Stephen D. Houston

The second book I've read in this series "Reading the Past" (Egyptian Hieroglyphics was the first). I'm sorry to say Houston doesn't come across nearly as well as Davies as a writer for the lay audience. A big chunk of the early book is about history, but the history of Western attempts to decipher the script rather than its own history - okay, but I have no particular interest in the lives and rivalries of these academics. When he does begin discussing the scripts, it didn't go too well. show more It's a very complicated system, involving intricate pictures that are combined in clusters to create words, which are themselves arranged in rows. Houston just never spends the time to explain simply how a basic reading goes, by showing you a cluster and breaking it down into parts. The very first example you see, he's making a point about exceptions to the rules and shows a few signs and a reading, but since he's making about three separate points in the same example I couldn't decipher it at all. It's not clear how the transcription relates to the clusters, let alone the individual symbols. As a result I never had a sound basis to follow the further explanations. I didn't expect to come out understanding Mayan writing, but I did hope to come out feeling like I knew how it worked, as I did with the hieroglyphs. Sadly, Davies doesn't pull that off. It's a pretty dry book that doesn't really accomplish its aim, in my view. show less