬ Photograph by A. Ruz L. 33 Courtesy M.G.
rift Eduard Seler (Stuttgart: Verlag von Robertson. 34 Courtesy George Stuart and
Strecker und Schroder, 1922), frontispiece the National Geographic Society. 35 Photo¬
drawing by Erich Heerman. 20 Courtesy graph by M.D. Coe. 36, 37 Courtesy Justin
Smithsonian Institution, National Anthro- Kerr. 38 Courtesy George Stuart and the
pological Archives, Bureau of American National Geographic Society. 39 Courtesy
Ethnology Collection. 21 From Brunhouse George Stuart and the National Geographic
1971 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Society. Photograph by Ann Hawthorne. 40
Press), after p. 214; by permission. 22 Courtesy George Stuart and the National
Courtesy Peabody Museum., Harvard Geographic Society. 41 Photograph by M.D.
University. Photograph by Carnegie Institu¬ Coe. 42 From Forstemann 1880, pi. 74. 43
tion of Washington. By permission. 23 From Courtesy W.L. Fash, from Fash, Scribes,
Carroll 1956 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Warriors and Kings (London and New York,
Institute of Technology), frontispiece; by Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 121.
 Further Reading and Bibliography

For those wishing to delve deeper into the symbols of Silas John. Science 180:
subject of writing systems in general, I highly 1013-1022.
recommend Sampson 1985 and DeFrancis Benson, Elizabeth P. (ed.) 1973 Mesoameri-
1989. Pope 1975 is the most complete and can Writing Systems. Washington: Dum¬
readable book on the decipherment of Old barton Oaks Research Library and
World scripts; the interested reader should Collections.
also consult the British Museum series, Berlin, Heinrich 1958 El glifo “emblema”
Reading the Past. For a general introduction en las inscripciones mayas. Journal de la
to Maya civilization, see Michael D. Coe, Societe des Americanistes n.s. 47: 111-119.
The Maya (4th edition), London and New -1959 Glifos nominales en el sarcofago
York 1987; and Morley, Brainerd, and de Palenque. Humanidades 2 (10): 1—8.
Sharer 1983. The history of Maya discovery -1963 The Palenque Triad. Journal de la
is well presented in Brunhouse 1971, 1973, Societe des Americanistes n.s. 52: 91—99.
and 1975. Scheie and Miller 1986 and Scheie -1968 The Tablet of the 96 Glyphs at
and Freidel 1990 present comprehensive Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Middle Amer¬
treatments of elite Maya culture based on art ican Research Institute, Tulane University,
and inscriptions. Those wishing to further Publ. 26: 134-149.
their knowledge of Maya writing should -1969 Review of The Maya by Michael
consult Kelley 1976 (now a bit out of date), D. Coe. American Antiquity 34 (2): 194.
Houston 1989, and especially Scheie 1991. -1977 Signos y significados en las inscrip¬
Although seriously flawed, Thompson ciones mayas. Guatemala City: Instituto de
1971a is still important; and anyone working Antropologia e Historia.
with the Maya script must have Thompson Beyer, Hermann 1937 Studies on the
1962, the basic catalog of the glyphs. The inscriptions of Chichen Itza. Carnegie
most important series dealing with the script Institution of Washington, Publ. 483, Con-
is Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing trib. 21.
(Center for Maya Research, Washington, Blakeslee, Sandra 1989 Linguists solve rid¬
D.C.). Maya pictorial ceramics and their dle of ancient Mayan language. The New
texts are presented in Coe 1973, 1978, and York Times, 4 April 1989, Sect. C: 1,
1982; and in Justin Kerr (ed.), The Maya Vase 14-15.
Book, 1 and 2 (New York 1989, 1990). Bowditch, Charles P. 1901 Notes on the
report of Teobert Maler (in Maler 1901).
Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles Etienne
Alsop, Joseph 1982 The Rare Art Traditions. 1864 Relation des choses de Yucatan de
New York: Harper and Row. Diego de Landa. Paris.
Anonymous 1911 Cyrus Thomas. Ameri¬ ——-1869-70 Manuscrit Troano. Etudes sur le
can Anthropologist n.s. 12: 337-393. systeme graphique et la langue des Mayas. 2
Ascher, Marcia, and Robert Ascher vols. Paris.
1981 Code of the Quipu. Ann Arbor: Bricker, Victoria 1986 A Qrammar of
University of Michigan Press. Mayan Hieroglyphs. New Orleans: Middle
Barthel, Thomas 1958 Die gegenwartige Sit¬ American Research Institute.
uation in der Erforschung der Mayasch- Brinton, Daniel G. 1886 On the lkonomatic
rift. Proceedings of the 32nd International Method of Phonetic Writing with Special
Congress of Americanists, 1956: 476-484- Reference to American Archaeology.
Copenhagen. Philadephia.
Basso, Keith, and Ned Anderson 1973 A -1890 Essays of an Americanist. Philadel¬
Western Apache writing system: the phia: David McKay.

292
 FURTHER READING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 293

Brown, Cecil H. 1991 Hieroglyphic literacy mary by F. Anders. Graz: Akademische

in ancient Mayaland: inferences from Druk- u. Verlagsanstalt.
linguistic data. Current Anthropology 32 (4): Coe, Michael D. 1963 Una referenda anti-
489-496. gua al codice de Dresden. Estudios de
Brunhouse, Robert L. 1971 Sylvanus Q. Cultura Maya 3: 37-40.
Morley and the World of the Ancient Maya. -1966 The Maya. London: Thames and
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Hudson (4th edition 1987. London &.
-1973 In Search of the Maya. The First New York: Thames and Hudson).
Archaeologists. Albuquerque: University -1968 America’s First Civilization. New
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-1943a Maya epigraphy: directional Tozzer, Alfred M. 1907 Ernst Forstemann.
glyphs in counting. Carnegie Institution of American Anthropologist n.s., 9: 153-159.
Washington, Notes on Middle American -1919 Joseph Thompson Goodman.
Archaeology and Ethnology 20. Cambridge. American Anthropologist n.s., 21: 441—445.
-1943b Maya epigraphy: a cycle of 819 -1931 Alfred Percival Maudslay. Ameri¬
days. Carnegie Institution of Washington, can Anthropologist n.s., 33: 403-413.
Notes on Middle American Archaeology and ——1941 Landa’s Relacion de las Cosas de
Ethnology 22. Cambridge. Yucatan. Papers of the Peabody Museum of
-1944 The fish as a symbol for counting Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
and further discussion of directional University, 18. Cambridge.
glyphs. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Trager, George L. 1974 Writing and writing
Theoretical Approaches to Problems 2. systems. Current Trends in Linguistics 12:
Cambridge. 373—496. The Hague.
-1950 Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Trik, Aubrey S. 1963 The splendid tomb of
Introduction. Washington: Carnegie Insti¬ Temple I, Tikal, Guatemala. Expedition 6
tution of Washington. (1): 2-18.
300 FURTHER READING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner, B.L. 1978 Ancient agricultural land Waldeck, Jean Frederic 1838 Voyage pittor-
use in the Maya lowlands. In Pre-Hispanic esque et archeologique dans de Province
Maya Agriculture, 163-183. Austin: d’Yucatan pendant les annees 1834 et 1836.
University of Texas Press. Paris.
Tylor, Edward B. 1881 Anthropology. New Wang, William S.-Y. 1981 Language struc¬
York: D. Appleton &. Co. ture and optimal orthography. In Percep¬
Ulving, Tor 1955 A new decipherment of tion of Print, ed. O.J.L. Tzeng and H.
the Maya glyphs. Ethnos 20: 152-158. Singer, 223-236. Hillside, N.J.: Lawrence
Valentini, Philipp J.J. 1880 “The Landa Erlbaum Associates.
alphabet,” a Spanish fabrication. Proceed- Webster, David (ed.) 1989 House of the
ings of the American Antiquarian Society 75: Bacabs, Copan, Honduras. Washington:
59—91. Worcester. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Villela, Khristaan n.d. J. Eric S. Thomp¬ Collections.
son’s first 25 years: Argentine politics and White, Christine D., and Henry P. Schwarcz
the Maya collapse. Class paper for Topics 1989 Ancient Maya diet: as inferred from
in Pre-Columbian Art (Prof. Mary Miller), isotopic elemental analysis of human
Yale University, 1989. bone. Journal of Archaeological Science 16:
Vogt, Evon Z. 1971 The genetic model and 457-474.
Maya cultural development. In Desarollo Whorf, Benjamin L. 1933 The phonetic
cultural de los may a, ed. E.Z. Vogt and A. value of certain characters in Maya writ¬
Ruz L., 9-48. Mexico City: Universidad ing. Papers of the Peabody Museum of
Nacional Autonoma, Centro de Estudios Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
Mayas. University, 13 (2).
von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang 1947 Maya -1935 Maya writing and its decipher¬
Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost ment. Maya Research 2 (4): 367-382. New
Cities of Central America and Yucatan. Orleans.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Willey, Gordon R. 1979 John Eric Sydney
von Winning, Hasso 1963 Pre-Columbian Thompson, 1898-1975. Proceedings of the
Art of Mexico and Central America. New British Academy 65: 783—798.
York: Harry N. Abrams Inc.
 Index

Numerals in italics refer to text illustration numbers;

numerals in bold refer to plate numbers

Aglio, Agostino 80 Buren, Martin van 93 Chinese languages 21, 24, 30-1;
Aguilar, Geronimo de 79 Bush, Alfred 218 writing 17-18, 21, 25, 26, 27,
Ah Cacau (“He of the Choco- Bushnell, Geoffrey 123 29-33, 39, 43, 147, 148, 156,
late”) 216 158, 274; 5
Ah. Kin (“He of the Sun”) 72, Cabrera, Dr. Paul Felix 74 chocolate 216, 247-8; 60
o 118 Cakchiquel Maya 72, 200 Chol/Cholan Maya 48, 49-50,
Akerblad, Johan 38, 115 Calakmul 64 196, 199, 205, 214, 234, 235,
Almendariz, Ricardo 74, 90, 93, Calderon de la Barca, Mme. 240, 243, 266, 268
96, 111, 193; 16 Fanny 76 Chord Maya 75, 199
Alsop, Joseph 249 calendar 7, 59, 60, 61-2, 63, 95, chronological periods 59-60
Altun Ha 57, 244; 58 130-5; 15 clauses 143—4; 33
Alvarado, Pedro de 72, 73 Calendar Round 61-2, 63, 101, Cleopatra 38, 39; 9
Anghiera, Peter Martyr d’ 78, 79 108, 134, 135, 180 Cline, Howard 76
Anglo-Saxon 24, 43 Campbell, Lyle 233 Coba 65, 231-2; 38
Apache language 20 Caracol 65, 68, 273 Cocom, Juan Nachi 71, 119
Arabic language/script 29, 35, Carlson, John 229 codex-style vases 225-6; 65
37 Carroll, John 136, 158-9 Coe, Michael: and H. Berlin
Aztec empire 59, 60, 70, 71, 208 Caso, Alfonso 208 178-9; and Thompson 123,
Aztec language see Nahuatl Catherwood, Frederick 45, 92- 155-6, 160-2
Aztec rebus writing 138; 26 8, 109, 110, 115, 193, 253; 11, Coe, Sophie 154, 155, 162
12 color-directions 121, 133; 25
balam ahau 256 Catlin, Stanton 182 conflation of signs 66
balche 247 Cauac Monster 242 Cook de Leonard, Carmen 152
bar-and-dot numeration 91, Cempoallan 78 Copan 49, 58, 64, 65, 74-6, 93,
101, 112; 17, 24, 9 cenotes (sinkholes) 54, 70, 126 94, 95,96, 110, 114, 126, 127,
Bardawil, Larry 197 Chac (Rain God) 57, 58, 232 128, 132, 169-70, 174, 178,
Barthel, Thomas 153, 154 chacmool 70—1, 152 222,250, 252-6,263, 273; 39,
Barthelemy, Abbe J.J. 36, 38 Chama area, vase from 36 63, 64, 11, 12. 35, 43; Altar Q
batabo’ob (nobles) 72 Champollion, Jean Francois 11, 75-6, 95, 253,254; 18; Sepul¬
Baudez, Claude 77 15, 17, 34, 37, 39—41, 54, 90, tures 255; Stela F 94
Beltran, Father Pedro 96 91, 96, 231, 261; 2 Coptic 17,35,37,40, 49,54,91,
Ben-Ich Katun 178, 180, 199- Chan-Bahlum (Snake-Jaguar) 96
200, 254; 41, 43 205, 207, 212, 213, 215, 233; Cortes, Hernan 77, 79, 226
Benson, Betty 199, 210—12 31 count-of-captives glyph 238; 56
Berlin, Heinrich 176-8, 201, Chan Muan 5 Covarrubias, Miguel 60
204, 210, 212, 254,272; 39,30 Charles III, king ofSpain73, 215 Creator Goddess 226; 42
Bernal, Ignacio 208 Charnay, Desire 109, 110-11; 23 cuneiform script 41, 43, 10 see
beverage, glyphs for 60 Chase, Diane and Arlen 273 also Sumerian
Beyer, Hermann 143—4, 159, Cherokee syllabary 28, 43; 4 Cunil, Jacinto 130, 140, 176
178; 33 Chi, Gaspar Antonio 119 Cypriote syllabary 42, 43
Bird-Jaguar 179, 180, 214, 238, chi'chaan 257
240; 40, 42 Chichen Itza 64, 69, 70-1, 72, Darwin, Charles 25, 89
Blakeslee, Sandra 268-9 93, 95, 96, 110, 125-6, 127, day signs 116, 131, 199, 200; 19
Bonampak murals 65-6, 68, 128, 130, 140, 143, 159, 169, Decree of Canopus 40
194, 270; 5 170, 269, 274; 33, 35, 16; Deer-Monkey 257
Bowditch, Charles Pickering Castillo 128; Temple of the DeFrancis, John 22, 31, 32
115, 131, 174 Thousand Columns 157; Del Rio, Antonio 74, 75, 76-7,
Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles Temple of the Warriors 128; 90, 92, 93, 193, 215; 16
Etienne 91, 99-101, 106, 107, Well of Sacrifice 70, 126 Demarest, Arthur 164, 252, 273
110, 115, 116, 120, 137, 220, chicleros 114-15, 127 Determinant Theory 134-5,176
229, 260; 13 chikin, glyph for “west” 32 Diehl, Richard 219
Brinton, Daniel Garrison 118 Chilam Balam Qaguar Prophet), Diodorus Siculus 15-16, 141
Brunhouse, Robert 106 Books of 71, 268, 275—6 Direction-count glyphs 134,

301
302 INDEX

212, 239—40, 269; 29, 57 Gomara, Francisco Lopez de 78 Shield-Jaguar; Waterlily

Dobzhansky, Theodosius 154 Goodman, Joseph T. 111-14, Jaguar
Dog God 151 122, 130, 131, 132, 240 Jaguar-Dog 257
Dos Pilas 65, 273 Goody, Jack 269 Japanese script/language 22, 28,
Dresden Codex 79, 80, 90, 91, Graham, Ian 170, 183 29, 30, 32-3, 148, 156, 264; 6
95, 101, 107, 108, 112, 116, Greek script 25, 26, 28, 29, 35 John, Silas 20
132, 140, 146, 148, 149, 151, Griffin, Gillett 193, 196, 203, Jones, Christopher 214
152, 157, 193, 198, 226, 227- 225, 270 Jones, Tom 141
8, 242, 265; 18, 20, 14,15, 42 Grolier Codex 139, 227-8, 229; Joralemon, David 184, 195, 196,
Dupaix, Guillermo 92 37 197, 201, 236
dynastic event glyphs 172, 173, Grube, Nikolai 243, 244, 246, Josserand, Kathryn 240, 268-9
180, 205, 206-7, 213; 37 252, 256, 257 Justeson, John 234, 236, 240,
242; 54
Echeverria Alvarez, Luis 208 Haddon, A.C. 125
Egyptian royal cartouches 36, Hagen, Victor von 94 Kabah 69, 93, 127
37, 38-9, 40; 9, 10 Haggard, H. Rider 98 Kakupacal (Fiery Shield) 33, 35
Egyptian script 25, 27, 30, 31, halach uinic (true man) 72 Kan-Toc 180
34, 43, 53, 147, 263, 264; head variants 112; 24 Kan-Xul 215
decipherment of 11, 15, 34— Healey, Giles 194 katun glyphs 178, 180
40, 54, 105, 164, 259, 260, Hebrew language/script 29, 35, katun prophecy 275-6
261-2, 263, 274; 7, 8, 1, 2 43 Kauil (God K or Bolon Dzacab)
8 Ahau see Pacal hel (change of office) glyph 216; 133, 242-3, 258
18 Rabbit 253, 255 48 Kekchi Maya 130
Ekholm, Gordon 182 Hero Twins 220, 222, 224—5, Kelley, David 118, 119, 156-61,
El Mirador 63 226, 238, 242 164- 5, 174, 203, 204, 206,
El Peru, Stela 31: 62 Herodotus 15, 16, 36 208,213,214,233, 234; 35,26
Emblem Glyphs 177-8, 180, Hill, Archibald 19, 141-2, 165, Kerr, Justin 223, 225, 246
205, 224, 227, 238, 244, 245, 181, 199, 268 Kidder, A.V. 98, 126, 129, 169,
248, 254, 256, 263; 39, 64, 30 Hittite (Anatolian) Hierogly¬ 170
enemas 229 phic 26, 34, 41-2, 43, 164, Kin Chaac 251
English: spoken 22, 23—4, 51, 234, 261-2, 264 Kingsborough, Edward King,
53; written 18, 30, 43 Hofer, Philip 79 Viscount 77, 80, 90, 94, 101,
Estacheria, Josef 74 holcano’ob 72 106
Etruscan 29, 43, 44 Holmul 98 Kircher, Athanasius 16-18, 30,
event glyphs see dynastic event Hopfner, Lotte 121 34, 35, 38, 39, 90, 96, 106,
glyphs Hopi language 21, 136 115, 122, 124, 141, 156, 160,
Ewing, Douglas 218, 228 Hopkins, Nicholas 240, 268 163, 164, 165, 260, 261; 1
Horapollon 16, 17, 141 Knorosov, Yuri Valentinovich
Fash, William 252, 253, 255, Houston, Steve 137,235, 243—4, 10-12, 119, 139, 145-66, 176,
273 246, 247, 252, 255, 256, 257,
Feathered Serpent (Kukulcan 178, 182, 184, 198, 200, 206,
258 208, 212, 229, 233, 234, 236,
and Quetzalcoatl) 71 Humboldt, Alexander von 73,
Forstemann, Ernst 107, 112, 238, 242, 261, 275; 34,24,25,
80, 90, 91, 92, 95 26, 41
116,121,130,153,259-60; 14 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 40 Kubler, George 199, 210
Fox, James 234, 236, 242; 54 Hunter, Annie 111, 129
Friedman, Col. William 34 Kukulcan (Feathered Serpent)
Furst, Peter 256—7 Incas 19, 21; 2 71
Indo-European languages 22,
Galindo, Juan 75-6, 92 23,41,53 La Venta 61
Gardiner, Sir Alan 17 Indus script 44 Labna 127
Gelb, Ignace 25-6, 29-30, 36, Initial Series 131-2, 134, 141, Lady Ahpo-Hel 215
41, 138, 269 172, 173; 22 Lady Beastie 213
God D see Itzamna Inuit (Eskimo) language 28 Lady Xoc 4
God K see Kauil Itza Maya 70, 71, 130 Lady Zac-Kuk (White Quetzal)
God L (war god) 203, 222, 248; Itzamna (Creator divinity, first 207, 215
42 priest, God D) 12, 100, 137; lakin, glyph for “east” 159; 36
God N see Pauahtun 42 Landa, Fray Diego de 30, 72, 80,
gods 13, 57, 58, 63, 121, 130, Izamal 100 95, 100-1,107, 112, 115, 116,
133, 149, 151, 178, 203, 222, Izapan (narrative art style) 61 119-20,122,126,136-7,140-
226, 232, 237, 242-3, 255, 1, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151,
258; 28, 51, 36, 42 see also jaguar (balam) 58, 71, 152, 256— 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 163,
Xibalba 7, 264: 67; see also Bird-Jaguar; 165- 6, 200, 204, 222, 235,
Goetze, Johann Christian 79, Chan-Bahlum; Chilam Ba- 237, 240, 242, 244, 247, 260,
107 lam; Hero Twins; Jaguar-Dog; 269; 19, 20, 21, 13
 INDEX 303

Latin 17, 22, 23, 42, 51 147, 169, 174, 175, 177, 182, Plongeon, Augustus Le 109
Leyden Plate 63 183-4, 217, 240, 270; 21, 22 Plotinus 16, 17
Linear B 14, 28, 42-4, 234; 11,3 Motecuhzoma the Younger 78 Poe, Edgar Allan 34, 92
Long Count system 60, 62, 70, Muan Bird 149 Pokomam 72
108, 112, 113; 22 Munoz, Juan Bautista 74 Pollock, Harry 201
Long, Richard C.E. 137-9, 144, polyvalence 234—5, 246, 262; 52,
154 nagual 256-7 53
Longyear, John 170 Nahuatl (Aztec) 18, 21, 22, 23, Porno de Ayala, Guaman 2
Lounsbury, Floyd 165, 166, 59, 118, 119, 135, 255, 257 Ponce, Fray Alonso 117-18
178, 182, 197-201, 204-5, Naj Tunich cave 237-8; 55, 40 Pope, Maurice 33, 259
209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 223, Nakbe 226 Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) 72,
227, 228, 233, 241, 242, 243, Nakum 98 99-100, 200, 220,221-2, 226,
268; 43, 35 name and title glyphs 173—4, 249, 268
Lunar or Supplementary Series 175, 177; 38 pottery 218-26, 228-9, 230,
130-1, 132; 26, 27 name-tagging 244-5, 246-7, 248, 245-50, 258, 265; 59, 64, 36
253; 58 Powell, John Wesley 22
Machaquila 39 Naranjo 65, 68, 98, 115, 178, Prescott, William H. 76
MacLeod, Barbara 243, 244, 249; 39, 61 Primary Standard Sequence
246, 247, 248, 249 New Empire 71, 127 223, 224, 225, 229, 230, 236,
Madrid Codex 105-6, 116-17, Nine Lords of the Night 132; 28 245, 247, 248, 249-50, 265;
146, 149, 226; 19, 30 Norman, B.H. 80, 96 49, 50, 59, 60
Maize God (1 Hunahpu) 58, Norman, Will 240 Proskouriakoff, Tatiana 11, 128,
222; 36 numerical classifier 140; 31 154-5, 158, 159, 164, 167-84,
Makina title 204, 212; 44 210-11, 212, 250, 261, 272;
Maler, Teobert 114, 115, 168, Old Empire 71, 127, 139 37, 27, 28, 29, 31
174, 179, 182; 17, 22 Olmec 60, 61, 62, 139, 156, 184, Proto-Cholan 48, 50, 240, 247,
Mam 72 219, 257-8 248
Mani 95, 101 Otulum see Palenque Proto-Mayan 48, 49
Mapachtepec 26 Psammetichus, pharaoh 15, 17
Martinez Hernandez, Juan 114, Pacal (“Shield”) 64, 195, 205, Ptolemy V 38; 9
132, 155 206-7,209-10,212,213,215, Putnam, F.W. 126
Mathews, Peter 176,197, 203—4, 263, 273; 45, 31, 32 Putun Maya 69, 71, 72; 7
214, 236, 243, 244 Paine, Albert Bigelow 114 Puuc 69, 93, 170
Maudslay, Alfred Percival 96, Palenque 49, 50, 64, 65, 68, 73-
110-12, 114, 115, 125, 129, 4, 75, 76, 77, 93, 95, 96, 110, Quetzalcoatl (Feathered
165, 177, 179, 182, 183, 193, 177, 178, 183, 184, 193-217, Serpent) 71
204, 211, 223; 16, 22 254, 262, 263, 269; 39, 44; 96 Quiche Maya 55, 63, 72, 99-
Maya area 54—6; 14 Hieroglyphs tablet 262, 264; 100, 200, 220
Mayan language groups 47-54; Palace 194, 215; Tablet of the quipu recording system 19; 2
12, 13 Temple of the Cross 90, 93, Quirigua 65, 68, 93, 95, 110,
Mayapan 71, 72, 95 110, 194, 201, 204, 207, 212, 178, 253; 22
Merida 50, 56, 154 213, 222, 255; 16, 31; Temple
Mesa Redonda de Palenque of the Foliated Cross 197; Rabbit God 51
196-7,201,203,204-11,213; Temple of the Inscriptions Rabinal Achi 99
33 177, 194, 195, 203, 206, 209, Racknitz, Joseph Friedrich, Bar¬
Mesoamerica, definition of 264; 32; Temple of the Sun on von 79
58-72 233 Rada y Delgado, Juan 116
Miller, Jeff 196-7 Paris Codex 101,116, 146, 226 Rafinesque-Smaltz, Constan¬
Miller, Mary 244, 253, 270,271, Pauahtun (God N) 222, 237 tine Samuel 89-91, 94, 101,
272 Peck, Diane 221, 223 193, 259; 9
Minervan Obelisk 17, 106 Pendergast, David 244 Ramesses the Great 39; 10
Mixtec 175, 208, 255 penis perforator 197, 236 Rau, Charles 110
Monkey-man scribes 226, 229, Period Ending rites 236, 242, Ray, John 35
249, 255; 51, 43 255 relationship glyphs 214; 47
month signs 116, 131, 165, 166, Persian 22, 37, 40, 41, 43, 105 Remusat, Abbe 39
200; 20, 55 Peru 19; 2 Ricketson, Oliver and Edith
Moon Goddess 149, 151, 222 Phoenician script 20, 25, 29, 262 126, 127, 128
Mopan Maya 130 Piedras Negras 65, 68, 115, 168— Riese, Berthold 253
Morales, Moises 196, 202 9, 171-5, 178, 182, 251; 22, Rio Azul 247
Morgan, Lewis Henry 25 39, 27, 28 Rio Bee 203
Morley, Margaret 157 Piedras Negras, Stela 3: 266; 68 Rivers, W.H.R. 126
Morley, Sylvanus 25, 26, 71,98, Pio Perez, Juan 95, 120 road sign system, international 1
125-9, 131, 132, 143, 144, Plato 13-14 Robertson, Don 201
304 INDEX

Robertson, Merle Greene 195— Stone, Andrea 238 tzolkin (almanacs) 108, 148
6, 201, 207, 211; 33 Stromsvik, Gustav 128, 169-70 Tzotzil Maya 49, 257, 258
Rosetta Stone 35, 36, 37—40, Stross, Brian 247 Uaxactun 65, 68, 98, 126, 127,
115, 259, 260, 261 Stuart, David 175, 231-3, 236- 128
Rosny, Leon de 101, 106, 115- 43, 245, 246, 247, 249-51, uay 256-8, 265; 65
16, 119, 149; 25, 18 252-5, 257, 258, 268, 272, Ulving, Tor 153
Roys, Ralph 199 274- 57 38 39 Upended Frog Glyph 173; 37
Russian script/language 43, 50 Stuart’, George 74, 77, 89, 231-2 Uto-Aztecan family 22,135,136
Ruz Lhuillier, Alberto 123—4, Sumerian 13, 23, 24, 26-7, 31, Uxrnal 64, 65, 69, 77, 93, 127,
177, 194-5, 206, 207, 208, 34, 41, 43, 262, 264, 274; 3 232; Governor’s Palace 93—4
209, 215 Supplementary or Lunar Series
Valentini, Philipp J.J. 119, 122,
130-1, 132; 26, 27
148, 152, 163
Sacy, Count Sylvestre de 38, 40 Swadesh, Maurice 197-8
Synharmony, Principle of 149, Ventris, Michael 42—4; 3
Saenz, Dr Josue 227, 228, 229
Ventur, Pierre 237
Sampson, Geoffrey 18 200, 238, 268
Venus tables 80, 95, 108, 132,
Sanders, William 157, 255
148, 227-8; 18, 15
Sanskrit 22, 43 tamales 247
vessel shapes, glyphs for 59
Sapir, Edward 135-6 Taube, Karl 222, 229, 243, 244,
vigesimal system 108
Satterthwaite, Linton, Jnr 168, 246, 252
Tedlock, Dennis 268 Villacorta, Antonio and Carlos
169, 172, 228
Teeple, John E. 130, 131,134—5, 146, 198
Sayil 93
136, 173, 176 Vision Serpent 258; 4
Scheie, David 196, 201, 202,
Tenochtitlan 61, 77, 184, 219 Vogt, Evon 257
203, 204, 205-7
Teotihuacan 60, 72 Vucub Caquix (bird-deity) 63
Scheie, Linda 178, 196, 197,
Thomas, Cyrus 110, 116-19, Vulture God 149
201-3, 204, 205-7, 209-10,
211,212,213,216-17, 232-3, 120, 121-2, 137, 151, 152, Waldeck, “Count” Jean Freder¬
239, 240, 241, 243, 252, 253, 161, 166, 260; 20 ic 74,76-7,89,90,93,94, 111,
255, 256, 258, 266, 269, 270, Thompson, Sir Eric 49, 61, 69, 115, 193; 16, 8
271, 272, 273; 34 107, 112, 114, 120, 123—44, water group prefix 254, 263
Schellhas, Paul 121, 144, 146, 147, 148, 152-3, 154-6, 157, Waterlily Jaguar 257; 65
147, 148, 153, 230, 242, 260 158, 159, 160-6, 169, 170, wayhel 257
Scherzer, Carl 100 172, 174, 175-6, 181, 182, Whorf, Benjamin Lee 135—9,
seating glyph 213, 214, 263; 46, 184, 199, 201, 204, 209, 212, 142, 144, 149, 152, 156, 161
66 216, 218-19, 222, 228, 232, 165, 181, 198, 229, 260, 268;
Secondary Texts 223, 224, 230, 234, 239, 241, 245, 251, 254, 30, 23
256, 265 258, 260, 261, 270; 31, 21, 25 Willey, Gordon 271
Seibal 65,69, 115, 178; 39, 65,7 Thoth (Theuth), Egyptian god Willson, Robert 132
Seler, Eduard 120-2, 132, 148, 13, 226 Wing-Quincunx 247; 59
149, 153, 166, 240, 242, 260; Tikal 50, 63, 64, 65, 66-8, 98, Woodbury, Richard 198
25, 19 115, 133, 178, 183, 214, 216, world directions and colors 121,
Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary 245; 39, 58, 6 133; 25, 18
28, 43; 4 Tokarev, Sergei Aleksandro¬ world-tree 212; 31
Shaw, George Bernard 22, 30 vich 146 Xbalanque 220, 222
Shield see Pacal Tolstov, S.P. 147 Xibalba (Underworld) 54, 58,
Shield-Jaguar 179,180, 214, 258; Toltec 60, 70, 128; 37 149, 218-30, 238, 248, 255
40 Toothache Glyph 172, 173; 37
Shook, Edwin 128 Tortuguero Emblem Glyph 227 Yang, William S.-Y. 32
Short Count 70 Totonac 77-8 Yax Kuk Mo (Green Quetzal-
signatures 61, 62 Tozzer, Alfred Marston 122, Macaw) 253
Smith, Robert and Ledyard 126, 136, 157-8 Yax Pac (New Dawn) 114, 253,
127-8 Trager, George 21 255, 263
Smith, William Stevenson 158 Tro y Ortolano, Juan de 105-6 Yaxchilan 50, 65, 68, 98, 110,
Smoke Imix God K 255 Troano 105-6,110,115, 116-17 115, 178, 179, 181, 182, 197,
Socotz Maya 130 Tula 70-1 199, 214, 238, 240, 254, 258;
Socrates 13, 14 Tulum 93 27, 39, 40, 42, 4
Spengler, Oswald 71 Turkish 23 Yaxha 254
Spinden, Herbert Joseph 132, Tuthmosis 39; 10 Young, Thomas 38-9, 40, 261
136, 175, 180, 251 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) Yucatec Maya 48, 49—54, 96,
Stephens, John Lloyd 41, 45, 112,114 120, 137, 140-1, 142, 149,
92-8, 109,110,115,159, 174, 260-day count 61, 108, 148; 15 151, 155, 156, 162, 199, 200,
193, 252, 253, 259, 260; 18, Tylor, Sir Edward 13, 25, 138, 205, 234, 235, 240, 243, 244,
10, 11, 12 147 256, 262-3; 24
Stirling, Matthew 60, 61, 139 Tzeltal Maya 48, 49 Zapotec 18, 59, 60, 61, 208
The inside story of one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of our time—the last
great decipherment of an ancient script.

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award

"A fluent, engaging, and informative account of the decipherment of Maya hiero¬
glyphics." —Publishers Weekly

"Rich in personal, even intimate, details, the book reads at times like a novel. It is
well calculated to keep aficionados of Maya culture on the edges of their seats."
—New York Times

"As good an introduction to the world of the Maya, and of the Maya scholars, as
one is likely to get." —USA Today

"A great story told clearly and passionately by a great Mayanist. It’s an inspiring
example of the ultimate triumph of a truth in the knock-down, drag-out world of
academic politics." —Science

"Coe writes with verve, imagination, and brave candor. His book combines
impeccable scholarship with an unpretentious spirit—that is a rare feat indeed."
—Library journal

"Portrays a Maya culture obsessed with warfare, dynastic rivalries, and ritual
bloodletting, yet rich with masterpieces in art and architecture." —Science News

"A fascinating tale....Coe's narration captures the thrill of each advancing step.
He takes pains to make clear to the uninitiated reader obscure and complicated
aspects of Mayan lore, and does so with a light touch that bespeaks of a gifted
teacher and writer." —Associated Press

Michael D. Coe is Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, and Curator of

Anthropology in the Peabody Museum, at Yale University. Professor Coe has
undertaken extensive field research in Central America and the United States,
and is the author of many standard texts on Pre-Columbian archaeology, includ¬
ing The Maya and Mexico, both published by Thames and Hudson.

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