The Real Maya Mystery Breaking the Maya Code. MICHAEL D. COE. Thames and Hudson, New York, 1992 (distrib- utor, Norton, New York). 304 pp., illus. $24.95. "The Maya Mystery has become Maya his- tory," quipped Gillett Griffin a few years back. He was right in every way. Thanks to the decipherment of the New World's only Pre-Columbian literature, the Classic Maya texts, scholars are zeroing in on the native chronicles of a great archeological mystery: the collapse and abandonment of the south- em lowland cities in the ninth century A.D. Augmenting field archeology, a tale of royal hubris, war, famine, and desper- ate--even brilliant-reform is opening up to us. The collapse is a real puzzle, but it now yields its secrets. Breaking the Maya Code is about a differ- ent mystery: why it took more than a century of intense scrutiny for Mayanists to settle on a productive method for decipher- ing the glyphic texts left in four time-wom books and scattered on the ruined monu- ments of the Yucatan peninsula. And it's about a different collapse: the collapse of resistance to the fact that an aboriginal American people achieved and maintained literacy. It's a great story told clearly and passion- ately by a great Mayanist. It's an inspiring example of the ultimate triumph of a truth in the knock-down, drag-out world of aca- demic politics. With the simple prose he is famous for among his colleagues, Michael Coe unravels the mystery of Maya decipher- ment. His introductory chapters include everything one needs to follow the argu- ment to its persuasive conclusion-basic primers in linguistics, writing systems, Maya archeology, and the early history of the field. Compounding the expectable clash of egos and personalities found in any scientific debate. there is an underlvinn , .2 fundamental difference of opinion. In a rare deployment of ten-penny words, Coe re- lates the theory of linguist Geoffrey Samp- son. Sampson divides all possible scripts into semasiographicand glottographic. The latter category includes those writing sys- tems which encode spoken language, the former those which convey ideas indepen- dently of spoken language. To be fair, Sampson regards the semasiographic mode as only a hypothetical possibility. The amazing thing is not that a linguist should Three Mayanists. From lee, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov in Leningrad, about 1960; J. E. S. Thompson in [From Breaking the Maya Code; center photograph by Otis Imboden, courtesy of George Stuart and SCIENCE VOL. 257 18 SEPTEMBER 1992 conceive of a literature that could convey ideas directly in any spoken language. It is that generations of leading scholars would believe Maya glyphs worked that way when positive evidence pointed to the altema- tive-that the ancient Maya wrote in Mayan. To be sure, the truth always had its champions. John L. Stephens, who made the Maya famous in the English-speaking world 150 years ago, speculated that the ancient Maya were ancestral to the modem Maya and that the glyphic texts contained their histories. The main protagonist in Coe's stow is Yuri V. Knorosov. the Rus- sian linguist who most clearly and consis- tently argued for the anchoring of Maya glyphs in Mayan language. The vindication of Knorosov's general phonetic and logo- graphic approach, and the honor he now receives in the scholarly world, are trans- parently sources of satisfaction for Coe. And so they should be. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, when Knorosov was gener- ally consigned to outer darkness by J. Eric S. Thompson and a field of Mayanists that revered this British giant, Coe and his wife, Sophie, steadily worked to translate and promote Knorosov's views. In the 1960s, other major proponents of the historical content of Mava texts and of decipherment rose, especially Tatiana Proskouriakoff and David H. Kelley. The battle for Maya decipherment continued through the 1970s and '80s. In it were pitted an emerging group of people pursuing ancient written Mayan, led by such ener- getic young epigraphers as Linda Schele and Peter Mathews and the prominent linguist I his English garden, 1974; David H. Kelley, 1991. I National Geographic Society]