The decipherment of the Maya script was, Coe states, “one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of our age, on a par with the exploration of space and the discovery of the genetic code.” He presents the story eloquently and in detail, with many illustrations of the mysterious Maya inscriptions and the people who tried to decipher them. Most of the credit, he says, goes to the late Yuri V. Knorosov of the Russian Institute of Ethnography, but many others participated. They did not always agree, and some of them went up blind alleys. Coeemeritus professor of anthropology at Yale Universityvividly describes the battles, missteps and successes. What is now established, he writes, is that “the Maya writing system is a mix of logograms and syllabic signs; with the latter, they could and often did write words purely phonetically.”

Reprinted from Scientific American, April 2000.