The following is an excerpt from a passage about Mesoamerican epigraphy.
[1]
__________________________________________________ For nearly a century, scholars believed that Mayan hieroglyphs were purely logographic or symbolic, representing whole ideas rather than individual sounds. This consensus was largely dominated by one prominent archaeologist, who insisted that the glyphs had no phonetic component. However, in the 1950s, a linguist proposed a radically different approach, suggesting that the writing system was actually logo-syllabic, combining word-signs and phonetic syllables.
[2]
This breakthrough came from analyzing surviving codices and comparing them to an alphabet recorded by a sixteenth-century bishop. The linguist realized that when native scribes wrote the Spanish letters, they wrote glyphs that matched the sounds of those letters. For example, the Spanish letter b is pronounced 'beh,' which corresponded to the Mayan glyph for the syllable be. By applying this phonetic key, scholars began reading actual Mayan words, paving the way for modern epigraphers to decode the majority of the surviving inscriptions.
Which choice best introduces the passage by establishing its main focus?
- AAlthough scholars struggled for years to read the ancient Maya script, which remained one of the world's most mysterious writing systems.
- For decades, the decipherment of the ancient Maya writing system was stalled by a fundamental misunderstanding of how the glyphs functioned.Cevap
- CAncient Maya scribes recorded their history on stone monuments and bark-paper books, these hieroglyphs have fascinated archaeologists for centuries.
- DThe preservation of ancient Mayan codices, despite the widespread destruction of texts by Spanish colonizers, are crucial to understanding their culture.