Thomas Sylvester Barthel (4 January 1923 in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
– 3 April 1997 in
Tübingen
Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three ...
) was a German
ethnologist
Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology) ...
and
epigrapher
Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered
rongorongo
Rongorongo (Rapa Nui: ) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that appears to be writing or proto-writing. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, with none being successful. Although some c ...
script of
Easter Island
Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its ne ...
.
Barthel grew up in Berlin and graduated from secondary school in 1940. During the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
, he worked as a
cryptographer
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
for the
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the '' Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previo ...
. After the war he studied folklore, geography, and prehistory in Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. He received his doctorate in Hamburg in 1952 with a thesis on
Mayan writing. From 1953 to 1956 he was a Fellow of the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
The German Research Foundation (german: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germ ...
, in 1957 a lecturer in Hamburg, and from 4 July 1957 to 1 February 1958 he was a guest researcher with the Institute for Easter Island Studies at the
University of Chile
The University of Chile ( es, Universidad de Chile) is a public research university in Santiago, Chile. It was founded on November 19, 1842, and inaugurated on September 17, 1843. .
In order to document rongorongo, Barthel visited most of the museums which housed the tablets, of which he made pencil
rubbing
A rubbing ('' frottage'') is a reproduction of the texture of a surface created by placing a piece of paper or similar material over the subject and then rubbing the paper with something to deposit marks, most commonly charcoal or pencil but ...
s. With this data he compiled the first corpus of the script, which he published as ''Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift'' in 1958. He was the first scholar to correctly identify anything in the texts: He showed that two lines in the ''Mamari'' tablet encode calendrical information.
In 1959 Barthel became Associate Professor of Ethnology at the
University of Tübingen
The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Wà ...
, and from 1964 to 1988 he was Professor of Ethnology. His primary research was in the folklore of the Americas. He bequeathed his rongorongo data to the
CEIPP The C.E.I.P.P., or the ''Centre ''(formerly ''Cercle'')'' d'Etudes sur l'île de Pâques et la Polynésie'' ("Study Centre (formerly "Circle") on Easter Island and Polynesia") is a geographic and anthropological group created by André Valenta and M ...
''(Centre d'Études de l'Îles de Pâques et de la Polynésie),'' which is engaged in verifying and expanding on his work.
Barthel was also active in the mid-twentieth century attempts to decipher the
Maya script
Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which ...
, the 'hieroglyphic' writing system of the
pre-Columbian
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, ...
Maya civilization
The Maya civilization () of the Mesoamerican people is known by its ancient temples and glyphs. Its Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is also noted for its art, a ...
in
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica ...
. He was one of the first to analyse
emblem glyph
Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which ...
s in detail and in terms of their political and hierarchical associations. His proposed identification of four major or prime emblem glyphs was later expanded upon by
Joyce Marcus
Joyce Marcus is a Latin American archaeologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds the position of Curator of Latin American Archaeo ...
, and the Barthel-Marcus quadripartite partitioning of Classic era Maya sites into four regional capitals and an associated hierarchy of four levels of site importance, became an influential concept in Mayanist research.
Along with
J. Eric S. Thompson
Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson (31 December 1898 – 9 September 1975) was a leading English Mesoamerican archeology, archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigraphy, epigrapher. While working in the United States, he dominated Maya studies and p ...
, Barthel was a strong critic of the "phonetic approach" to Maya decipherment, and held the view that the Maya script lacked
phonetic
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
ism and did not constitute a "true" writing system. In particular, Barthel stood solidly against the phonetic decipherment methodology put forward in the early 1950s by the Russian epigrapher
Yuri Knorozov
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (alternatively Knorosov; russian: link=no, Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; 19 November 1922 – 31 March 1999) was a Soviet-Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly reno ...
, who like Barthel had also worked on both the Maya and rongorongo scripts. At a 1956 meeting of the
International Congress of Americanists The International Congress of Americanists (ICA) is an international academic conference for research in multidisciplinary studies of the Americas. Established August 25, 1875 in Nancy, France, the scholars' forum has met regularly since its incept ...
in
Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...
attended by Knorozov, Barthel's criticism of the phonetic approach contributed to the continuing dismissal of Knorozov's ideas —ideas that would later be proved essentially correct when the phonetic approach championed by Knorozov provided the breakthrough in Maya decipherment from the 1970s onwards. Barthel and Knorozov would remain at-odds for the remainder of their respective careers.
[In an interview given to the Finnish Mayanist Harri Kettunen in 1998, Knorozov describes Barthel as his "old foe". See Kettunen (1998).]
Published works
* 1958a. ''Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift''. Hamburg : Cram, de Gruyter.
* 1958b. "The 'Talking Boards' of Easter Island." ''Scientific American,'' 198:61-68
* 1971. ''Pre-contact Writing in Oceania.'' In: Current Trends in Linguistics 8:1165-1186. Den Haag, Paris: Mouton.
* 1978. ''The Eighth Land: The Polynesian Discovery & Settlement of Easter Island''. Honolulu: the University Press of Hawaii.
* 1990. "Wege durch die Nacht (Rongorongo-Studien auf dem Santiagostab)", in Esen-Baur, Heide-Margaret (ed.), ''State and Perspectives of Scientific Research in Easter Island Culture.'' Courier Forschungsinstitute Senckeberg 125. Frankfurt am Mein: Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, 73–112.
Notes
References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Barthel, Thomas
German ethnologists
German cryptographers
Rongorongo
Easter Island people
Mayanists
German Mesoamericanists
1923 births
1997 deaths
Mesoamerican epigraphers
20th-century Mesoamericanists