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Title: Breaking the Maya Code
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Manufacturer: Thames & Hudson
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $11.25
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| Breaking the Maya Code by Thames & Hudson Lively, even viscious | A good story needs a villain. The villain of the book in question is Sir Eric Thompson, who must have been a fascinating figure (in fact I've been looking for some biography of him after reading the present work). Skip the first chapter, which concerns writing systems in general, and you get a hilarious work (perhaps the author had James Watson's "Double Helix" in mind when writing), abounding with anecdotes and gossips of the nasty academic world. Thompson is the arch-villain, but the author's censure on the "field anthropologists" is also severe.
The first chapter seems to mar the whole work, which is a bit too long, and is not very accurate. For example, the Chinese writing system doesn't have "214 determinatives" as the author claims (p. 32) -- there're 214 "section headers" in a traditional Chinese dictionary, which were devised by lexicographers, and are not supposed to tell "one the general class of phenomena to which the thing named belongs" (p. 31), although the two concepts have overlapping. Of course these're only minor mistakes, and to them we should not pay too much attention, as the author warns us, unwittingly: "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." (p. 152). All the same, one star has been deducted! | | Breaking the Maya Code by Thames & Hudson Much to say about nothing | I saw this book at the bookstore and bought it without reading the online reviews. It had a good inviting title but it never delivered.
With a title of "Breaking Maya the code" you will think you will learn about the "Maya code".
The author however goes over the history and steps (mainly misteps as mentions it over and over) taken on "breaking the code".
I particulary dislike the way the calls out names & ridicules many anthropologyst and other Mayan researchers without a particular explanation to the reader on why. Most of them dead of course so they can not complain right.
The author mostly complains about the mistakes and biases of the researchers and never really gets to the code itself. In summary he is very critical of everyone that had to do with the Maya.
I will rate this book just as he rates a book by B.M. Norman (page 96); "The book is on the whole worthless,..." except for the pictures and photos in the middle.
You will not learn any Maya code with this book.
| | Breaking the Maya Code by Thames & Hudson A Riviting History of the Decipherment of Maya Writing! | Note: I made some immature Mormon angry because of my negative reviews of books that attempted to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews almost as fast as they are posted. They don't want you to read Coe's book, and for good reason.
So your "helpful" votes are appreciated.
It is astonishing how little known one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century is! If asked to list the ten most important achievements of the 20th century, most people would not know that one of them was the decipherment of Maya writing.
The decipherment of Maya writing was help up by religious and political prejudice. A Russian man in the height of the cold war held the key. "Dr. Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, the man who, against all odds, has made possible the modern decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing."
The great Maya scholar Dr. J. Eric S. Thompson simply could not see the forest for the trees. He was so fixated on the peaceful-kingdom illusion of ancient Maya society that he dismissed the "Marxist-Leninist" approach.
Thompson should not have worried about communists so much and concentrated on what they were saying. Tatiana Proskouriakoff was another Russian who played a crucial role in the decipherment of Maya writing.
Coe's book should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the Maya.
Oddly, Mormon writers who have so many pictures of Maya ruins in their books seldom mention the decipherment of Maya writing. Can it be that it says nothing about the themes and subject matter of the Book of Mormon? This is a very curious omission.
See my one-star reviews of Mormon books. Click on the following links, the scroll down to my reviews. Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon
See my five-star review of "The Ancient Maya," by Robert Sharer. The Ancient Maya, 6th Edition. Read the following:
Sharer writes: "After more than a century of gathering and analyzing archaeological evidence, we have discovered nothing to support the idea of intervention by people from the Old World." "This is not to say that accidental contacts between the Old and New World peoples could not have occurred before the age of European exploration" (p. 6).
"On the basis of the available evidence, then, the courses of cultural development in the New and Old Worlds seem clearly independent of each other and devoid of significant contact until 1492" (intro., p. 7).
The ancient Maya civilization, Sharer continues, "are to be `explained' not as a product of transplanted Old World civilization, but as the result of the processes that underlie the growth of any culture, including those that develop the kind of complexity we call civilization."
"The idea, which either explicitly or implicitly asserts that the peoples of the New World were incapable of shaping their own destiny or developing sophisticated cultures independently of Old World influence, is still popular in quarters." "But this is but one more popular myth devoid of fact, for the evidence points unmistakably toward the evolution of civilization in the New World independently of developments in the Old World."
The Ancient Maya, 6th Edition
Other essential books on ancient America are:
"The Mound Builders: The Archaeology of a Myth," by Robert Silverberg.
Mound Builders
And here is a short masterpiece: "Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of the American Indians," by Robert Wauchope.
LOST TRIBES & SUNKEN CONTINENTS
Again, your comments--positive or negative--are appreciated. Thanks. | | Breaking the Maya Code by Thames & Hudson War between Gourou's | | I have read the book like a thriller. The author has been able to create a permanent interest for following the war between the various " gourous " of Maya language. My interest was not only for the Maya code, but for the description of the basic mechanisms and broad knowledges necessary in order to break a code. | | Breaking the Maya Code by Thames & Hudson A Linguistic Detective Tale | Mayan civilization flourished in Central America for more than a thousand years and at least four million Mayas still live in Guatemala and Mexico and speak Mayan languages. The ruins the Mayas left behind are spectacular -- Tikal in Guatemala, featured in the movie "Star Wars," is perhaps the greatest of them all. However, our knowledge of the Mayas has always been limited because scholars were unable to decipher Mayan writing. In fact, many scholars have denied that the Mayan symbols -- glyphs -- were more than doodlings, calendars, and compilatation of dates.
"Breaking the Maya Code" is not a history of the Maya civilization but rather a history of the scholars who have attempted to unravel the meaning of the enigmatic Mayan glyphs. Coe's premise is that racial discrimination and scholarly politics retarded the decipherment of the glyphs. Amazingly, many scholars of the Maya didn't bother to learn the Mayan language.
The chief villain of the book is Sir Eric Thompson who had a strangle-hold on Mayan studies for many years. It was only with his death in 1975 that a motley group of linguists and amateurs learned to read the glyphs -- and thus demonstrate conclusively that the Mayas possessed a written language. The remarkable individuals who achieved this breakthrough included a Soviet scholar who had never visited Central America, a 12 year old boy, a self-described redneck woman from Tennessee, and a mathematician who began life as a Wisconsin farmboy. The dirt archeologists, "wielders of trowels" in the author's words, were unenthusiastic about the accomplishments of the linguists.
The author paints a picture of the dead hand of academia inhibiting rather than promoting the study of Mayan writing. An archaelogist himself, he personally knows the principal characters in his story and he was a participant in many of the key events that led to a comprehension of Mayan writing. His writing is lively, mostly warm and generous about his colleagues but sometimes critical, and the whole story is told in a connected narrative that reads like a novel, albeit one in which the reader is led through the complex process of how linguists learned to decipher Mayan glyphs.
Smallchief | | Breaking the Maya Code by Thames & Hudson Book Description | Michael Coe's classic inside story of one of the major intellectual breakthroughs of our time--the last great decoding of an ancient script--has been updated throughout and now includes an epilogue that brings the reader up to date in the fast-changing field of Maya decipherment. Among the more exciting advances to be described are:
* the discovery of the specific Maya language and sophisticated grammar used by the ancient scribes on stone monuments and painted vases;
* archaeological explorations of tombs and buildings of the ancient founders of the great city of Copan, whose very existence had been predicted by epigraphers through glyphic decipherment;
* the realization that many small city-states were dominated by two rival giants, Tikal and Calakmul, through a potent combination of military conquest, diplomacy, and royal marriages. |
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