By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—Back in the 1840s, Englishman Frederick Catherwood and American John Lloyd Stephens came across the ruins of the Maya Empire in the rain forests of Central America, specifically in the area now known as Belize (formerly British Honduras).
They were not prepared for the extent of what they discovered: great cities—remnants of what was clearly an advanced civilization—lost deep in the jungle. Though the human faces carved on the crumbling stones resembled those of the indigenous people who still lived in the area, not much was known at that point about the population that had built and abandoned these structures centuries earlier.
“The city was desolate and in ruins,” Stephens later wrote. “Architecture, sculpture, and painting had once flourished here. Orators, warriors, and statesmen had once lived here. But no one now alive knew that such things had been, or could tell of their past existence.
“In the romance of the world’s history nothing ever impressed me more forcibly than the spectacle of this once great and lovely city, overturned, desolate, and lost, overgrown with trees for miles around, and without even a name to distinguish it.”
One of the most compelling and mysterious features of this lost civilization was the “writing” it left behind: symbols carved in stone and written in books made of mulberry bark and jaguar skin. It was a system quite unlike any European language. And for centuries, no one was able to decipher any of it.
But on Sunday afternoon, Jonathan Spiro, the former president of Castleton University, led a rapt audience at the Brandon Inn through the improbable journey from discovery to decipherment as part of the Science Pub series of lectures organized by Martha Molnar and the Friends of the Castleton Library. The series brings guest speakers to monthly gatherings where the intellectually curious learn about arcane topics from experts in their fields.
Spiro clearly loves to talk about Mayan hieroglyphics and his enthusiasm was contagious. By the end of the presentation, the standing-room only crowd had learned some of the most basic rules of Mayan grammar and heard a dizzying tale involving Spanish clergy, French polymaths, British archaeologists, Soviet eccentrics, and American prodigies, each contributing to—and sometimes hindering—the incremental process that has allowed researchers to demystify one of linguistics’ big mysteries.
Spiro explained that writing systems generally fall into three categories:
- Logographic: symbols represent words, as in Chinese.
- Syllabic: symbols represent consonant-vowel pairs, as in Linear B of ancient Greece.
- Alphabetic: symbols represent discrete sounds, as in modern European languages such as English, French, and Russian.
It turns out that Mayan script is a hybrid logographic-syllabic system, where some of the 800 or so known symbols (“glyphs”) correspond to particular words, but most correspond to syllables that are combined in specific ways to represent whole words.
Starting with the numeric system—the Maya carved numerals everywhere—the secrets of the Mayan script slowly opened up. Many early assumptions about the system and the Maya themselves turned out to be inaccurate. For example, one of the leading scholars of Mesoamerican culture, J. Eric S. Thompson, believed that the preponderance of numerals in Mayan carvings indicated that the Maya were peaceful mystics and astronomers who mapped the heavens.
Later study in the 1930s by Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a Russian-born archaeologist, showed that the ubiquitous numerals were actually dates and that many carvings were biographies of elite members of ancient Mayan society. Further study also revealed that many of the carved texts discussed brutal warfare, countering Thompson’s view of the Maya as peaceful.
Another Russian, the linguist Yuri Knorozov, uncovered the hybrid logographic-syllabic nature of Mayan script, even figuring out how syllables were sequenced to produce words. But his work was routinely rejected because of his eccentricities (he co-authored papers with his cat, Asya, a habit sure to endear him to the serious academy).
“Knorozov was one of the great minds of the 20th century,” said Spiro, clearly a fan of the man and his quirks.
In the 1980s and 90s, an American prodigy named David Stuart began making even more significant breakthroughs in Mayan syntax and grammar, leading to his receipt of a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship while he was still a teenager.
According to Spiro, Mayan script is the “most complex writing system ever devised” and it’s still bedeviling linguists despite all the progress that’s been made. While most glyphs are now understood, many are still elusive.
At the end of the presentation, Spiro distributed copies of a Mayan syllabary and engaged the audience in a brief exercise, asking us to “write” a Mayan word using what we’d learned.
Spiro was clearly in his element, comfortable in front of a room and in control of his material. He took questions, many of them quite thoughtful, from the audience before he joined them for dinner in the Inn’s dining room—it’s a tradition of these events for the speaker to join the audience for dinner afterwards to continue the conversation over food and drinks.
For anyone who loves to scratch their intellectual itch, the Science Pub series is a terrific way to learn new subjects and meet likeminded souls. The lectures are free, but dinner and drinks are paid by attendees.
The next event will be on February 4, 2024 at 4 p.m. at the Tap Room on Lake Bomoseen. The topic will be “Decoding Insect Smell,” presented by Gregory Pask, Professor of Biology at Middlebury College. Arrive early to get a seat…the events draw big crowds.
