Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Mayas Surviving the Colonial Genocide

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/mayas-surviving-the-colonial-genocide-df7a6f45c32d

Starting in the 15th century, after the failure of the Crusades to take control of the Middle Eats and the Muslim world, the whole world was colonized first by the Portuguese and the Spaniards, then by the French and the English – mainly but not only, don’t forget the Dutch. In Mesoamerica, the Spanish Crown, the Spanish Catholic Church, and the Spanish Inquisition organized and performed the worst-ever genocide, both human (diseases, war, and extermination of the male population) and cultural: autodafé of books and anything that could be burned and that had anything written in the Maya glyphs, with the menace of extermination of those who would resist.

The resistance was fierce. Against European diseases, none was possible. These diseases and the death of a still not yet really numbered proportion of the population enabled the Spaniards and other Europeans to have a serious advantage. They used it fully, even sending some groups of rangers to spread the diseases. The Mayas though resisted culturally and they adopted the Spanish alphabet to transcribe, from memory since the books had been burned, what they could remember and it took them about three centuries to do it. But these transcriptions were at once translated into Spanish, thus imposing a second cultural genocide: the loss of all glyphic diacritic elements that were not actually put in words, or syllables, and then the loss of the language itself and its artistic forms in the stories, myths, poetry, rituals and rites,  and other plays and epics told in these transcriptions.

The recuperation of the glyphic language only came in the 20th century, after the Second World War when the reading of the glyphs as a writing system enabled the Mayas and humanity to finally understand the many thousand inscriptions on the monuments that were slowly excavated from the jungle. And it was a battle against “Sir” Eric Thompson who refused to consider these inscriptions as any sort of written language pretending they were nothing but cultural symbols, at best mnemonic for storytellers and priests. We had to wait for Yury Valentinovich Knorozov, a Soviet scholar and university professor in Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg, in the 1950-1960s when he finally was heard by other scholars like Micheal D. Coe or Dennis Tedlock.

The new developments of Maya Country in Yucatan, Mexico, are centered on the Maya Train and its interconnection with the Tehuantepec isthmus rail corridor that will connect the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, enabling easy access to this Maya train from the East or the West.

Deciphering Maya writing was a battle against “Sir” Eric Thompson who refused to consider these inscriptions as any sort of written language pretending they were nothing but cultural symbols, at best mnemonic for storytellers and priests. We had to wait for Yury Valentinovich Knorozov, a Soviet scholar and university professor in Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg, in the 1950-1960s when he finally was heard by other scholars like Micheal D. Coe or Dennis Tedlock.

         

 Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:31 AM