Breaking The Maya Code By Michael D. Coe

In the book, “Breaking the Maya Code” by Michael D. Coe, he shows how the re-creation of a society can occur by deciphering its graphics as well as its language. It also shows how that particular society, although feared by many, was lost for thousands of years, and can now be revealed to the rest of the world. Most scholars believed that not only was the language, hieroglyphics, a script that was painted on numerous monuments as well as written in bark-books and on sarcophagi, was too arduous to distinguish. Coe reveals within the book, through the painstaking accounts of each of the archaeologists who attempted it, how the code was broken over time. The author also includes within the remarkable history of the Mayans, from their beginnings,

Since Knorosov’s ideas ran counter to the accepted interpretation of Mayan code up to that time, by the scholar Eric Thompson, Coe called Knorosov a fraud. Yet other people showed up, mainly two women, Marla G. Robinson and Linda Schelee, who worked together studying the ancient city of Polanke to further crack the Maya code. Michael Coe obtained the objective he was trying to convey in detailing the history of the many archaeologists and linguists who attempted to break the code, and in showing the astonishingly positive results relative to the contemporary Mayans, who had been kept from learning about, or speaking the language of, their own

It was an exhaustive effort on his behalf and he obviously loves his work. He concludes that the present Mayans are delighted to learn about their ancestry; he makes the case that Mayan civilization was torn apart or destroyed repeatedly, most recently in the 1980’s with Central America’s civil wars. He interprets his work through the lens of a scholar and linguist, but not through meeting with the people and discovering what they want in the present relative to their history. He does not write how the Mayans were ‘Christianized’ and their native language hijacked by Spaniards. This book did not work as Coe concentrated too much on the scholarly and less on the human