Nikolai Grube from the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn. It is a fascination shared by many in the eight-strong team led by Prof. I’m fascinated by the thoughts of the past that people have written down.” “This was the only place that taught Maya script. What began as a hobby now had him in its grip forever: he packed in his office job, retook his Abitur and moved to Bonn to study. And the fascination has never left me since.” Prager, who is German but was born in Switzerland, would visit the University of Basel’s library while at school, borrow books on the subject and get in touch with researchers at an early age. “I then came across a book that talked about the Maya script and the fact that nobody had deciphered it yet.
Focusing first on Ancient Greek writing systems, he then moved on to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Prager has been fascinated by ancient scripts, particularly that of the Maya, ever since he was 11. “If they’d already used a particular syllabogram or logogram in a text, they’d make the same word in a new way using different elements.” This fear of repetition means that there are now at least 20 known variants of the personal pronoun “u.” “With such a wide scope, nobody noticed – quite understandably – when the same word was being used,” Prager says. He is the coordinator of the “Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Maya” project, which is led by Professor Nikolai Grube from Bonn. For Maya script is highly complex: besides logograms, which are more or less a pictorial representation of the word they stand for, there are also syllabograms, which are put together to form the spoken word.Īnd all of this comes in many different variations, because “the ‘artists,’ as the Maya scribes called themselves, were afraid of repetition,” as Dr.
With a script that has two dozen pictures for a single pronoun, it is no surprise that generations of academics have tried and failed to crack the Maya’s writing system.
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