Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg

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Brasseur de Bourbourg
Title page of the history of Mexico

Abbé Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (born September 8, 1814 in Bourbourg , Département Nord , † January 8, 1874 in Nice ) was a French historian , ethnologist and archaeologist .

Life

Brasseur de Bourbourg , as he was mostly just called, studied theology and philosophy in Belgium. In 1845 he was a teacher at the Québec Catholic Seminary . In the following years he particularly distinguished himself through his Central America studies. In 1854 he found the Maya manuscript Popol Vuh in the library of Guatemala City . In 1855 he translated the Annals of the Cakchiquel , and in 1862 he discovered in Madrid the lost manuscript of Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán , which later became one of the foundations for deciphering Mayan writing .

In his Grammaire de la langue quichée (1862), Brasseur de Bourbourg began to establish a connection between the Mayan culture and the island state of Atlantis described by Plato . In 1866, Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l'ancienne civilization du Mexique) was published, the rich illustrations were by Jean-Frédéric Waldeck . A connection with the architecture of classical Greco-Roman antiquity was also insinuated on the basis of the illustrations. Due to his inadequate ability to decipher the Mayan Codices, Brasseur mistakenly believed he could see in them accounts of a lost land called Mu . These claims met with great resonance and inspired Augustus Le Plongeon and Ignatius Donnelly , among others, to hypotheses about the location of Atlantis . Together with Brasseur's first translation of Popol Vuh, they form the basis for New Age myths about an alleged after-effects of Mayan culture in the present.

Publications

  • 1859/1860: Voyage sur l'Isthme de Tehuantepec dans l'état de Chiapas et la République de Guatemala . Paris.
  • 1861: Popol Vuh, le Livre sacré des Quichés etc. , 2 volumes. Paris.
  • 1862: Grammaire Quichée et le drame de abinal Achí (grammar of the Quiché language and the drama of Rabinal Achí ), Paris.
  • 1866: Monuments anciens du Mexique. Palenque, et autres ruins de l'ancien civilization du Mexique . Paris.
  • 1867: Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique Centrale durant les années antérieurs de Christophe Colomb ; 4 volumes. Arthus-Bertrand, Editeur. Paris.
  • 1868: Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique . Paris.
  • 1871: Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatemalienne . Paris.

literature

Web links


Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Umberto Eco : The History of the Legendary Countries and Cities. Hanser, Munich 2013, p. 198.
personal data
SURNAME Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles Etienne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian , ethnologist and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1814
PLACE OF BIRTH Bourbourg , North Department
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1874
Place of death Nice