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| Went to Mexico in 2022 and somehow didn't try a single "Mayan" rum cake, dang it! |
Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
To me, the most interesting through-line of this book is how the actions of petty academics served to hinder, stall, and otherwise thwart the translation of the Maya glyphs for decades. I have some small experience with petty academics who care WAY more about their self-proclaimed role of thought police and their self-imposed mission to maintain the status quo of their field than they do actually progressing knowledge, and I am always on the lookout for others willing to spill the tea on that same topic. And dude, does Coe spill the tea! You need to get yourself some popcorn to munch while you read about Thompson’s career-long power play that served absolutely nothing but his own sense of self-worth. I wouldn’t have found this book nearly as interesting without that play-by-play of who tried to ruin whose career for personal reasons, who wouldn’t admit that someone else was right and kept bitching about it endlessly, who was low-key racist and who was high-key racist, etc.
Do you want to know how to call someone racist without calling them racist? Coe shows us how via his thoughts about another academic:
“Having met Gelb but once, many years ago [...], I cannot really call him a racist. His book, however, is very definitely infected with that sinister virus of our time.”
There was also a Nazi sympathizer, a German-born, Louisiana-based researcher named Hermann Beyer who had to be forbidden to wear a swastika at work, who was later sent to the Stringtown Concentration Camp in Oklahoma at the start of WWII and who subsequently died there.
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| Chichen Itza, 2022 |
Coe is also VERY (and undeservedly!) snarky about archaeologists--or, sorry, about “dirt-archaeologists,” as he puts it. I kind of got the idea that he thinks they’re stupid. What’s up with that? The digs and the exploration of the jungle and the finding bits of stela with carvings on them are the best part!
Seriously, though--Thompson was such a jerk! He was so convinced that the Maya were illiterate magical shaman ignoramuses that he wouldn’t believe that they had a proper written language, and kept making every peon under him say that the glyphs were, like, pretty pictures that spoke to your heart or something. And he did this for upwards of forty years! And when people started finally actually translating the glyphs anyway (thank goodness for Knorosov!), he did his best to ruin all their careers and talk shit about them and keep them from getting hired, etc. Imagine if you were trying to translate the glyphs and some of his peons were on your hiring committee. Or your tenure committee. Or were peer-reviewing your article. Or in the audience at the conference where you’re reading your paper. Or on your PhD committee. Or your grad school application committee…
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| Chichen Itza, 2022 |
There’s another villain in this story, though: that absolute asshole De Landa! I hate that guy. Like, yay I guess that he wrote down a sort of syllabary that researchers finally figured out they needed to use to connect the written glyphs to the spoken language, but we wouldn’t have needed that second-hand source if De Landa hadn’t, you know, BURNED 99.9% OF THE MAYAS’ BOOKS! He even wrote about it in his diary, being all, “Jeez those guys screamed and cried when I burned every book they’ve ever written. What a bunch of dumbasses.” Racism has clearly been holding back our understanding of the Maya and their language ever since we first met them.
Our cast of heroes is charmingly eclectic, including the previously-mentioned Knorosov, much of his work done while trapped in the USSR, as well as a female artist from Tennessee, and a homeschooled child. All of them, I think, illustrate the importance of different perspectives when trying to solve a tricky problem. All of them, notably as well, exhibited grace and the spirit of collaboration and absolutely zero ego.
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| Chichen Itza, 2022 |
As far as actually translating the glyphs, I was interested to see that, from what I understand after reading another book on how Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated, they work sort of similarly to those hieroglyphs. With 20/20 hindsight, one would think that the Maya researchers would have leaned more heavily on the example of hieroglyphs, but I guess that everyone has to hobble their own way towards truth. Except for Thompson--he’ll just try to kneecap you and then when you fall down he’ll step on your neck.
I’d been hoping for an explanation or a reasoning for why Maya glyphs are so decorative, but Coe, perhaps because he’s studied them for his entire career and thus no longer sees them as so extraordinary, didn’t ever point out their structure as notable, even though they very, very, very much ARE. They’re so beautiful and fancy, and every glyph has its own writer’s interpretation of how it’s drawn. I LOVE it.
I did, however, learn a lot of interesting facts about how the Maya language reflects its people’s obsession with time. I was already interested in the Maya calendar and the Long Count way of dating, and now I know that precision of time is also inherent in their language. No imperfect tenses for you in the Mayan language--you have to know exactly when every action was, is, or will be completed!
I also thought that the focus on classification was interesting. Not only do you have to know what time something happened, but if there’s a group of something you want to talk about, you can’t just name it--you also have to classify it. Considering how much variety there can be in the construction of a single glyph, the language the glyphs are expressing is SO precise!
One more interesting tidbit: Coe writes about Naj Tunich, a cave containing glyphs and art that was being investigated, that “[t]he cavern walls, lit by their flashlights and photographic equipment, had many other surprises, not the least of which were realistic homoerotic encounters.”
Realistic homoerotic encounters, you say? Tell me more!
Happily, some of what Coe writes in this third edition of his book is now out of date. Coe writes, for instance, that “Mexican law forbids the teaching in schools of the Yucatec Maya tongue.” That is no longer the case. I’d be very interested in learning Maya, as well, but I don’t know where I’d even begin--I already checked DuoLingo, sigh. I’m also very interested in the four extant Mayan codices that De Landa didn’t manage to get his hands on. Trying to see all four will let me travel the world, although it’s shameful that only one gets to still live in Mexico.
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