and so it begins
Managing to escape from Greek class a little early last night, I was able to get to Die! Mommie, Die! rehearsal at the Bailiwick. The space truly looks great, but it’s quirky and needs some 60’s-ing up. The decor is pretty flat at the moment (although the set is fairly angular) and a few tidbits here and there should really liven things up.
It felt good to be back in that space again. Not sure why, but it did.
After I returned home I fell into watching an episode of Nova about Mayan epigraphers and their quest to decipher the glyphs found in South America. The polyglot in me DEMANDED I watch the entire show, thus I stayed up far later than intended.
But what a fascinating story! To look at the inscriptions coating the walls of temples and eventually get to an “Ah hah!” moment where you can understand them must have been the greatest intellectual orgasm ever.
Not to mention that Mayan writing is inherently beautiful. They have many ornate constructs for both concepts and sounds, as opposed to a pure alphabet (like we do in english), a pure syllabary for sounds (similar to the phonetic writings in Japanese), or even pictograms (like Chinese).
Each of the characters across constitutes the concept or word, and depending on where and when it is used, it can be as ornate or simple as needed. They literally have the ability to paint with words, and when you think that they were adorning sacred spaces in stone carvings that would last for eons, the thought that went into the writing is both staggering and revealing about the genius of their society.
Remember, they were doing this while the ancient civilizations of what would become Europe and Asia were still brewing up their concepts of culture and writing systems. That’s sort of why the ‘intellectual orgasm’ I mentioned above would have been so great. Here was not only a fully developed and artistic writing system, but it could actually be deciphered, acting as history books.
History, due to the fact that they invented one of the oldest (generally accepted) calender systems in the known world, based on a vigesimal (base-20) system. In the glyphs that were deciphered, much of the information relates to itself based on the calendering system, so perfect copies of historical records are right there, in stone, for eternity.
Fascinating stuff. Now you see why it kept me up!
Image via famsi.org