caa a22 4500 386318255 CHVBK 20180307111615.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198803 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0003598X00073610 doi S0003598X00073610 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0003598X00073610 Houston Stephen D. Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA The phonetic decipherment of Mayan glyphs [Elektronische Daten] [Stephen D. Houston] The complete decipherment of Mayan glyphs is an event that neither we, nor perhaps our children, shall ever see: the script is tortuously complicated, as many hieroglyphic writing systems are, and hardly susceptible to rapid and unequivocal ‘codebreaking'. Nevertheless, good progress has been made towards reading the glyphs, with many solid achievements in reconstructing the genealogies and political interaction of royal dynasties of the Classic period (e.g. Berlin 1959; Proskouriakoff 1960). The focus of the present paper is another, more controversial feature of Mayan glyphs: a set of ‘phonetic' or syllabic units used in spelling Mayan words. Virtually all glyph specialists now accept the validity of these units, but the path to consensus has been difficult and acrimonious. We shall examine here why many good scholars resisted ‘phoneticism' in Mayan script, and why additional evidence so impressively confirms its existence. Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1988 Antiquity Cambridge University Press 62/234(1988-03), 126-135 0003-598X 62:234<126 1988 62 AQY https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00073610 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00073610 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Houston Stephen D. Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Antiquity Cambridge University Press 62/234(1988-03), 126-135 0003-598X 62:234<126 1988 62 AQY CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge