Time Line of Decipherment
1832
Counting
Actual
decipherment began with an eccentric European genius named Constantine
Rafinesque, who boasted of having dabbled in more than a dozen professions,
from archeology to zoology. His insatiable thirst for knowledge had led
Rafinesque to a reproduction of just five pages of the Dresden Codex, from
which he was able to crack the Maya's system of counting. In 1832,
Rafinesque declared in his newsletter, the Atlantic Journal and Friend of
Knowledge, that the dots and bars
seen in Maya glyphs (like these above, from the Dresden Codex) represented
simple numbers—a dot equaled one and a bar five. Later findings proved
him right and also revealed that the Maya even had a symbol for zero, which
appeared on Mesoamerican carvings as early as 36 B.C. (Zero didn't appear
in Western Europe until the 12th century.)