Asimismo, incorpora las tendencias metodológicas e historiográficas más recientes en el análisis del uso y el desarrollo de la escritura en la América Media precolombina. The course combines lectures with seminar-style discussions, as well as some hands-on exploration of Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial texts on different media from the collections of the Peabody Museum and Harvard libraries.Įl interés y valor del presente catálogo bibliográfico radica en la inclusión de los autores, las obras y las escuelas fundamentales en la historia e historiografía del estudio e investigación de tres de las escrituras más tempranas de Mesoamérica, a saber, el sistema de signos olmeca y las escrituras jeroglíficas istmeña (o epiolmeca) y maya. The history of the study of writing systems in Mesoamerica is also brought into view with a particular emphasis on current discussions and recent advancements in our understanding of the indigenous scripts. It highlights how specific features of Mesoamerican writing systems reflect broader regional traditions with respect to the role of writing in social, political, and religious life of ancient societies. The course offers a survey of Mesoamerican writing systems that centers on the basic properties of the scripts and their uses. The region, known as Mesoamerica, is characterized by an amazing variety of indigenous writing systems, from phonetic ones like Maya hieroglyphs, to largely pictographic notations such as Mixtec records. In reality, none of the glyphic signs which survive are his, but those of a copyist working around 1616.This seminar explores the role of writing broadly defined in the social, political, and religious fabric of ancient civilizations of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Landa cited the influence of the native priesthood through their books and writing system in his defense, so he devoted several pages to the calendar and examples of hieroglyphic writing. Landa resigned, traveled to Spain and, apparently with voluminous notes, wrote a long account of Maya culture which justified his actions. The first bishop of Yucatan, arriving from Spain that same year, was furious with Landa for conducting the inquisition without proper authority and accused him of accepting false testimony. He says himself that he also ordered many ancient Maya books brought together and burned in the town square. He was elected head of the Franciscan Order in Yucatan and then, in 1562, held an elaborate inquisition or auto-da-fé in the town of Mani, in which he extracted by torture confessions of idolatry and child sacrifice. building churches and monasteries, preaching, converting. This was the same year in which the Spanish king repealed all the laws protecting the Indians which had been passed only four years before through the work of Bartholomeo de las Casas, and the year in which Yucatan was finally conquered. 1) arrived in Yucatan in 1546 as a Franciscan friar of 25. that the Maya inscribed the life histories of their kings.ĭiego de Landa (Fig. If I were commissioned to design a Maya monument dedicated to the history of decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs, I would inscribe it with three important dates: 1566, the year in which Diego de Landa is thought to have written in Spain his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan, our only approximation to a Rosetta Stone 1886, the year in which Ernst Forstemann in Dresden first read Maya dates and 1960, the year Tatiana Proskouriakoff demonstrated from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Such aids might have made decipherment much easier than for the extinct Old World languages, but they did not. There exists an extensive 16th and 17th century Maya literature written in European letters, for example, the Chilam Balam books from Yucatan and the Popol Vuh from Guatemala. Maya vocabulary, grammar and diction patterns have been scrupulously recorded in dozens of modern ethnographic and linguistic studies. The language has not died out: it is still the native tongue of more than a million people in Mexico and Central America. To those familiar with the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian or Assyrian cuneiform, the lack of progress in the reading of Maya hieroglyphs must seem strange.
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