Breaking the Maya Code,   ISBN:9780500281338

Customer Rating: 

I will echo the highly favorable comments already made by others. Prof. Coe enlightens us in a very comfortable style not only about the decipherment but also about the all-too-human sociology of scientific inquiry. We have here as well the overarching intrigue of how unlikely true history can be, in the very special case of our learning to read the writings of the Maya. One of my most valued books.

Customer Rating: 

This is a great story of a great deciphering and stays on par with Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B. What have stricken me the most about Maya writing decipherment was how long it have taken from the first insightful work of Knorosov to the almost full understanding of the script that we gain with the ending of the eighties. Especially if you compare this story to the one's describing decipherments of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Cretan Linear B. I think that this fact can only partially be attributed to Eric Thompson's negative influence, the rest is number one much worst familiarity of the researchers with Maya languages in comparison to scientists dealing with ancient Near East (I think it steams only partially from ignorant unwillingness as Coe presents it, the rest would be availability of Maya linguistic studies, till quite recently the dictionaries were scare and qualified teachers even more, and the next factor would be that Maya grammar is like anything we know from Europe or West Asia) to this we have to add apparent immense complication of their script (to the point that each scribe could develop his own way of writing certain glyphs so much that we could recognize that it is not a different "letter"). Only after Benedictine identification of all the allographs and polyphones the real decipherment could actually take off. And we deserve it to the great variety of Maya epigraphers who's personalities are so vividly depicted in this book.

Customer Rating: 

A good story needs a villain. The villain of the book in question is Sir Eric Thompson, who must have been a fascinating figure (in fact I've been looking for some biography of him after reading the present work). Skip the first chapter, which concerns writing systems in general, and you get a hilarious work (perhaps the author had James Watson's "Double Helix" in mind when writing), abounding with anecdotes and gossips of the nasty academic world. Thompson is the arch-villain, but the author's censure on the "field anthropologists" is also severe.

The first chapter seems to mar the whole work, which is a bit too long, and is not very accurate. For example, the Chinese writing system doesn't have "214 determinatives" as the author claims (p. 32) -- there're 214 "section headers" in a traditional Chinese dictionary, which were devised by lexicographers, and are not supposed to tell "one the general class of phenomena to which the thing named belongs" (p. 31), although the two concepts have overlapping. Of course these're only minor mistakes, and to them we should not pay too much attention, as the author warns us, unwittingly: "It will be recalled that Thompson dealt posthumously with Whorf by paying no attention whatsoever to Whorf's larger points, and devoting much ink to the latter's minor mistakes (and mistakes they were), like a terrier worrying a rat." (p. 152). All the same, one star has been deducted!

Customer Rating: 

I saw this book at the bookstore and bought it without reading the online reviews. It had a good inviting title but it never delivered.
With a title of "Breaking Maya the code" you will think you will learn about the "Maya code".
The author however goes over the history and steps (mainly misteps as mentions it over and over) taken on "breaking the code".
I particulary dislike the way the calls out names & ridicules many anthropologyst and other Mayan researchers without a particular explanation to the reader on why. Most of them dead of course so they can not complain right.
The author mostly complains about the mistakes and biases of the researchers and never really gets to the code itself. In summary he is very critical of everyone that had to do with the Maya.

I will rate this book just as he rates a book by B.M. Norman (page 96); "The book is on the whole worthless,..." except for the pictures and photos in the middle.

You will not learn any Maya code with this book.

Customer Rating: 

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.