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Breaking the Maya Code : Michael D. Coe Interview (Night Fire Films)

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Breaking the Maya Code : Michael D. Coe Interview (Night Fire Films) BREAKING THE MAYA CODE Transcript of filmed interview Complete interview transcripts at www.nightfirefilms.org MICHAEL D. COE Interviewed April 6 and 7, 2005 at his home in New Haven, Connecticut In the 1950s archaeologist Michael Coe was one of the pioneering investigators of the Olmec Civilization. He later made major contributions to Maya epigraphy and iconography. In more recent years he has studied the Khmer civilization of Cambodia. He is the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at Yale University, and Curator Emeritus of the Anthropology collection of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is the author of Breaking the Maya Code and numerous other books including The Maya Scribe and His World, The Maya and Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. In this interview he discusses: The nature of writing systems The origin of Maya writing The role of writing and scribes in Maya culture The status of Maya writing at the time of the Spanish conquest The impact for good and ill of Bishop Landa The persistence of scribal activity in the books of Chilam Balam and the Caste War Letters Early exploration in the Maya region and early publication of Maya texts The work of Constantine Rafinesque, Stephens and Catherwood, de Bourbourg, Ernst Förstemann, and Alfred Maudslay The Maya Corpus Project Cyrus Thomas Sylvanus Morley and the Carnegie Projects Eric Thompson Hermann Beyer Yuri Knorosov Tania Proskouriakoff His own early involvement with study of the Maya and the Olmec His personal relationship with Yuri Knorosov © 2005 Night Fire Films www.nightfirefilms.org Page 1 of 91 BREAKING THE MAYA CODE Transcript of filmed interview Complete interview transcripts at www.nightfirefilms.org His exhibition and book The Maya Scribe and his World and the discoveries in Mayaiconography and epigraphy that followed Working at Yale with Floyd Lounsbury The first Mesa Redonda de Palenque in 1973 The Dumbarton Oaks Miniconference of 1974 The discovery of name-tagging in the Maya texts The opening of the floodgates of decipherment in the mid-1980s The 1986 Blood of Kings exhibition and its impact Stresses between archaeology and epigraphy, finally resolved by discoveries at Copán The influence of Linda Schele on Maya studies The current state of Maya studies. Interview Transcript The nature of writing systems Q: Michael, could you talk a bit about the nature of writing systems and their relationship to spoken language, and the misconceptions that people had about that -- about what we know about how writing systems actually relate to the spoken language? Michael Coe: For centuries, people had the wrong idea about writing systems, unusual or foreign writing systems or exotic writing systems, such as Egyptian or Chinese -- that the writing system had no real relationship to the Egyptian language -- whatever it was, they weren’t too sure -- or to Chinese, which they did know. They got the idea among European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th Century that these writing systems were purely ideological, that is that they expressed ideas, straight from the soul, straight from the heart, straight from the brain, rather than passing through the medium of language. The Egyptians, in particular, fascinated them. They couldn’t read all these inscriptions on obelisks that were placed around Rome, for instance. They’d love to have been able to. But a 17th Century scholar, an amazing man named Athanasius Kircher, an unusual Jesuit scholar or polymath, actually, thought that he could read them, and that they -- each sign, separately, meant one idea. So this was a wonderful writing system, that the kind of Neo- platonic ideas that they had from the Greek philosophers, this was the best kind of writing system, that they didn’t have to worry about language or a language. It was just straight from the brain. When Chinese came into the consideration of these Europeans, they began to get the same idea about Chinese. It wasn’t until Jesuits actually went to © 2005 Night Fire Films www.nightfirefilms.org Page 2 of 91 BREAKING THE MAYA CODE Transcript of filmed interview Complete interview transcripts at www.nightfirefilms.org China and tried to convert the Chinese court that they learned that this writing system really was closely connected with language. There isn’t any writing system, real writing system in the world, that is not closely tied to language, and a particular language. Perhaps you could talk about the road sign systems that we have or- that tell you, for instance, “don’t park here”, and whatnot- that could be looked at without any language. But they are not really writing systems. Writing systems express a particular language- its grammar, its syntax, its vocabulary, its phonetics. And it was that discovery that enabled the great decipherments to be made, such as the decipherment of Egyptian. Q: Maybe go back to the Greeks even, because didn’t the Greeks have this notion that Egyptian expressed pure ideas? Talk about the romance of that, the notion that it’s, I suppose, a key to the mysteries, that these languages would be the source of wisdom. Michael Coe: The Greeks had the idea that these symbols, which they saw on the monuments of Egypt- and they knew the Egyptian civilization. They were in contact with it. They knew Egyptian priests. Somehow or another, Greek philosophers, later than Plato, got the idea that this writing system was something special, that it expressed the philosophy and religion of these people directly. And everything they wrote about that writing system, unfortunately, was wrong. The only one who got it right was Herodotus, who was often considered the father of history- we now consider him the father of anthropology. Herodotus had one thing right in that it was read from, generally, from right to left. We do know that that’s true. That’s the only thing the Greeks got straight about this. And during the Renaissance in Europe, when all of these Greek writings were rediscovered and re-evaluated, they took over the Greek notions about that writing system. And it’s led to all kinds of misconceptions that had to do with other even more exotic writing systems that were discovered later, such as, most particularly the Maya. Q: When Athanasius Kircher was confronted with this obelisk that went up in the Piazza Minerva, how did he make sense of it? What did he do with it? Michael Coe: Athanasius Kircher lived in Rome, being a member of the Jesuit hierarchy there, and he was a really good scholar. He did all kinds of interesting things. He had his own museum, his own collection. And in the Piazza Minerva is an obelisk, the smallest of all Roman obelisks in Rome, that sits on top of an elephant. And his notion was that this obelisk represented wisdom sitting on strength, strength being this lovely little elephant who was actually designed by the great sculptor, Bernini. It’s a wonderful monument. And Kircher actually published a translation of this that is absolute, complete gobbledygook. There isn’t one thing that is right about it, because he was stuck in this Neo-platonic idea that these things were all just pure symbols expressing thoughts- © 2005 Night Fire Films www.nightfirefilms.org Page 3 of 91 BREAKING THE MAYA CODE Transcript of filmed interview Complete interview transcripts at www.nightfirefilms.org that it was an ideographic system. And there’s no such thing as ideographic writing, per se, purely. He didn’t realize that this thing was in the Egyptian language and now can be read in the Egyptian language. It’s got nothing to do with poor old Kircher’s translation. But for a couple of centuries, everybody accepted, or at least one century, people accepted Kircher’s interpretation, until, of course, the great discoveries of Champollion and other specialists showed that this thing is actually in the Egyptian language. Q: Could you talk a little about the kinds of writing systems that do exist, and whether any of them are pure. If you could give us some examples of the different kinds of writing systems. And – if an a epigrapher was coming in and looking at an unknown writing system, how would he get an idea of what kind of writing system he’s dealing with? Michael Coe: There are several kinds of writing systems in the world. They can be classified- all the writing systems, hundreds of them that have probably been developed, can be pretty well classified into basically three groups. One of these is, of course, our own writing system, which is alphabetic, in which individual consonants and vowels are expressed- each one of these is individually expressed by one particular symbol. For instance, you have a consonant, such as a “b”, or a “c”, or a “d”, in our system, and our vowels, such as a,e,i,o,u all have their own symbol, separately. It’s fairly phonetic. Our writing system isn’t completely- it’s quite a complicated one. But, in effect, it is an alphabetic system. And for a long time, people thought, oh, well, basically, that’s a real writing system, there aren’t any other kinds of writing systems. And if it isn’t alphabetic and phonetic, then it’s not a real writing system. However, there are syllabic systems in which the- each symbol stands not for an individual consonant or a vowel- except in the cases of the pure vowels, like a,e,i,o and u- but rather a consonant followed by a vowel. A good example of this is in Japanese. Japanese can be written completely as a bunch of syllables.
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