The night after visiting Hacienda Sotuta Peon we decided to visit downtown Merida again. Merida seems to close streets in the center of town almost each day to present cultural or musical events. The restaurants placed their tables right out into the closed thoroughfare. Music filled the air as each block hosts a different band. Passionate temperatures and dancing in the streets. Deep into the city center in front of the tall cream facade of the Cathedral Idelfonso there was a historical band from Vera Cruz, called Mono Blanco (White Monkey). Their music captured me. It was the kind of original folk music with words that bite more than the average pop songs. This band has dedicated itself to interpreting traditional sounds from Veracruz employing traditional instruments that the band makes themselves. Those musical traditions have come from a variety of sources as Veracruz is a port on the gulf with long term connections between the carribean and New Orleans,,,, besides folk translations of spanish baroque music. The fifth link below is a unique version of La Bamba, a vercruzano song from the 1930's. About a third of the way through the chubby guy playing the jaw of a burro takes over and turns it into a rap song.
https://youtu.be/ia1l37SDHJ4 one string!
https://youtu.be/8DZmatM6NXY
https://youtu.be/Ij3uvB0nJBY
https://youtu.be/cY9J-ml2ybo
https://youtu.be/L06lckJECPM
https://youtu.be/YtWWnDAtkhw
I have said that mexican music is like a biology lesson because it is filled with body parts,,,,corazones, labios, and pechos (hearts, lips and breasts). All they lack are livers, kidneys, and spleens. Mono Blanco with their tiny veracruzano sombreros,had a great sound,,,carribean-mexican,,,steel drums, bongos, guitars, and an eerie vercruzano folk wail, like a cry for help while immersed in ecstasy.The steel drums and guitars bounced off the Cathedral and about the square and I was reminded of a jazz concert I saw in Italy in the center of Perugia, a 15th century city. The band in Perugia was led by Mussolini's grandson,,,but besides this anomoly, it was the renaissance setting with modern sounds bouncing off carved facades, and swirling about the faces of jaded gargoyles that swept me away,,,the epochal mix united well.
Where Avenida Montejo begins or ends for that matter there was a concert of various bands. On the stage at the moment we arrived was a mariachi band. Mariachis are something between elegance and comedy. Their traditional outfits with the silver dangles, scarves, and oversized sombreros, border on droll and at the same time retain a mature distinctive air. The tightness of their outfits often exaggerates their big bellies. The bass player is oft times a midget hidden behind his oversized bass acoustic guitar. The guy playing the ukelele might be a giant.
As the night wore on inebriation induced them to break out in bursts of dance, to spin about, and ad-lib. Our tired legs begged a seat so we sought a couple of empty chairs. It was near midnight and the mariachi was two or three songs shy of their finish. This was an unusual mariachi. The short reddish haired lead singer was either putting on a great gay act or he was flaming. Touching his cheeks in feminine gestures, and swishing about the stage with his violin he sang the standard mariachi lyrics yet every now and then slipping in his own aside that reinforced the strangeness of the event. A standard song about unrequited love would fill the night and then he would add at the end of a phrase , "me gustaria colgar a un cuerno" ("and me, I would like hang on a horn, horn being a euphemism for cock"). The audience, an older crowd, went wild with laughter at each remark. Mexicans have a relation with gays that yet I do not fully understand. At a similar event in the states the words would seem to present more of a threat. There would be a raft of people offended,,religious or racist, or other gays for that matter. Here nobody seems to become offended by the inferences even if they are cliches. I do not know if this translates to tolerance in all circumstances, but it certainly makes for a less politically correct atmosphere, a more comfortable sitting,,, free of agendas.
Merida,, the "White City", because of its many white limestone houses were built by hennequen, the agave fiber from which is made sisal rope. The present town is built on top of the Mayan city of T’Ho´, which was established around 1240 by the mayan chief itza Ah-Chan-Caan.
Common sights crawling over the buildings in the center of town
Merida was founded upon the mayan ruins of T'Ho by Don Francisco de Montejo y Leon, known as “El Mozo”,, another spanish "pacifier" in the region. The commercial beer,Montejo is named after him. It is said that one of his soldiers by the name of Francisco de Almaraz suggested the name of Merida when remembering the Roman ruins of Spain’s own Merida.
After hennequin production declined, Merida, with its cultural and edificial bones intact, returned to a beautiful picturesque tranquility. It is still one of the safest cities in Mexico. The cuisine of Merida is lip smacking delicious. Ceviche, the rich “tikinxik” sea bass or the “esmedregal” seasoned with “achiote” accompanied with greens, cochinita pibil, papadzules, panuchos (watch how you pronounce that one,,, panocha means cunt), sopa de lima, the chiles “xcatic” or “gueros”, and dulce de papaya .A great example of mestizo food is stuffed cheese, a whole Dutch cheese filled with finely ground pork meat and dressed with olives and capers. “Poc-chuc” is an elegantly prepared pork cooked on a comal accompanied with tomato and red onion. There are appetizing cocktails of prawns, large oysters, “chivita” snails, and calamar. The best known of these is Vuelve a La Vida that contains enough oysters, shrimp, and octopus that it should really be named The Lazarus Cocktail for it just might reinvigorate the dead.
The following day we reserved for Izamal. It is a small town near San Jose. It may be the oldest city in the Yucatan. One will never know for sure for it has been "converted" to something more colonial with just remnants of the mayan past. As Merida is the White City Izamal is the yellow city. When Pope John Paul visited several years ago they painted their entire town mustard yellow. Wish I had the paint contract for that one. Izamal is also the sight of many local artisans. Mario, our guide from Hacianda Cholule, where we were staying, drove us the 45 minutes to Izamal.
Mario our guide
During that time I pelted him with questions about his life. He spoke in gaps,,,or he left spaces between phrases,,,something many yucatecans do. After a question he would smile and there would follow an uncomfortable silence,,,as if he had not heard you,,,,and then he would slowly answer as if he needed to get it right. He was raised in a small poor pueblo near San Jose Cholule. His father was a farmer. His large family rarely had enough food. Sometimes just the masa (dough) for tortillas to eat.
When he was about 12 they moved from their village to Merida where his father became a tailor. Life was a little better but not much. Mario would occaisionally return to the homestead where his grandparents still lived to help with the agricultural endeavors. Probably it was a good combination for raising someone....want and a work ethic. When he was about 18 he went to the State of Mexico to join the seminary. He lived in our region for a while working in the poor cold villages on the other side of the Volcano, Xianatecatl. I know these places. The people live in slabwood houses with holes big enough to throw a cat through. It is colder than the mug shot for John Wayne Gacy. I went fishing once on the "other side".More than 10,000 feet up. I wasn't able to cast my line in the early morning because ice was forming in the eyelets of my rod restricting the movement of the line. Hard to believe it was Mexico. All the images of Mexico are of beach bathers or desert rats. There exists another vast "high altitude" culture here. Lake Titicaca Types in the land of sandy desert and beach towels.
Iglesia de San Idelfonso, the first cathedral in the Americas, the backdrop for the festive evening atmosphere in Merida. The stones for this church come from pyramids dismantled by the Spaniards.
Iglesia de Jesus
La Iglesia de Jesus
Merida,, the "White City", because of its many white limestone houses were built by hennequen, the agave fiber from which is made sisal rope. The present town is built on top of the Mayan city of T’Ho´, which was established around 1240 by the mayan chief itza Ah-Chan-Caan.
White house in Merida on Avenida Montejo
Common sights crawling over the buildings in the center of town
Small park on the side of the Iglesia de Jesus
The presidencia
After hennequin production declined, Merida, with its cultural and edificial bones intact, returned to a beautiful picturesque tranquility. It is still one of the safest cities in Mexico. The cuisine of Merida is lip smacking delicious. Ceviche, the rich “tikinxik” sea bass or the “esmedregal” seasoned with “achiote” accompanied with greens, cochinita pibil, papadzules, panuchos (watch how you pronounce that one,,, panocha means cunt), sopa de lima, the chiles “xcatic” or “gueros”, and dulce de papaya .A great example of mestizo food is stuffed cheese, a whole Dutch cheese filled with finely ground pork meat and dressed with olives and capers. “Poc-chuc” is an elegantly prepared pork cooked on a comal accompanied with tomato and red onion. There are appetizing cocktails of prawns, large oysters, “chivita” snails, and calamar. The best known of these is Vuelve a La Vida that contains enough oysters, shrimp, and octopus that it should really be named The Lazarus Cocktail for it just might reinvigorate the dead.
The following day we reserved for Izamal. It is a small town near San Jose. It may be the oldest city in the Yucatan. One will never know for sure for it has been "converted" to something more colonial with just remnants of the mayan past. As Merida is the White City Izamal is the yellow city. When Pope John Paul visited several years ago they painted their entire town mustard yellow. Wish I had the paint contract for that one. Izamal is also the sight of many local artisans. Mario, our guide from Hacianda Cholule, where we were staying, drove us the 45 minutes to Izamal.
Mario our guide
During that time I pelted him with questions about his life. He spoke in gaps,,,or he left spaces between phrases,,,something many yucatecans do. After a question he would smile and there would follow an uncomfortable silence,,,as if he had not heard you,,,,and then he would slowly answer as if he needed to get it right. He was raised in a small poor pueblo near San Jose Cholule. His father was a farmer. His large family rarely had enough food. Sometimes just the masa (dough) for tortillas to eat.
When he was about 12 they moved from their village to Merida where his father became a tailor. Life was a little better but not much. Mario would occaisionally return to the homestead where his grandparents still lived to help with the agricultural endeavors. Probably it was a good combination for raising someone....want and a work ethic. When he was about 18 he went to the State of Mexico to join the seminary. He lived in our region for a while working in the poor cold villages on the other side of the Volcano, Xianatecatl. I know these places. The people live in slabwood houses with holes big enough to throw a cat through. It is colder than the mug shot for John Wayne Gacy. I went fishing once on the "other side".More than 10,000 feet up. I wasn't able to cast my line in the early morning because ice was forming in the eyelets of my rod restricting the movement of the line. Hard to believe it was Mexico. All the images of Mexico are of beach bathers or desert rats. There exists another vast "high altitude" culture here. Lake Titicaca Types in the land of sandy desert and beach towels.
Izamal was all that it was promised. They truly all live in a yellow submarine. Izamal has been continuously occupied for thousands of years. As of 2000 the population was estimated at 15,000 people. It is known as "The City of Hills" (though most of the "hills" are probably the remains of ancient temple pyramids.
The Ceiba and the statue of Bishop Landa
A beautifully carved door in the convent
Inside the Convent
Yellow is the color of hope,,, not abandonment as in these fotos. I just liked the fact that there were no cars at this moment.
The Ceiba and the statue of Bishop Landa
A beautifully carved door in the convent
Inside the Convent
Izamal was an important site of the Pre-Columbian Maya civilization. It was sacred to the creator deity Itzamna and to the Sun God Kinich Ahau. Izamal was a site of pilgrimages in the region rivaled only by Chichen Itza. Two huge Pre-Columbian structures are still easily visible there and from some distance away in all directions. The first is a great pyramid to the Maya Sun God, Kinch Kak Mo, just three blocks from the Franciscan monastery, with a base covering over 2 acres (8,000 m²),,,,,and that is a big piece of real estate not presently owned by a politician or a priest, with a volume of some 700,000 cubic meters. That's one big resevoir of cubic space,,, perhaps 7000 tanker trucks.
Another, Pap Hol Chac was located where the Franciscan Monastery San Antonio de Padua now exists. Atop its grand base was a pyramid of 10 levels. A great stucco mask still existed on one side as recently as the 1840s, as can be seen in a drawing by the explorer Frederick Catherwood published by John LLoyd Stevens, the great illustrator of the Mayan culture. The second structure is the so called "acropolis", was most likely a large man-made mound probably built up over several centuries and originally supporting city palaces and temples. It is here on the acropolis that the Convent San Antonio de Padua was built.
In the center of Izamal where this Franciscan convent now stands upon what was the acropolis, part of the Pap Hol Chac pyramid complex. Pap Hol Chac means house of the forehead full of lightning". The pyramid was the largest in the Mayan world and partially dismantled by the spaniards. It had more than 150 steps. The sanctuary atop its remains and the convent were fashioned from its stones.
After the Spanish conquest of Yucatan in the 16th century a Spanish colonial city was founded atop the existing Maya one, ( the usual method of conquest was elimination by overlaying) however it was deemed a daunting project to eliminate both the pyramid and the acropolis so the Spanish decided to place a small Christian temple atop the great pyramid and build a large Franciscan Monastery atop the acropolis. It was named after San Antonio de Padua. Completed in 1561, the atrium of the Monastery was second in size only to that at the Vatican. Much of the cut stone from the Pre-Columbian city was reused to build the Spanish churches, monastery, and surrounding buildings.
Another, Pap Hol Chac was located where the Franciscan Monastery San Antonio de Padua now exists. Atop its grand base was a pyramid of 10 levels. A great stucco mask still existed on one side as recently as the 1840s, as can be seen in a drawing by the explorer Frederick Catherwood published by John LLoyd Stevens, the great illustrator of the Mayan culture. The second structure is the so called "acropolis", was most likely a large man-made mound probably built up over several centuries and originally supporting city palaces and temples. It is here on the acropolis that the Convent San Antonio de Padua was built.
Frederick Catherwood's drawing
In the center of Izamal where this Franciscan convent now stands upon what was the acropolis, part of the Pap Hol Chac pyramid complex. Pap Hol Chac means house of the forehead full of lightning". The pyramid was the largest in the Mayan world and partially dismantled by the spaniards. It had more than 150 steps. The sanctuary atop its remains and the convent were fashioned from its stones.
After the Spanish conquest of Yucatan in the 16th century a Spanish colonial city was founded atop the existing Maya one, ( the usual method of conquest was elimination by overlaying) however it was deemed a daunting project to eliminate both the pyramid and the acropolis so the Spanish decided to place a small Christian temple atop the great pyramid and build a large Franciscan Monastery atop the acropolis. It was named after San Antonio de Padua. Completed in 1561, the atrium of the Monastery was second in size only to that at the Vatican. Much of the cut stone from the Pre-Columbian city was reused to build the Spanish churches, monastery, and surrounding buildings.
Very little archeological work has been done at Izamal, but it is known that it was already an important city by the start of the Classic era about 200 AD, and over 80 archaeologically important structures have been mapped here.
Very Important If You Want To Know Something About Inquisitions and the mysterious Mayan Language:
The fourth Bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa (don't forget this name),,the mayan culture butcher,, ruled the catholic region here,,,, yet ironically 400 years after his life ended he became the E=MC 2 man about the lingual community.
The Maya culture was at its height about 800 A.D., but by 900 many of their cities had been abandoned. On Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, they had built magnificent pyramids and temples that still towered above the jungles when the Spanish arrived. They had developed a complicated calendar and an excellent numerical system,,, not just numbers one, two, three, many,, but with the concept of zero a very profound number for the epoch. Zero is still an important part of my life to this day. For about 2000 years, the Maya kept written records of their civilization. The Maya, scholar Michael D. Coe describes the Maya books. The pages were long strips of bark paper, folded like screens. Highly respected scribes wrote and illustrated them, using brushes dipped in red or black ink. According to images on pottery, these books called codices had jaguar-skin covers.
ONCE MORE—INTO THE FLAMES:
Just a little on the crafts of Izamal
The fourth Bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa (don't forget this name),,the mayan culture butcher,, ruled the catholic region here,,,, yet ironically 400 years after his life ended he became the E=MC 2 man about the lingual community.
The Maya culture was at its height about 800 A.D., but by 900 many of their cities had been abandoned. On Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, they had built magnificent pyramids and temples that still towered above the jungles when the Spanish arrived. They had developed a complicated calendar and an excellent numerical system,,, not just numbers one, two, three, many,, but with the concept of zero a very profound number for the epoch. Zero is still an important part of my life to this day. For about 2000 years, the Maya kept written records of their civilization. The Maya, scholar Michael D. Coe describes the Maya books. The pages were long strips of bark paper, folded like screens. Highly respected scribes wrote and illustrated them, using brushes dipped in red or black ink. According to images on pottery, these books called codices had jaguar-skin covers.
The Maya wrote with symbols called glyphs a bit like
Egyptian hieroglyphics,, but not really, for it finally turned out they weren't just pictographs but syllables. Mayans carved information into the buildings they created,
and they wrote thousands of codices that contained prophecies, songs, rituals,
genealogies, also history and science. When the Spanish reached the Yucatan, a lot of those
books were still left in the abandoned ruins. Most of them would soon be
deliberately destroyed.
Diego de Landa was one of the first Franciscans to arrive in Yucatan, Mexico. Upon his arrival, he atempted to evangelize the indigenous people of the area. He wanted them to abandon their beliefs and customs and convert to the Catholic faith. But many continued to practice their rituals and were reluctant to embrace the new religion that was shown to them.
It sounds like the Augustinian attempt to evangelize in Chalma, a holy site near Tenancingo. Landa had a love hate relationship with the Maya people in that twisted sort of catholic way, you know tough holy ghost kind of love,, yet he was determined to convert them to Christianity at all costs.
One day near the town of Mani, the sexton of the church discovered evidence of an animal sacrifice in a cave, not uncommon in the mayan world. Landa was informed and quickly took this as an opportunity to demonstrate the will of God. On July 12, 1562, the Auto de Fe was begun in Mani, 100 kilometers southeast of Merida. In fact after the inquisition Landa was recalled to Spain for the barbarous acts that took place in Mani and he used the animal sacrifice event as justification for his actions. At Landa's own painless inquisition when he wasrecalled to Spain the friar told the tribunal: "We found a large number of books , and because they contained nothing and in which there was not just superstition but falsehood of the devil, we burned them all, about which they (the indians) felt wonderful and they were sorry", a pretty nervy assumption, given catholic history of persecution through cultural blindness and the astonishing fact that Landa was unable to even read the codices. This is pure negation of another culture because of refusal to comprehend. Klatu Barada Mikto,,, if you remember that movie The Day The Earth Stood Still with Michael Renny. "Ignorance and bad teeth have at least one thing in common. Keeping your mouth closed makes them both less obvious". Landa expressed surprise that the Indians got so upset about what he was doing. According to some accounts, 157 Indians who resisted the inquisition were killed in his clean-up process. However in true catholic style Landa was absolved, returning to the New World as the appointed Bishop of Yucatán.
In his Auto Da Fe de Mani Landa arrested several Mayan rulers and ordered them to a tribunal. They were marched to the tune of the Psalm "Miserere mei, Deus" shorn of their locks and tortured. Hoisting was a favorite of Landa. Hoisting consists of binding hands and hoisting unfortunate subjects up with weights tied to their feet in order to exact confessions of faith. Another torture is pictured below.
Then the natives witnessed another horror, the destruction of almost all their history. Five thousand idols of different shapes and dimensions were broken or burned, 13 large stones used as altars, 22 small carved stones, 27 scrolls with signs and hieroglyphics, tons of books and 197 vessels of all sizes. Some Maya priests had tried to save their books by fleeing into the jungle with them. But the materials didn’t hold up well in the wet, humid Yucatan climate, and those eventually deteriorated and disappeared. Only four codices survive today. That left those who wanted to study the culture very little to work with. Fortunately, some glyphs were carved into the nonflammable stone of buildings and monuments. But many prominent Scholars believed that those marks were religious symbols, not actual writing. Ironically years later, perhaps, repentant for the barbarism he had committed, the good bishop devoted himself to the study of Mayan culture. And he wrote a book entitled "Relation of the things of Yucatan". Even though Landa was responsible for an irreconcilable auto de fe fortunately Diego de Landa was an extremely good linguist. His contemporaries,, all these early Franciscans, who were in Yucatán, learned Maya very early. We have important vocabularies from them, grammars and so forth. Because of Landa's guilt complex and the attempts by the early franciscan friars the mayan language would be decodified.
Bishop Landa
It sounds like the Augustinian attempt to evangelize in Chalma, a holy site near Tenancingo. Landa had a love hate relationship with the Maya people in that twisted sort of catholic way, you know tough holy ghost kind of love,, yet he was determined to convert them to Christianity at all costs.
One day near the town of Mani, the sexton of the church discovered evidence of an animal sacrifice in a cave, not uncommon in the mayan world. Landa was informed and quickly took this as an opportunity to demonstrate the will of God. On July 12, 1562, the Auto de Fe was begun in Mani, 100 kilometers southeast of Merida. In fact after the inquisition Landa was recalled to Spain for the barbarous acts that took place in Mani and he used the animal sacrifice event as justification for his actions. At Landa's own painless inquisition when he wasrecalled to Spain the friar told the tribunal: "We found a large number of books , and because they contained nothing and in which there was not just superstition but falsehood of the devil, we burned them all, about which they (the indians) felt wonderful and they were sorry", a pretty nervy assumption, given catholic history of persecution through cultural blindness and the astonishing fact that Landa was unable to even read the codices. This is pure negation of another culture because of refusal to comprehend. Klatu Barada Mikto,,, if you remember that movie The Day The Earth Stood Still with Michael Renny. "Ignorance and bad teeth have at least one thing in common. Keeping your mouth closed makes them both less obvious". Landa expressed surprise that the Indians got so upset about what he was doing. According to some accounts, 157 Indians who resisted the inquisition were killed in his clean-up process. However in true catholic style Landa was absolved, returning to the New World as the appointed Bishop of Yucatán.
In his Auto Da Fe de Mani Landa arrested several Mayan rulers and ordered them to a tribunal. They were marched to the tune of the Psalm "Miserere mei, Deus" shorn of their locks and tortured. Hoisting was a favorite of Landa. Hoisting consists of binding hands and hoisting unfortunate subjects up with weights tied to their feet in order to exact confessions of faith. Another torture is pictured below.
Then the natives witnessed another horror, the destruction of almost all their history. Five thousand idols of different shapes and dimensions were broken or burned, 13 large stones used as altars, 22 small carved stones, 27 scrolls with signs and hieroglyphics, tons of books and 197 vessels of all sizes. Some Maya priests had tried to save their books by fleeing into the jungle with them. But the materials didn’t hold up well in the wet, humid Yucatan climate, and those eventually deteriorated and disappeared. Only four codices survive today. That left those who wanted to study the culture very little to work with. Fortunately, some glyphs were carved into the nonflammable stone of buildings and monuments. But many prominent Scholars believed that those marks were religious symbols, not actual writing. Ironically years later, perhaps, repentant for the barbarism he had committed, the good bishop devoted himself to the study of Mayan culture. And he wrote a book entitled "Relation of the things of Yucatan". Even though Landa was responsible for an irreconcilable auto de fe fortunately Diego de Landa was an extremely good linguist. His contemporaries,, all these early Franciscans, who were in Yucatán, learned Maya very early. We have important vocabularies from them, grammars and so forth. Because of Landa's guilt complex and the attempts by the early franciscan friars the mayan language would be decodified.
Later in his life Bishop Landa tried to learn the mayan writing system. He was convinced that the glyphs were an alphabet, Landa enlisted a nobleman, Gaspar Antonio Chi, to help him. According to Michael Coe in Breaking the Maya Code, Landa’s method went something like this: He pronounced a Spanish letter, then asked Chi to point out the matching glyph. Landa then sketched each glyph and wrote the letter beneath it. So could people now read what the ancient Maya had written. Unfortunately, no. Landa’s chart had three symbols for the letter “A,” two symbols for “B,” and other notes that didn’t make sense. The problem was with his pre-conception about the writing system, that symbols were individual letters. He didn't conceive that he was dealing with syllables not letters. He misinterpreted what Chi was telling him. What he gave us in this is a kind of much flawed alphabet.
What came to pass by acident:
A long time passed. Landa was gone,, the history of the Maya ashes and rot,,, but something marvellous happened. In 1862, more than three hundred years after the book burning, a franciscan Abbé named Brasseur de Bourbourg was in Madrid searching through a collection of old materials about the Americas. He came across a manuscript called Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán Account of the Affairs of Yucatan written by Diego de Landa himself. While recalled to Spain, Landa had gathered up his notes and wrote a long essay on Maya life. The manuscript that the Brasseur found was a copy of Landa’s original, probably incomplete, yet it gave details about the Maya calendar, the number system, and people’s everyday lives. And it included notes on the glyphs. Whoa! This would prove to be mindboggling!
A long time passed. Landa was gone,, the history of the Maya ashes and rot,,, but something marvellous happened. In 1862, more than three hundred years after the book burning, a franciscan Abbé named Brasseur de Bourbourg was in Madrid searching through a collection of old materials about the Americas. He came across a manuscript called Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán Account of the Affairs of Yucatan written by Diego de Landa himself. While recalled to Spain, Landa had gathered up his notes and wrote a long essay on Maya life. The manuscript that the Brasseur found was a copy of Landa’s original, probably incomplete, yet it gave details about the Maya calendar, the number system, and people’s everyday lives. And it included notes on the glyphs. Whoa! This would prove to be mindboggling!
Brasseur de Bourbourg's main interest in the document, however, was a section in which de Landa reproduced what he termed "an alphabet" of the as yet undeciphered Maya hieroglyphics, the writing system of the ancient Maya civilization. In this passage de Landa had annotated the Mayan symbols (or glyphs) which supposedly corresponded to the letters of the Spanish alphabet, as given to him by a Maya noble who he had questioned about the correlation between spanish and mayan. Brasseur de Bourbourg realised that this could prove to be basis of deciphering the Maya script, and he announced this discovery when republishing the manuscript in late 1863 with the title, Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa The attempt however proved to be more difficult.
Yet Brasseur had discovered a kind of rosetta Stone. He just hadn't discovered how to use it yet. Landa's alphabet proved to be valuable because of the bilingual characteristic. After Brasseur’s discovery. Brasseur himself tried to translate part of the Madrid Codex, using Landa’s ABC's, and completely fouled it up. In fact, he so misunderstood the system that he read the glyphs and the codex backwards. We now know they’re read from left to right, top to bottom.
Yet Brasseur had discovered a kind of rosetta Stone. He just hadn't discovered how to use it yet. Landa's alphabet proved to be valuable because of the bilingual characteristic. After Brasseur’s discovery. Brasseur himself tried to translate part of the Madrid Codex, using Landa’s ABC's, and completely fouled it up. In fact, he so misunderstood the system that he read the glyphs and the codex backwards. We now know they’re read from left to right, top to bottom.
Below Landa's Alphabet:
ONCE MORE—INTO THE FLAMES:
Nearly another hundred years went by and one of those coincidental miracles took place. During World War
II, a young Russian named Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov entered Berlin with the
Red Army. According to Michael Coe,
Even though he’d never been on a Maya site, Knorosov
came up with an idea that no one else had thought of. First, he re-imagined what
must have gone on between Landa and his Maya aide: Landa was speaking a Spanish
letter, and asking his Indian helper what that equaled in Mayan. But since the Maya didn’t
have an alphabet, Knorosov said, the Indian didn’t even know what a letter was. So he
got as close as he could to what Landa was saying. He pointed to images representing
words that had that sound in them.
In 1952, Knorosov published his ideas. A lot of the
long-time scholars of the
language went into denial, but it eventually became
clear that Knorosov was right. The
glyphs stood for syllables, and occasionally for
words. Researchers had already realized
that some were numbers. So, four hundred years after the books were burned,
scholars could finally unravel ancient Maya texts. Interpretation of the glyphs is
still in process, but at last it can be done. Just 35 years ago other scholars have utilized the Landa Alphabet to begin to unravel the mayan language. Ironically Landa's destruction of codices left him with a festering guilt. To whiten his blackened soul he created an alphabet which has been a crucial clue to the opening of the great mayan mystery.
We hired a horse- drawn carriage (caruaje) to take us to the homes where local artisans work their magic creating unique crafts. There is a handcraft route the buggy driver takes to see the workshops where miniatures are made, where hammocks are woven, where paper mache butterflies and dragonflies are crafted and where wooden jaguars, crucifixes, puppets, boxes and more are carved. Other crafts include jewelry crafted from cocoyol, the seeds of the scrubby palm, Acrocomia aculeata, and the long sharp spines of the hennequen plant. Cocoyol is the hard black marble sized seed of a type of palm. The cocoyol seedis placed in the ground for a bit to loosn the hard shell so the inner seed can then be worked. I especially liked cocoyol-man, Don Esteban, and his family. They make necklaces and bracelets combining cocoyol and hennequen spines with silver. He gave us a description of the process then Don Esteban, grabbed up a raw one and began polishing and talking. In fact he did all the talking (singing even in mayan) while his family sat there as if they had seen all this many times before. It's a burden to become a cliche by repetition. The raw seed began to turn a shiny dark cafe color with sucessive polishing. The rest of the family was occupied at a nearby table with drilling, polishing, and stringing seeds and beads. It is laborious work to create a necklace. Just to polish the henequen "points" is a chore.
Don Esteban Aban Montejo
The family had a modest showroom area. My wife began choosing and negotiating. Mama left the drilling-stringing area and got into the act now that the demo was over and the sale had begun. For the work involved his prices were very reasonable. Like thirty dollars for an elaborate necklace of cocoyol and silver. The combination is stunning. My wife walked out with two bracelets, and three necklaces and a good discount. My family knows how to bargain. They can squeeze a nickel until the buffalo's balls turn blue. Sometimes, in some of those transactions it is difficult for me to watch without a little discomfort yet almost always all parties end up smiling.
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