The Information Super-Frog

Pre-Columbian Maya books and their decipherment, a cartoon history by Andy Warner. From "The Nib", 2016.

https://thenib.com/mayan-codices/

Pretty good! Some obligatory nitpicking:

* For scholarly use, “Maya” should be both the noun and the adjective unless one is talking about the language. (”Mayan” or “Mayans” was long considered a shibboleth of dubious or sloppy fringe writing. Better magazines, newspapers, etc generally followed the scholarly usage... up to the deluge of articles in 2012 connected with the turn over of the Maya Long Count calendar cycle, the supposed “Mayan Apocalypse” (sic), when most outside of academia seem to have given up.)
* “There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of codices”. A conservative estimate! Early explorers reported entire “libraries” of them. Conquistadores considered burning them, along with smashing idols, as part of their sacred duty of conquest of the Pagans. Archaeologists discovering tombs of ancient Maya nobility often find rectangles of white and colored stucco dust - the frustrating remains of ancient books after all organic material has rotted away.

Some oversimplification:
* Numbers were deciphered in the 19th century, then gradual but significant work was done by indentifying various common nouns and terms by function - sort of like if another civilization discovered the ruins of 20th century restrooms, the pictograms for male and female identified as functionally equivalent of the spelled out letters “MEN” and “GENTLEMEN” / “WOMEN” “LADIES”, even if they had no idea exactly how the alphabet worked or how to pronounce the words. Then being able to recognize those strings of letters in other contexts.

Missing that nuance led to something simply wrong:
* Proskouriakoff’s piecing together dynasties of Maya rulers was brilliant work - but done by recognizing the function of glyphs for “birth”, “coronation”, “death” etc. While happening about the same time as Knozorov’s phonetic breakthroughs, it was unrelated, being rather the last great discovery of functional research on Maya glyphs, the approach which went back to the 19th century.

Still, pretty good! Check it out!

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