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Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West
Decipherment of the Mayan glyphs proceeded from logical reconstruction. Recognition of the signs for numbers permitted equating them with dates of the Mayan calendar. A sign list compiled as a sort of "alphabet" in the 16th century by Fray Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who served as bishop of Yucatán, was incorrect in some of its interpretations but offered a number of useful clues. In 1952, Yuri Knorozov was the first to suggest that the glyphs were phonetic symbols. Later in the decade, Tatiana Proskouriakoff hypothesized that a set of sculpted inscriptions from Guatemala depicted rulers of Piedras Negras, along with the ruler's birth date and date of accession, and it became obvious that Mayan monuments recorded history. Eventually it was recognized that Maya scribes mixed phonetics with logograms (whole-word semantic symbols such as "+" or "&") in unpredictable ways... Robinson's descriptions of such analysis, and his accounts of both successful and unsuccessful decoding attempts, are clear, provocative and stimulating.