![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraque_bkAbout 100 people answered the pop quiz. Thanks!
Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 1830s, primarily by Jean-François Champollion. The purpose of this question was to gauge how aware the respondents were of what I'd consider to be a very well-known and strongly accepted decipherment. When I was in sixth grade, we were taught to write an approximation of our names with Champollion's single-phoneme characters. We even added properly-gendered name determinatives to the end. Aw.
At first I was surprised that anyone didn't know... I mean, "Rosetta Stone" is a common phrase, right? But some of the comments make it seem more likely that the few people who answered "no" know of the decipherment, they just disbelieve it. I probably should have phrased the questions more like "To the best of your knowledge, is it generally accepted that etc".
There is no decipherment of the Phaistos Disk that has been generally accepted. The purpose of this question was to gauge awareness of what I thought was a pretty well-known undeciphered text. However, it seems that a lot of people who aren't language buffs haven't heard of it, and some who have believe one or another of the proposed translations. Again, I should have asked whether there was a generally accepted solution. Nonetheless, 75% of you still gave the answer I was looking for. Can anyone think of an undeciphered writing system that's more widely known?
As you may have guessed, the subject I was really interested in was Mayan hieroglyphs. Yes, they have been deciphered, but as I suspected, many of you (42%) thought they hadn't, and based on the comments, some didn't know one way or the other.
Despite being a language buff, I wasn't sure myself to what extent the writing had been deciphered until I read Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code. I had a vague idea that perhaps only the calendar was fully understood, which was indeed the case for some time. But major breakthroughs began in the 60s and 70s, and now almost all the inscriptions can be read. Why doesn't everyone know about it, as is the case with Egyptian? Why didn't my sixth grade class write their names in Landa's syllabary?
It seems to me there are quite a few factors at work here. Most obviously, the Mayan decipherment is more recent. Plenty of people are old enough that when they were in school, the Mayan script was still a mystery. But I'm 22, and I wasn't taught about it in school either. Were any of you? (I went to California public schools, which are certainly a mess.)
Also, Mayan decipherment was not as dramatic as one brilliant man working from a bilingual text. Far more than with Egyptian, Mayan writing was deciphered through the work of many people over a long period. There's no one hero of Mayan hieroglyphs, no one Rosetta Stone moment.
And, as Coe explains in his book, there are reasons it didn't happen that way. Strong personalities within the Mayanist community, such as Eric Thompson, forcefully resisted the idea that phonetic readings of the glyphs was the way to go, denying that the writing recorded history, or even that it was a true writing system at all. In Coe's introduction, he's careful to note that there are no "villains" in his story, just human beings who were doing their best, but it's hard to deny that Thompson held back Mayan decipherment for decades. Ironically, a great deal of help was found in the work of Mayanists in communist Russia, beyond the reach of that stifling influence.
Coe doesn't go into this in very great detail, but it also seems to me that there's a racist element in both the initial resistance to viewing Maya inscriptions as real writing, and in the continuing lag in public education about the Mesoamerican cultures. There was civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas, but you'd hardly know it to read the textbooks I read in school. I've been an Egypt buff practically all my life, and I'm struck by the similarities -- the Mayans also built great cities and monuments (including pyramids), used beautiful and complex writing, had powerful kings and many gods, made bloody wars against their neighbors, and were arguably more advanced than the Egyptians in math and astronomy. Both the Mayan civilization and the Egyptian eventually declined, and both were conquered by Europeans. Yet, we venerate the Egyptians, while barely acknowledging the Mayans' existence by comparison.
Is it too hard to admit that Indians did all this? The Egyptians were not black -- they oppressed their black neighbors the Nubians (along with many other cultures, of course) -- if they had been black, would Egyptologists have been less eager to allow them their accomplishments?
There's a double-edged sword to it. On the one hand, there's a tendency to devalue Indian cultures as a way of reducing the guilt over what's been done to them. Then there's the "noble savage" myth that still exists as a way of emphasizing the guilt and, paradoxically, reclaiming innocence... and the Maya don't work with that either. Maya lands certainly weren't a peaceful utopia shattered by cruel European warfare, as some would prefer to imagine.
But, you know, I'm not an expert on this. I'm just a dude who reads a lot of books. What do you guys think? What's your experience of the way your culture views the Maya?
By the way, some of you mentioned 2012, said to be when the Maya believed the world would end. This is quite right. The current Great Cycle in the Maya calendar began on August 13, 3114 BC, and will end on December 23, 2012, at which time the world will be destroyed and recreated. Coe reproduces a Mayan prophecy about what precisely will happen on that day:
Then the sky is divided
Then the land is raised,
And then there begins
The Book of the 13 Gods.
Then occurs
The great flooding of the Earth
Then arises
The great Itzam Cab Ain.
The ending of the word,
The fold of the Katun:
That is a flood
Which will be the ending of
the word of the Katun.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 1830s, primarily by Jean-François Champollion. The purpose of this question was to gauge how aware the respondents were of what I'd consider to be a very well-known and strongly accepted decipherment. When I was in sixth grade, we were taught to write an approximation of our names with Champollion's single-phoneme characters. We even added properly-gendered name determinatives to the end. Aw.
At first I was surprised that anyone didn't know... I mean, "Rosetta Stone" is a common phrase, right? But some of the comments make it seem more likely that the few people who answered "no" know of the decipherment, they just disbelieve it. I probably should have phrased the questions more like "To the best of your knowledge, is it generally accepted that etc".
There is no decipherment of the Phaistos Disk that has been generally accepted. The purpose of this question was to gauge awareness of what I thought was a pretty well-known undeciphered text. However, it seems that a lot of people who aren't language buffs haven't heard of it, and some who have believe one or another of the proposed translations. Again, I should have asked whether there was a generally accepted solution. Nonetheless, 75% of you still gave the answer I was looking for. Can anyone think of an undeciphered writing system that's more widely known?
As you may have guessed, the subject I was really interested in was Mayan hieroglyphs. Yes, they have been deciphered, but as I suspected, many of you (42%) thought they hadn't, and based on the comments, some didn't know one way or the other.
Despite being a language buff, I wasn't sure myself to what extent the writing had been deciphered until I read Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code. I had a vague idea that perhaps only the calendar was fully understood, which was indeed the case for some time. But major breakthroughs began in the 60s and 70s, and now almost all the inscriptions can be read. Why doesn't everyone know about it, as is the case with Egyptian? Why didn't my sixth grade class write their names in Landa's syllabary?
It seems to me there are quite a few factors at work here. Most obviously, the Mayan decipherment is more recent. Plenty of people are old enough that when they were in school, the Mayan script was still a mystery. But I'm 22, and I wasn't taught about it in school either. Were any of you? (I went to California public schools, which are certainly a mess.)
Also, Mayan decipherment was not as dramatic as one brilliant man working from a bilingual text. Far more than with Egyptian, Mayan writing was deciphered through the work of many people over a long period. There's no one hero of Mayan hieroglyphs, no one Rosetta Stone moment.
And, as Coe explains in his book, there are reasons it didn't happen that way. Strong personalities within the Mayanist community, such as Eric Thompson, forcefully resisted the idea that phonetic readings of the glyphs was the way to go, denying that the writing recorded history, or even that it was a true writing system at all. In Coe's introduction, he's careful to note that there are no "villains" in his story, just human beings who were doing their best, but it's hard to deny that Thompson held back Mayan decipherment for decades. Ironically, a great deal of help was found in the work of Mayanists in communist Russia, beyond the reach of that stifling influence.
Coe doesn't go into this in very great detail, but it also seems to me that there's a racist element in both the initial resistance to viewing Maya inscriptions as real writing, and in the continuing lag in public education about the Mesoamerican cultures. There was civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas, but you'd hardly know it to read the textbooks I read in school. I've been an Egypt buff practically all my life, and I'm struck by the similarities -- the Mayans also built great cities and monuments (including pyramids), used beautiful and complex writing, had powerful kings and many gods, made bloody wars against their neighbors, and were arguably more advanced than the Egyptians in math and astronomy. Both the Mayan civilization and the Egyptian eventually declined, and both were conquered by Europeans. Yet, we venerate the Egyptians, while barely acknowledging the Mayans' existence by comparison.
Is it too hard to admit that Indians did all this? The Egyptians were not black -- they oppressed their black neighbors the Nubians (along with many other cultures, of course) -- if they had been black, would Egyptologists have been less eager to allow them their accomplishments?
There's a double-edged sword to it. On the one hand, there's a tendency to devalue Indian cultures as a way of reducing the guilt over what's been done to them. Then there's the "noble savage" myth that still exists as a way of emphasizing the guilt and, paradoxically, reclaiming innocence... and the Maya don't work with that either. Maya lands certainly weren't a peaceful utopia shattered by cruel European warfare, as some would prefer to imagine.
But, you know, I'm not an expert on this. I'm just a dude who reads a lot of books. What do you guys think? What's your experience of the way your culture views the Maya?
By the way, some of you mentioned 2012, said to be when the Maya believed the world would end. This is quite right. The current Great Cycle in the Maya calendar began on August 13, 3114 BC, and will end on December 23, 2012, at which time the world will be destroyed and recreated. Coe reproduces a Mayan prophecy about what precisely will happen on that day:
Then the sky is divided
Then the land is raised,
And then there begins
The Book of the 13 Gods.
Then occurs
The great flooding of the Earth
Then arises
The great Itzam Cab Ain.
The ending of the word,
The fold of the Katun:
That is a flood
Which will be the ending of
the word of the Katun.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 03:25 pm (UTC)I do think that our relative ignorance of Mayan culture (and other primitive cultures, wherever they may be found) does have an element of racism behind it. I know very little about Mesoamerican cultures myself, but that's certainly the case with classical Indian culture. Much of classical Indian history has been wildly misinterpreted for a wide variety of reasons, but the biggest misinterpretation was due to racism. No one wanted to believe that the dark-skinned people indigenous to India could have developed a sophisticated civilization, and even after it was discovered that they *had*, there was still a great deal of resistance to the idea. It was very easy for people to say, "oh, that was brought in from outside the subcontinent," because there was a vague connection to Mesopotamia. Likewise, I think it'd be very easy for people to say, "oh, it's just art, it's not a real language," and dismiss Mayan achievements out of hand.
I possibly got a little off-topic there.
But, I think it's easier to accept Egyptian achievements not only because they weren't dark-skinned, but also because they were treated as relative equals to the Romans and the Greeks, *by* the Romans and the Greeks, and we know that they were The Shit. But while the Greeks did have contact with India, it was mostly of the "let's kick their asses" and/or "gee, their civilization sure is quaint" variety. And if you look at the accomplishments of most primitive civilizations with reference to what the Romans were doing at the time, it's yet again easy to dismiss those other cultures as not being worth anyone's while, because they couldn't even begin to compare to Roman culture. This is how early historians looked at the situation, and I think a lot of that has held over.
Also, I did know that the Phaistos Disk hasn't been deciphered, but I don't think that's as well known as, say, linear A. My grade eleven history class learned about linear A and linear B, but it wasn't until first year university that I even heard of the Phaistos Disk.
BTW, I friended you a while back.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 03:40 pm (UTC)Really? What did they talk about? The Incan quipu are very cool, but it's still debated whether they're actually a writing system, or just economic records.
I definitely agree that India has been short-changed, though we did learn a bit about it when I was in school. One fascinating thing a lot of people don't know is that our European languages are related to the Sanksrit-derived languages of India ('s why they call it the Indo-European group, don'tcha know). Discovering the similarites between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit was not only a major breakthrough in linguistic science, but should also highlight the fact that we're culturally and genetically related to India as well. We were one people as recently as five or six thousand years ago.
I thought of using Linear A, but for some reason thought no one would know about it. Hm.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 03:54 pm (UTC)Interesting stuff, though.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 04:55 pm (UTC)You know, I can't even remember. I think my teacher mostly talked about what it looked like and what it was used for, that is, economic records. But I have the shittest memory ever, so I couldn't tell you in great detail. I remember thinking it was very boring, though, because it was all about economics. Ironically, primitive economic systems are now a great pet interest of mine.
And yes, the discovery of the Indo-European language group has done a lot to increase interest in Indian civilization. I think it's more "acceptable" to admire it, now that we know that they were "like us". But it's also sort of worked to marginalize interest in and respect for non-Sanskrit-speaking peoples like the Dravidians, because they are not "like us" and are thus not as worthy of study. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of regions get treated like that, and it's predominantly those regions that are populated by dark-skinned or otherwise primitive peoples.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 06:25 pm (UTC)And yes, it should be perfectly obvious that the Maya were a highly sophisticated civilization. But my point was that many people will *wilfully ignore* what is in front of them if it conflicts with their set of values. I don't know if it's the case in Mesoamerica, so I'm not going to argue the point, but I do know that while it should be perfectly obvious that the Harappan civilization in India was a highly developed indigenous culture, there are still people who cling to the Aryan invasion theory. And that's because they don't want to accept the evidence that civilization could and did exist before the coming of the Indo-Europeans.