Breaking the Maya Code
by Michael D. Coe
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael D. CoeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-10-01
ISBN: 0500281335
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Book Reviews of Breaking the Maya Code
Book Review: A Riviting History of the Decipherment of Maya Writing!
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Breaking the Maya Code
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.Central America Books
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