Stephens, John L.:
Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan - signiertes Exemplar
1999, ISBN: 6040f2df039712ab16aeec3c9cd5a24c
Gebundene Ausgabe
135+[28 plates] with folding site map, one cross section and figures. Folio (14 1/4" x 11 1/4") bound in original publisher's wrappers. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeolo… Mehr…
135+[28 plates] with folding site map, one cross section and figures. Folio (14 1/4" x 11 1/4") bound in original publisher's wrappers. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Volume V, Number 1 and 2. Separate front wrapper laid in signed by the author. First edition. Tikal is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. It is located in the archeological region of the Petén Basin in what is now northern Guatemala. Situated in the department of El Petén, the site is part of Guatemala's Tikal National Park and in 1979 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tikal was the capital of a conquest state that became one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya. Though monumental architecture at the site dates back as far as the 4th century BC, Tikal reached its apogee during the Classic Period, c. 200 to 900. During this time, the city dominated much of the Maya region politically, economically, and militarily, while interacting with areas throughout Mesoamerica such as the great metropolis of Teotihuacan in the distant Valley of Mexico. There is evidence that Tikal was conquered by Teotihuacan in the 4th century AD. Following the end of the Late Classic Period, no new major monuments were built at Tikal and there is evidence that elite palaces were burned. These events were coupled with a gradual population decline, culminating with the site's abandonment by the end of the 10th century. Condition: Edge wear, spine ends chipped. Separate wrapper signed laid in with index for volume V else very good., Peabody Museum Press, 1911, 3, 3 volumes. 246 pages with diagrams, tables and bibliography; 10 pages with photographic reproductions of the Codice Dresden (37 pages), Codex Madrid (56 pages); Codice Paris (12 pages); 279 pages. Quarto (11" x 6 1/2") bound in brown with gilt lettering to spine and cover and housed in a slipcase. Prepared by Patricia Rodriguez Ochoa, Edgar Gomez Marin and Myriam Cerda Gonzalez. First edition. Yuriy Valentinovich Knorozov was a Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly renowned for the pivotal role his research played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. In 1952 Knorozov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis'mennost' Tsentral'noy Ameriki, or Ancient Writing of Mesoamerica.) The general thesis of this paper put forward the observation that early scripts such as ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform which were generally or formerly thought to be predominantly logo-graphic or even purely ideographic in nature, in fact contained a significant phonetic component. That is to say, rather than the symbols representing only or mainly whole words or concepts, many symbols in fact represented the sound elements of the language in which they were written, and had alphabetic or syllabic elements as well, which if understood could further their decipherment. By this time, this was largely known and accepted for several of these, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs (the decipherment of which was famously commenced by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 using the tri-lingual Rosetta Stone artifact); however the prevailing view was that Mayan did not have such features. Knorozov's studies in comparative linguistics drew him to the conclusion that the Mayan script should be no different from the others, and that purely logo-graphic or ideographic scripts did not exist. Knorozov's key insight was to treat the Maya glyphs represented in de Landa's alphabet not as an alphabet, but rather as a syllabary. He was perhaps not the first to propose a syllabic basis for the script, but his arguments and evidence were the most compelling to date. He maintained that when de Landa had commanded of his informant to write the equivalent of the Spanish letter "b" (for example), the Maya scribe actually produced the glyph which corresponded to the syllable, /be/, as spoken by de Landa. Knorozov did not actually put forward many new transcriptions based on his analysis, nevertheless he maintained that this approach was the key to understanding the script. In effect, the de Landa "alphabet" was to become almost the "Rosetta stone" of Mayan decipherment. A further critical principle put forward by Knorozov was that of synharmony. According to this, Mayan words or syllables which had the form consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) were often to be represented by two glyphs, each representing a CV-syllable (i.e., CV-CV). In the reading, the vowel of the second was meant to be ignored, leaving the reading (CVC) as intended. The principle also stated that when choosing the second CV glyph, it would be one with an echo vowel that matched the vowel of the first glyph syllable. Later analysis has proved this to be largely correct. Knorozov further improved his decipherment technique in his 1963 monograph The Writing of the Maya Indians and published translations of Mayan manuscripts in his 1975 work Maya Hieroglyphic Manuscripts. During the 1960s, other Mayanists and researchers began to expand upon Knorozov's ideas. Their further field-work and examination of the extant inscriptions began to indicate that actual Maya history was recorded in the stelae inscriptions, and not just calendric and astronomical information. The Russian-born but American-resident scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff was foremost in this work, eventually convincing Thompson and other doubters that historical events were recorded in the script. Other early supporters of the phonetic approach championed by Knorozov included Michael D. Coe and David Kelley, and whilst initially they were in a clear minority, more and more supporters came to this view as further evidence and research progressed. Through the rest of the decade and into the next, Proskouriakoff and others continued to develop the theme, and using Knorozov's results and other approaches began to piece together some decipherments of the script. A major breakthrough came during the first round table or Mesa Redonda conference at the Maya site of Palenque in 1973, when using the syllabic approach those present (mostly) deciphered what turned out to be a list of former rulers of that particular Maya city-state. Subsequent decades saw many further such advances, to the point now where quite a significant portion of the surviving inscriptions can be read. Most Mayanists and accounts of the decipherment history apportion much of the credit to the impetus and insight provided by Knorozov's contributions, to a man who had not as yet set foot outside of his native Russia, but had still been able to make important contributions to the understanding of this distant, ancient civilization. Condition: Corners bumped, edge wear to slipcase else a very good set., Universidad de Quintana Roo, 1999, 3, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1867. Twelfth Edition. Hardcover. Good. No dust jacket. Rebound, library grade binding. All listed engravings and map present. Some page foxing and soiling noted.. Catherwood, Frederick (Draftsman). 424 and 474 pages. front., illus., 27 pl. (2 fold. ) port., map, plan. 22 cm. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: John Lloyd Stephens. John Lloyd Stephens (November 28, 1805 October 13, 1852) was an American explorer, writer, and diplomat. Stephens was a pivotal figure in the rediscovery of Maya civilization throughout Middle America. John Lloyd Stephens was born November 28, 1805, in the township of Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Stephens received an education in the Classics at two privately-tutored schools. At the early age of 13 he enrolled at Columbia College, graduating at the top of his class four years later in 1822. Stephens read with interest early accounts of ruined cities of Mesoamerica by such writers and explorers as Alexander von Humboldt and Juan Galindo. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren commissioned Stephens as Special Ambassador to Central America. While there, the government of the Federal Republic of Central America fell apart in civil war. His Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán gives a vivid description of some of those events which Stephens witnessed. Stephens and his traveling companion, architect and draftsman Frederick Catherwood first came across Maya ruins at Copán, having landed in British Honduras (present-day Belize). They were astonished at their findings and spent a couple weeks mapping the site. They surmised that this must have been built by some long forgotten people as they couldn't imagine the native Mayans as having lived in the city. Stephens was actually able to buy the city of Copan for a sum of $50 and had dreams of floating it down the river and into museums in The United States. They went on to Palenque, Uxmal, and according to Stephens, visited a total of 44 sites. Stephens and Catherwood reached Palenque in April 1840 and left in early June. They documented the Temple of the Inscriptions, the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Foliated Cross. [4] Of even greater importance, their book provided descriptions of several ancient Maya sites, along with illustrations by Catherwood. These were greatly superior in both amount and accuracy of depiction to the small amount of information on ancient Mesoamerica previously published. Stephens continued his investigations of Maya ruins with a return trip to Yucatán which produced a further book. His books served to inspire Edgar Allan Poe, who also reviewed three of his travel books for the New York Review and Graham's Magazine. He suffered from a disease of the liver, and died after four months of illness at the age of forty-six. He is buried in the New York City Marble Cemetery. Stephens is the subject of a biography Maya Explorer by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, first published in 1947., Harper & Brothers, 1867, 2.5<
