Maya Hieroglyphs Without Tears

The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs is one of the most intriguing of scholarly puzzles. In this book, which Sir Eric Thompson wrote specially for the British Museum, he approaches the intricacies of Maya hieroglyphics with the full breadth of his learning, providing a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the subject. The Maya were the only people in the New World to evolve a complete writing system. Their civilization, which reached great heights of artistic and intellectual achievement, left historical, mathematical, and religious records in hieroglyphs that have yet only partially been deciphered. Eric Thompson traces the evolution of this language from the stone monuments engraved with hieroglyphs of c. 500 BC, to the earliest dated classic Maya writing of AD 292, and finally to the three surviving hieroglyphic books of AD 1300-1500. Because previous research has shown that neither an alphabetic nor a phonetic system can be applied, Eric Thompson suggests a [...]new set of 'rules' describing the nature of Maya glyphic composition. But due to the often varying meanings evoked by hieroglyphs, coupled with our limited understanding of Maya culture, many Maya texts remain undeciphered. However, Eric Thompson's exposition of one of the better understood Maya passages, together with a set of clear figures and some photographs, provides an excellent incentive to the linguist to pursue the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs, without tears. The author The late Sir Eric Thompson was an English Mayanist of world renown. He was a member of a British expedition to Belize in the late 1920s and continued to work in the Maya area as an archaeologist for the Field Museum of Chicago. The range of Sir Eric's expertise in Maya studies was perhaps wider than that of any other scholar. He was an archaeologist, historian, anthropologist, and folklorist but his reputation was most firmly established by his pioneering work on the hieroglyphic writing system of the Maya.