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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.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 11:34 pm (UTC)I agree with
no one Rosetta Stone moment. And maybe that's why I've never really heard about it in day-to-day life. The general population doesn't have a lot of room for the boring aspects of history.