The thing about de Landa was, despite writing down "a whole alphabet," he was so fundamentally wrong about how Mayan writing worked that his "alphabet" was basically useless.

The problem was that Mayan writing wasn't an alphabet, like English and Spanish have, where each individual sound has its own letter. It was like modern Japanese writing. Letters stood for combinations of sounds — either whole syllables (like Japanese hiragana and katakana) or words (like Japanese kanji).

De Landa didn't get this. He only knew about alphabets, so he assumed Mayan had one. We're pretty sure what happened is, he asked Maya speakers questions like "What's your letter B?" and they picked a syllable that sounded like "B" and showed him how to write it.

It was as if you said to a Japanese speaker "What's your letter B?" and they said "Oh, we write the syllable bi as び." And then you said, "What's your letter G?" and they said, "Oh, we write the syllable ji as じ." And then you said "What's your letter U?" and they said "Oh, we write the syllable yu as ゆ." And then if you were like, "Great, so びゆじ spells bug?" they'd be like "WTF? No, びゆじ spells biyuji."

That's the level de Landa was operating at, except he never figured out he'd made a mistake.

THAT SAID, he understood that Mayan writing represented sounds, which a lot of later scholars didn't. There are so many different ways to be wrong, and so few ways to be right.

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>Also, his transcription was fundamentaly flawed so it didn't work when later scholars tried to use it for translation that's why it was ignored for decades until Knorozov's work

As the article points out, Eric Thompson’s stranglehold on Maya studies is another reason it was Knorozov who made the breakthrough. American and European scholars were aware of the de Landa alphabet; it just wasn’t utilized to its maximum potential because there was so much resistance to the idea of Maya glyphs representing phonemes.

To quote Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code,

>Until his death in 1975, only a few months after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, John Eric Sidney Thompson dominated modern Maya studies by sheer force of intellect and personality. Thompson never held a university post and never had any students; he never wielded power as a member of a grantgiving committee, or as an editor of a national journal; and within the organization that he served for so many years, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he made no executive decisions. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, it was a brave or foolhardy Mayanist who dared go against his opinion…

>Thompson made some tremendous discoveries and should be given credit for them. Nevertheless, his role in cracking the Maya script was an entirely negative one, as stultifying and wrong as had been Athanasius Kircher’s in holding back decipherment of ancient Egyptian for almost two centuries…

>As might be expected, Thompson’s views on the Landa “alphabet” were distinctly ambivalent, but he was the first to see that Landa’s ti sign which ends his sample sentence ma in kati (“I don’t want to”) functions as the Yucatec locative preposition ti’, “at,” “on”; that it could also have functioned as a purely phonetic-syllabic sign, as the bishop implied, was something that Eric simply could not allow…

>These decipherments were all major advances, but Thompson failed to follow them up. Why? The answer is that Thompson was a captive of that same mindset that had led in the first century before Christ to the absurd interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Diodorus Siculus, to the equally absurd fourth-century AD Neoplatonist nonsense of Horapollon, and to the sixteenth-century fantasies of Athanasius Kircher. Eric had ignored the lesson of Champollion.

>In a chapter entitled “Glances Backward and a Look Ahead,” Thompson sums up his views on Maya hieroglyphic writing. “The glyphs are anagogical,” he says… The glyphs are not expressing something as mundane and down-to-earth as language, but something much deeper, according to Thompson.

Every decipherment has drawn upon earlier work — Thomas Young on Egyptian, Alice Kober on Linear B, Ignace Gelb and Piero Meriggi on Anatolian hieroglyphs, etc. — and that does not at all diminish Knorozov’s remarkable accomplishment.

I’m talking about the Berlin affair, where research pertaining to the Mayan codices (a good amount under fascist hands at this point) were retained and sent to the ussr by this guy, not that he went to Mexico himself or anything

I remember this anecdote well, because most of the written text in this language had been previously systematically destroyed by European powers

What? No. He was working off photographs. I don't think he ever saw a glyph in person until after he published his research.

He almost lost his own work in a fire, iirc.

There was a significant advance over the course of the American Civil War (1861-65), from little-better-than-medieval levels - as in the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic wars, and Crimea - to almost-WWI levels by the end of the war.

Thanks for the interesting read.

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There's a great documentary about him, English subs available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4MRWuTebRE

I think knorozov had personally saved the majority of the writing left from the Mayans before deciphering it from (according to some) a library fire

Everyone here crawling to uphold the honour of Bishop de Landa seem to be forgetting that he burnt hundreds if not thousands of Mayan codices, in a tragedy for the study of history that's comparable to the fire at the libary of Alexanderia.

Also, his transcription was fundamentaly flawed so it didn't work when later scholars tried to use it for translation that's why it was ignored for decades until Knorozov's work

I guess I probably did a doo doo cause of Self Promotion Rules.

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Well.. That's a shame to read.

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I am not thinking of anything, I just want to know if there is any other explanation.

I think divine revelation is not a good way of explaining similar cultural motifs.

Waaayyy back in Reddit’s history there was a guy who thought he knew who did it. Had some decent evidence but it ultimately wasn’t who he thought it was. It was a popular post. The entire incident is fascinating.

Edit: here it is https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eeb6e/i_believe_i_know_who_was_behind_the_max_headroom/

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The collective unconscious is pseudoscience? Why is the Briggs/Myers’s test used so often? 😂

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I’ll add that in November 1918, the guards opened the gates and said “war over, go home”. He and his mates walked from Bulgaria to France where they met up with a British unit and were transported home. He was a quiet, gentle man and I was very fond of him. He died in 1966 from cancer, aged 70.

I don't think it is considered pseudoscience, but to the extent it's not pseudoscience, it is simply a mechanism of diffusion.

>I just want to know if there are other accepted frameworks other than diffusionism and evolution.

There is, but not in history. You might be thinking of divine revelation, in which case you should try some theology subs.

I'm saying that there are a limited number of regular geometric figures available in the universe, so that will cause repetitions in their use. Also, that physics is the same everywhere, so that also limits options. I think the two main frameworks you cited are enough to answer the question. Unless you want to start thinking about divine revelation, which is also widely claimed by ancient peoples.