Stardate 20020921.1641

(On Screen): I'm fascinated by the Maya. They had a remarkable civilization. It was in some ways extremely savage and brutal, and they seem to have fought an amazing number of wars. But they also created many truly stunning buildings, and in their heyday had some of the world's largest and most successful cities.

I'm also fascinated by the Maya because they are one of the very few cultures in the world to have created a sophisticated writing system. I truly think that writing is the single greatest invention of the human race, and the Maya did it.

It's not easy to determine exactly how many times it happened independently because it isn't easy to tell whether a given society borrowed the idea from someone else or came up with it on their own. At the very least, it happened in China and in Mesopotamia. I don't know if anyone can prove whether the Indians and Egyptians borrowed it from the Mesopotamians or came up with it on their own.

But there's no question that the Maya didn't borrow it from anyone else. There were other cultures in MesoAmerica which had primitive writing systems before that but they didn't approach the sophistication and outright beauty of the Mayan system, for Mayan inscriptions don't just incorporate information. They are also esthetically pleasing.

And for a very long time, they were unreadable by western researchers. Which was really frustrating because there were huge numbers of people who still spoke the language those inscriptions represented, and there were written records from the time of the Spanish conquest which seemed to indicate what some of them should mean. And yet all attempts to read them failed, until just recently. In just the last thirty years, the Mayan writing has been cracked, and now Mayan inscriptions all over MesoAmerica can be read almost as easily as Egyptian hieroglyphics. (Not every symbol is known but most are, and the residual symbology is being slowly filled in from context.)

Unfortunately, we're not learning as much as we could have. The Mayans didn't just carve inscriptions into rock, they also created books. One of the great cultural crimes in history was when the Spanish invaders collected every book they could find and burned them all, destroying priceless information forever. Only four of those books, referred to as "codices", survive in whole or in part.

Nonetheless, what is there reveals a very complicated civilization, rich and brutal. And we largely owe our ability to read about them to a man named Yuri Knorosov. His initial work on the subject was actually published about the time I was born in the early 1950's, but didn't become influential for quite a long time, mostly because what he wrote directly contradicted the beliefs of Sir J. Eric S. Thompson, who at that time dominated the field. But Thompson eventually died, and his ideas ceased to rule, and Knorosov's work finally came to light and pointed researchers in the right direction.

The problem with the Mayan script was actually figuring out what the symbols were, and then figuring out what they represented. All Mayan inscriptions consist of a sequence of squares concatenated together, each of which is elaborately carved. Sometimes the squares contain a single object, but in some cases they can be bewilderingly complex, full of different things concatenated together: animals, swirls, abstract objects, faces, all kinds of things. (To get an idea of what it was like, see this.)

It turns out that each square is a word. In the cases where the square is a single thing, then it's a reference to a meaning, and there's a short list of such. For the rest, when there were multiple symbols in a square they represented syllables of the word; it was a phonetic system. It was Knorosov who first demonstrated that the Mayan writing system was mostly phonetic and was based on a syllabary. Without that, they'd never have broken in.

I've read several books about this, but the most interesting is "Breaking the Mayan Code" by Michael D. Coe.

Knorosov's work was a vital step in the process of breaking in. And he did all of it in the Soviet Union, where he was a citizen. During the years he worked on the Mayan language, he never had a chance to visit Mexico or Belize, or indeed to leave the USSR at all. It was never easy for any academic to get a visa to leave the Soviet Union even temporarily, because the government never let anyone go unless they were damned sure they'd come back. (The USSR didn't want the embarrassment of routine defections by academics attending international conventions, since they were at the time creating the worker's paradise, and of course everyone in the USSR was blissfully happy there. Even the occasional defecting ballet dancer was a problem.) So Knorosov did almost all of his work at the Russian Institute of Ethnography in Leningrad, basing it totally on books and publications about the subject obtained from western researchers.

If Knorosov proves anything, he demonstrates that it is nonsense to say that no one can truly understand another culture without having visited that culture and lived among its people. Which is why, when Eric Tam asks:

I have a few questions for all of you other culturehawk bloggers out there. Have any of y