Let them speak in glyphs

THE MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art), NEW YORK — LIVES OF THE GODS, DIVINITY IN MAYA ART — NOVEMBER 22, 2022

Small things are bothering the audience, the public when a prestigious museum publishes a book going along with an exhibition in the museum and there is no mention in standard places of the © date of the book, nor on the title- or credit-pages the reference to the exhibition and its dates. I had to go to Amazon’s sites to find a date which is the date of publication Amazon declared which might only be the date when they set the book in their catalogue.

The second remark that has to be made is about the systematic non-presentation of the numerous glyphic inscriptions. The authors of the articles in the book reproduced, but totally upside down the mistake Sir Eric Thompson — a (it should be “the” as long as he lived) leading English Mesoamerican archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigrapher (http://www.supportingevidences.net/john-eric-sidney-thompson/) — did all his life, thus blocking research on Maya glyphic syllabic writing system. Thompson considered these glyphs as nothing but artistic compositions, not as a writing system. Luckily, a Soviet researcher from Leningrad — at the time — Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was able to work on the Dresden (Deutsche Demokratische Republik at the time) Codex and to propose as soon as the early 1950s a syllabic reading of Maya glyphs, but his position could only expand in the USA and the world after Thompson died in 1975. Thompson was wrong, completely wrong as for these glyphs not being a writing system. But his T-numbers to identify, list, and classify the various glyphs Thompson collected are still used as a standard tool to analyze the composite glyphs, and these T-numbers were and still are a very useful tool vastly used by Mayanists, and first of all, the FAMSI organization, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., with an open access dictionary, and other books by John Montgomery and Michael D. Coe, and many others. Why didn’t the MET book use these T-numbers to identify the glyphs and their components and architecture? Why didn’t the book give for the simple “transcriptions” of the glyphs and the various sentences or texts they provide, the glyphic originals in clear redrawing of course? They never did in…