Decipherment and Excavation

The Decipherment

In the following paragraphs, the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyph is referred to as “the Decipherment” for convenience, though it is not marked as an explicit historical event or accomplished by a representative figure in the discipline. Rather, the decipherment is a process which is incomplete “as long as one undeciphered sign dangles to torment specialists” (Houston and Martin 2016, 444). The decipherment of hieroglyphs brings historical-oriented interpretation to both Maya and Egyptian archaeology.

To have an understanding of the impact of the decipherment has made to the Maya archaeology, it is necessary to have a basic idea of its history. It will take a 600-page book like Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code (same name to the documentary in class) to present a complete history of the Decipherment. The paragraph will use Coe’s five pillar for successful decipherment as the analytical tool of several key figures who contributed to the monumental development of the Decipherment: Bilingual, biscript, or similar constraint, corpus, script typology, language and context.

Bilingual, biscript, or similar constraint is a text that has at least two or more language including the target of the decipherment, and at least one known language. The most famous bilingual text is Bishop Diego de Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, whose abridged version was discovered and published by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1864 (Coe 2012, 165). The Relación recorded a list of signs of Maya hieroglyph corresponding to a roman alphabet. This list, now called the Landa alphabet, is the Rosetta Stone of the Mayanists. However, Brasseur applied it literally as an alphabet, which resulted in a chunk of disastrous gibberish.

The corpus is a large body of texts that is sufficient for the epigraphers to compare the signs in the writing system. The most famous corpus in Maya archaeology is the one made by Ian Graham. However, before him, the corpus that contributed to the breakthrough decipherment were credited to two man: Alfred P. Maudslay and Teobert Maler. Maudslay uses wet-plate camera and plaster casts to record the illustrations of hieroglyphs and architecture from Quiriguá, Copán, Chichén Itzá, Palenque, and Yaxchilán; Maler also photo a whole range of stelae and lintels from many sites. As Coe comments, “both constitute a true corpus and along with the published codices constitute the base on which the true decipherments of our time have rested” (Coe 2012, 191).

John Eric Sidney Thompson was a contested figure in the Decipherment. His witted criticism to Whorf and Knorozov successfully discredited them for several decades until their phonetic approach to the decipherment proves right. However, it is undeniable that Thompson’s contribution to the understanding of the Maya Calendar was still important to the Decipherment. His Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in 1950 is “a must” to know “how the Maya calendar and astronomy actually worked” till now (Coe 2012, 238). Besides this feat, he takes the Maya hieroglyph as a set of ideograms linking to some religious meanings only known to ancient Maya priests. It proves to be problematic, both in terms of his decipherment and his power and authority within the Maya archaeology.

The script typology of Maya hieroglyph is finally made possible by the decipherment from Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov. He suggested the syllabic nature of the Landa’s alphabets, and associated it with the phonetic approach for the Decipherment. Also, he incorporate the contemporary Maya language into his decipherment, which proves to be effective in deciphering hieroglyphs which can find their counterparts such as k’u-ch(i), “vulture”, k’u-tz(u), “turkey”, etc.

Historical context is brought up by Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s paper, “Historical Implication of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala”. From the time interval of the dates, she found that the records of date on the stelae actually depicts the entire life of a ruler rather than some “gods seated in niches formed by the bodies of celestial dragons” (Coe 2012, 295) suggested by Thompson with his belief in religious implications of the hieroglyphs. It is the first time the ground of the anti-historical Maya “astronomical priest” model is shaken, and a more rational historical interpretation is initiated. Hereby Coe names it by “the Age of Proskouriakoff”.

As soon as these five pillars are set for the Decipherment, the Maya archaeologists and epigraphers together signed the death warrant of the mystique of Maya hieroglyphs that has haunted the Maya archaeology for decades.

Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

The decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyph is broadly known for the genius of Champollion. The starting point of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyph, however, is way back from the successful attempt of Champollion. The 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Rashid (ancient Rosetta) during the French Napoleonic invasion of Egypt facilitates Champollion's decipherment (Bard 2015, 35). As mentioned above, the Rosetta Stone belongs to the bilingual text among Coe’s five pillars of decipherment, though strictly speaking, it is a trilingual text containing hieroglyphics, demotics (a text type often used on scripts) and ancient Greek. Champollion identified the phonetic value of the Egyptian hieroglyphs through the cartouche, the bracket that encloses the name of the king on the Rosetta stone. For instance, he identified the name “Ptolemaios” (Ptolemy in English) from ancient Greek, and then found a square bracket, the cartouche, in hieroglyphics; similarly, “Cleopatra” is also presented in a cartouche. After comparing the consonants of those names in ancient Greek, he identified the repeating signs in the cartouche, and the process resulted in his breakthrough discovery of the phonograms of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

From the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyph, it is clear that one of the most important effect of decipherment is bringing the historical context to the archaeological interpretation. The archaeological interpretation within the timeframe of an existing writing system will have “to be seen in the context of a richly detailed corpus of texts written on stone and papyrus” (Shaw 2004, 79). Although this approach may cause the abuse of the use of text, which will be discussed later, the textual resources are vital to the historical focus in the Egyptian archaeology.

To give a vivid example of a cartouche, I will translate the cartouche of Ramesses II, which was also identified by Champollion in the Rosetta Stone, rather than explaining how Champollion break the decipherment in detail. The cartouche shown in the left is the name of King Ramesses II from the site Abu Simbel. I draw the vocabulary lists from Collier and Manley’s How to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, which was the textbook of my Egyptian hieroglyph class.

       Step 1. We need the vocabulary list to identify the consonants by each sign or group of signs. Since the cartouche only depicts the name of a king, there is no determinatives (meaning-signs) that does not represent a sound value, but hints on what the word really means.

       Step 2. When we get the vocabulary list, we can check the sequence of reading by looking at the direction of the signs. The “Re”-sign is heading to the left, so we read the cartouche in the priority of left to right, top to bottom.

       Step 3. Then we transliterate the signs into sound with the help of the vocabulary list. The Egyptian hieroglyph often ignores the vowels, so we insert vowel “e” in most cases for simplicity reasons. It goes ỉmn-mry-rꜥ-ms-s, which corresponds to the sound amun-mery-Re-mose-se.

       Step 4. We check which king on the kinglist has the similar sound values, and voila! We found Ramesse-meryamun (II), which is the name of Ramesses II. His cartouche in other forms are shown as well.