MAYAN HIEROGLYPHI C LANGUAGE Reintroduction of a lost language. Northwestern H.S. / Global History for High Achieving Huskies /
Transcript
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M AYAN H IEROGLYPHIC L ANGUAGE Reintroduction of a lost
language. Northwestern H.S. / Global History for High Achieving
Huskies / Hawkins
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A RMATURE L INGUISTIC T OOL K IT Question: Mayan Hieroglyphic
Language has around 800 symbols. what might we conclude? Rule #1
count the signs or Symbols If a script has 20 -35 signs or symbols
then its probably alphabetical. Representing simple sounds. Ancient
Somalian for example. If a script has 80 -100 signs or symbols then
its probably based on syllables. Native American Cherokee for
example. If a script has hundreds of signs or symbols then its
probably logographical. A language where each sign represents whole
words, like Chinese has thousands of symbols for thousands of
words.
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What they discovered W ORD - With such a rich inventory of
signs, both logographic and syllabic, the ancient Maya scribe
combined them in bewildering ways for both functional and aesthetic
purposes, hence the assumption. Scribes could and did write the
same word in multiple ways. Sometimes only logograms were used.
Other times just phonetic signs were employed. And sometimes
logograms are accompanied by phonetic complements, phonetic signs
that serve to clarify the reading of the logogram by either
spelling out the beginning or ending sound of the word. One reason
for the use of phonetic complements is that a sign can have
multiple functions, a phenomenon called polyvalence. Scholars
assumed The Mayan system was a Limited logographical System.
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Confused?..... And you thought spelling English was tough! It
is also possible that a glyph can function as both logogram and
phonetic sign. For instance, the phonetic sign ku is also the
logogram TUUN and the calendrical sign for the tzolk'in day Kawak.
In this case, the logogram TUUN is usually followed by the phonetic
complement ni to indicate its reading. The Kawak sign would also be
easily distinguished because of numeric sign before it and its
location in a Calendar Round or Long Count block.but lets go back
to how this complicated language got lost in the first place.
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H ISTORICAL R EFERENCE : THE DEATH OF A CULTURE- 1524 1579
Franciscan priest and bishop of Yucatn. Modern scholars regard
Landa with a mixture of frustration and admiration. At the same
time he wrote his comprehensive work on Mayan culture, his orders
to destroy all icons and hieroglyphics obliterated the Mayan
language forever, helping to undermine and destroy the civilization
he so vividly described. Diego de Landa
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1500 years of history destroyed in the name of Catholicism. D
IEGO DE L ANDA D IEGO DE L ANDA C RIMES AGAINST THE M AYAN C ULTURE
Upon learning that the Mayans were Still making offerings to
ancient gods Diego de Landa arrested and tortured thousands of
Mayans for devil worship. He implemented a primitive inquisition
that destroyed most of Mayan artifacts. He held a Great Ceremony Of
Destruction in the central plaza and burning every Mayan manuscript
available. Diego de Landa viewed the Mayan texts as A tool of the
devil and forced Mayan scribes learn European script. Under
prosecution of being burned at the stake for writing in the ancient
language, Mayan Hieroglyphics died out by the 1800s. Only four
incomplete codex survived.
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T IME L INE : CRACKING THE MAYAN CODE In 1774, Spanish explorer
Jose Calderon finds remains of Mayan City Palenque. Inside the
temple the explorer and his men found huge stone tablets with
Hieroglyphic carvings. 1810 Three Mayan books resurface, one in
Madrid, another in Paris and the most famous in the Royal Library
of Dresden Germany its called the Dresden Codex. 5 pages of the
Dresden Codex are printed in a Paris publication regarding
communications in the Americas.
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1832 Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: his explanation of the
bar-and dot symbols representing fives and ones, respectively,
constitutes the first instance of successful decipherment of
ancient Mayan. Time Line: Continued
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E RNST F ORSTEMANN 1880 R OYAL L IBRARY OF D RESDEN Facsimile
reproduction of Dresden Codex by Ernst Forstemann,1880 with
commentary. This was an early example of a "photographic" process
known as "chromolithography". The black and white images were
reused for an 1892 edition. Possibly the material that was found in
WWII by Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov. Forstemann discovered the date
the Mayan s thought the universe began- 4 Ahau 8 Cumka [ August 13
th 3114 BC] This allows field researchers to establish important
dates on the Mayan stelae, critical to the work of Thompson and
Proskouriakoff.
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A LFRED M AUDSLAY 1880 PHOTOGRAPHER Arrives with Glass plate
camera starts documenting the Mayan carvings in the city states of
Quirigua, Copan, Tikai This becomes the informational foundation
from which the ancient language is resurrected. Why is this
Important?
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J. E RIC S. T HOMPSON 1930 S -1960 S Thompson did considerable
work in deciphering of Maya hieroglyphics, especially those related
to the calendar and astronomy, as well as identifying some new
nouns. He developed a numerical cataloguing system for the glyphs
(the T-number system) which, with some expansions, is still used by
Mayanists today. His attempted decipherments were based on
ideographic rather than linguistic principles. In his later years
he resisted the notion that the glyphs have a strong phonetic
component, as put forward by the Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov.
After his death, for a time some younger Maya epigraphers blamed
Thompson for holding back what became a very fruitful approach to
the glyphs with his forceful and articulate disagreements.
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Russian Linguist Knorozov took up the challenge to break the
Mayan code after he read it was undecipherable. Y URI V
ALENTINOVICH K NOROZOV R USSIAN L INGUIST A Russian solider he
became a linguist after finding a copy of the codexs in a bombed
out library. What set Knorozov apart was that he realized Landa's
alphabet was really part of the Maya syllabify, and he succeeded in
identifying many of the syllabic glyphs. Knorozov knew that no on
language is made up entirely of one system our own system uses
numerals and logograms. He realized that the Mayan systems combined
phonetic signs and word signs. He based his phonetic Understandings
on the works of Diego de Landa. Diego de Landa. He used the Madrid
Codex to decipher the word for west based on combining Landa and
Thompsons academic theories. Thompsons anti-communist political
agenda discredits Knorozovs phonetic theories.
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T ATIANA P ROSKOURIAKOFF EPIGRAPHER, ETHNOLOGIST, AND AN
ARCHAEOLOGIST 1936-1975 Tatiana Proskouriakoff studied to be an
architect at Pennsylvania State University. Attaining access to the
Penn Museum, she volunteered to draw for one of the curators there.
This work impressed the archaeologist Linton Satterthwaite, who
invited her to join his 1936 expedition to Piedras Negras in
northwestern Guatemala. Piedras Negras was a classical site of
Mayan ruins that Satterthwaite had been excavating for some time.
Over the next few years Proskouriakoff produced a series of
reconstructive drawings depicting ancient Mayan cities Tomsk,
Siberia on January 23, 1909
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This stela helped to prove that the Maya inscriptions spoke of
history. In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, suggested that these
"niche" scenes represented rulers newly seated on their thrones.
She pointed out that the "niche" stelae always carried the earliest
dates of their series and that a certain set of "inaugural"
hieroglyphs followed those dates whenever they appeared in later
texts. This breakthrough led to the recognition of birth and death
glyphs, the name-glyphs of the rulers, parentage information, the
capture of enemies, and other biographical items from the lives of
the Maya rulers.
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Tatiana began to notice a sequence of dates and signs in the
hieroglyphic transcriptions. She identified a series of seven
rulers in a time span of 200 years. She was also able to prove that
these texts showed rites of passage and major accomplishments of
the rulers. Her studies of the stelae of Piedras Negras influenced
the way archaeologists today incorporate glyphic data to reach
interpretive results. BEAUTY AND BRAINS Pioneering woman in the
field of Maya archaeology
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The jade mask from the temple of King Pacal R OBERTSON / S
CHELE / M ATTHEWS While touring Palenque, Linda Schele met the
famed artist and photographer of Maya ruins, Merle Green Robertson,
who became Schele's most important mentor during the earlywho
became Schele's most important mentor stages of her new vocation.
The association with Robertson quickly drew Schele into the world
of the ancient Maya, their art and their system of hieroglyphic
writing. Mesa Redonda de Palenque In 1973, Robertson organized the
first Mesa Redonda de Palenque, a small conference whose goal was
deciphering Maya writing, a hieroglyphic system, at that time not
fully understood. Participating In that conference, and working
with Peter Matthews, Schele used her knowledge, vision and a
compilation of recent epigraphic breakthroughs to decipher a major
section of the Palenque King List. This achievement became the
stimulus that led to many later discoveries by Schele and other
scholars.
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David began deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs at the age of 8,
under the tutelage of his father and later Linda Schele. He
presents first paper on Mayan Hieroglyphic language at age 12 In
1983, at the age of 18, he became the youngest-ever recipient of a
Mac Arthur Fellowship "genius grant. His publications include Ten
Phonetic Syllables (1987), which laid much of the groundwork for
the now-accepted methodology of decipherment. In 2003 he published
a volume ongoing series Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,
devoted to drawings and photographs of sculpture from Piedras
Negras, Guatemala. Dr. David Stuart Linda and David Schele
Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing