Thomas Sylvester Barthel

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Thomas Sylvester Barthel (born January 4, 1923 in Berlin ; † April 3, 1997 in Tübingen ) was a German ethnologist and university professor . He became known worldwide for his basic work on deciphering the Rongorongo script.

biography

Barthel was born as the son of the working-class poet Max Barthel in Berlin-Wedding. In 1940 he completed his high school education at the Lessing School in Berlin with the Abitur and in the same year he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in Poland. During the Second World War he worked as a decipherer, which was very helpful for his later professional interest in deciphering foreign scripts. In 1946 Barthel studied ethnology in Berlin with Richard Thurnwald and Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch as well as geopolitics with Albrecht Haushofer and from 1949 ethnology in Leipzig with Julius Lips and his wife Eva Lips . In 1950 he began studying ethnology with Franz Termer in Hamburg and received his doctorate in 1952 with a study on the Codex Dresdensis ("Studies on the deciphering of astronomical, Augurian and calendar chapters in the Dresden Maya manuscript").

A scholarship in 1957/58 as a visiting researcher at the Universidad de Chile enabled ethnological research on the Atacameños on site and from July 4, 1957 to February 1, 1958, he traveled to Easter Island on the Chilean sailing training ship Esmeralda . He processed the knowledge he acquired there into his book “Das eightchte Land”, a scientific analysis of the settlement myth of Hotu Matua .

His habilitation thesis “Basics for deciphering the Easter Island script”, published in 1958, is a globally recognized and, in large part, still valid basic work. For the first time, this meticulous treatise systematically compiled all of the surviving written documents of the Rongorongo script, with details of their origin, exact markings and a complete list of the known characters. To catalog the Rongorongo glyphs , Barthel developed a number system with which each character can be represented as a three-digit number. In an expanded and supplemented form, it is still the standard in Easter Island research today.

Barthel also dealt intensively with the deciphering of the Maya script . From 1965 to 1966 he traveled to Mexico to do field research. He was the first to identify the emblem glyphs of the classic Maya centers and thus made a decisive contribution to the deciphering of the political structures of the Maya empire. Together with the British researcher John Eric Sidney Thompson , Barthel was, however, a staunch opponent of the hypotheses of the Russian researcher Yuri Walentinowitsch Knorosow , whose phonetic approach ultimately led to the breakthrough in the deciphering of Mayan writing.

In 1959 Thomas Barthel went to the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen as a professor at the Ethnological Institute, which he headed from 1964 until his retirement in 1988, and built up the collection of oceanic art there.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Thomas Barthel: New Readings on Mayan Script (dedicated to J. Eric S. Thompson on his 75th birthday), Stuttgart 1974

Fonts (selection)

  • Comments on an astronomical quipu from southern Peru (1951)
  • Studies on the deciphering of astronomical, auguric and calendar chapters in the Dresden Mayan manuscript (1952)
  • The main deity of the Easter Islanders (1957)
  • Basics for deciphering the Easter Island script (1958)
  • Round buildings on Easter Island (1960)
  • The Sacrifice of the Heart in Ancient Mexico (1965)
  • Writing Systems (1968)
  • The eighth country: The discovery and settlement of Easter Island according to indigenous traditions (1974), ISBN 0-82480-553-4
  • An Early Key to Indo-Mexican Studies (1992)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Barthel, Thomas Sylvester
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ethnologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 1997
Place of death Tübingen