Breaking The Maya Code
Michel D Coe
Thames and Hudson, 2012
304pp, 113 black and white illustrations
Paperback, £14.95
At first sight Breaking the Maya Code may appear to be a textbook of little interest to a general reader. This is a happy misapprehension, as it is a surprising page-turner. After a potted introduction to writing systems, it gets cracking with a story that is billed in the book as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the 20th century. With no single decipherer – like Champollion who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs – in Breaking the Maya Code there are a host of heroes as well as villans.
The archaeologist Eric Thompson (1898-1975), for all his contributions in other areas, effectively acted as a brake to decipherment for about 40 years: 'It seems that Thompson never believed that there was any system at all in what the Maya wrote down: it was a mere hodgepodge of various primitive attempts to write, inherited from the distant past and directed towards supernatural ends by the priests who supposedly ran the society. If he had been the slightest bit interested in comparative analysis, which he definitely was not, he would have found out that none of the 'hieroglyphic' scripts of the Old World worked this way. Here, he made a fatal mistake, for if anthropology teaches us anything, it is that at a given level of social and political evolution, different societies around the globe arrive at very similar solutions to similar problems...' (p.258).
Indeed, such was the eloquence of Thompson's attacks that it is not uncommon to hear and to see in print this assessment of the Maya script. Fortunately, there is now an engaging account of the script and the characters.
All these books show both the complexity and limitations of the Mayan civilisation. Their art is very different from that of the Classical traditions of the West and the East; however, there is no reason to suggest that they were influenced by supernatural forces. Like other ancient societies, they had no way of predicting the end of their high civilisation, but what they left has immeasurably enriched the present age.
