How Did The Mayan Code Contribute To Its Downfall

The Mayan Code, also known as the Mayan Script and the Mayan Hieroglyphs, was the writing system of Ancient Maya. The oldest account of it being used was found inside a Mayan pyramid in 2006 and found to be from around 300 BC (“Mayan Writing”). Attempts to break the Mayan Code began in 1832 and continued until the early 1950s, when breakthroughs in the Code were made, allowing more glyphs to be figured out. The first thing to be decoded were the Mayan numbers in 1832, allowing Mayan years to be matched with writings and carvings. Later, in 1880, Ernst Förstemann decoded the Mayan Calendar and discovered the Mayan way of measuring time (“Time Line”). In the 1930’s, Eric Thompson, a popular Mayanist, convinced most other researchers that each
After the Mayan Code was broken, researchers were able to use information from scripts and writings from Ancient Maya to prove previous theories wrong and to write plausible theories that had a possibility to be true. “Thompson had a -- sort of a two pronged attack on -- well, let’s say three pronged attack on Knorosov, one on the basis of his politics, that is he would have been brainwashed by the Soviets into a totally Marxist, Leninist, anti-American, anti-imperialism, anti-Western, so that was Thompson’s take on it right from the beginning” (“Breaking” 61). Eric Thompson believed that the glyphs were symbolic for words and constantly believed that Knorozov had made an incorrect translation, attacking him in two or three different ways (Stuart 4). “For instance, Knorosov made one iconographic mistake in one of his articles that identified a deer -- what is quite clearly a deer -- as a jaguar, and Thompson said “well, maybe that’s a Marxist-Leninist jaguar but it’s not one of ours, it’s a deer”” (“Breaking” 61). He refused to believe any of the information revealed by the Code because he was convinced that the translations were wrong, and convinced other researchers to believe the same (“Breaking”
The Mayans used carvings and scripts to portray themselves as an Agricultural society that relied heavily on farming. The Mayans would have had to clear more and more land to make space (Stromberg). With a such high population, if something had happened to the food supply, the Mayan population would have fallen, and later, the culture, which is another theory (Perl 14). It was argued that the Code didn’t actually portray anything about the downfall of Mayan Civilization and didn’t accurately portray Maya. As most of Mayan Agriculture did not need terracing, something that is usually used in a purely agricultural society, and that since only a small amount were found in Mayan ruins, Mayan societies could not have structured intensive agriculture and the scripts that portrayed that were untrue, and merely emphasizing a particular aspect of Mayan culture (Culbert