Time Line of Decipherment
1981
In
their own words
Before
all the glyphs could be read aloud in the original Maya, researchers needed to
complete Yuri Knorosov's phonetic decipherment. This began in 1981 when
15-year-old budding Mayanist David Stuart (above, with Linda Schele) discovered
that individual Maya words could be written in multiple ways, using different
symbols for the same sounds, as in "faze" and "phase."
Eric Thompson's theory had been that the Maya wrote in rebus, in which
symbols are used for whole words. A modern rebus of the phrase "I can
see" might include pictures of an eye, a tin can, and the sea. While some
glyphs can indeed be read this way, Stuart's finding—that any
symbol with the correct beginning sound can be used to identify that sound in a
word glyph—is also true. As a result, a single glyph could be drawn in
dozens of ways. With this revelation, scholars could now read many glyphs once
considered indecipherable.