of late medieval Bengali and related manuscripts in eastern India. The task of decipherment then proceeded from the known to the unknown and culminated in Prinsep’s reading of the Asokan inscriptions around 1837 (Prinsep 1837). He achieved this task between 1834 and 1838. The main source of study of the Kharoshti script for Prinsep was a series of Indo-Greek coins bearing royal names both in Greek and Kharoshti, which made the task of decipherment comparatively easier.

Pinsep’s spirit comes through when, writing about the framework of archaeological researches in India, he advocates “the need of an independent pursuer of the object for its own sake; or for his own amusement and instruction” (Prinsep 1835, 623).

Dilip Chakrabarti

References

Imam, Abu. 1966. Sir Alexander Cunningham and the Beginnings of Indian Archaeology. Dhaka.

Prinsep, James. 1832. “Roman Coins in Upper India.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1: 27–41.

———. 1833. “On the Greek Coins in the Cabinet of the Asiatic Society.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2: 27–41.

———. 1834. “Note on the Coins Found by Captain Cautley at Behat.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3: 227–228.

———. 1835. “On the Connection of Various Hindu Coins, etc.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 4: 623.

———. 1837. “Facsimiles of Ancient Inscriptions.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 6: 218– 223, 278–288, 663–682, 869–887.

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana

(1910–1985)

Tatiana Proskouriakoff was one of the greatest scholars of the maya civilization. She made major contributions in the areas of Maya art and architecture as well as in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics.

Proskouriakoff was born in Russia in 1910 and emigrated to the United States with her family while still a child. She graduated from university with a degree in architecture just as the Great Depression set in. She was a wonderful artist, and her talents were spotted by Linton Satterthwaite, who at the time was excavating the classic Maya site of Piedras Negras, guatemala, as part of a University of Pennsylvania project. He hired her as staff artist for the project, and her superb reconstruction drawings of ancient Maya sites and temples caught the attention of scholars working for the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., at the time the largest and best-funded institution working in the Maya area. Proskouriakoff was hired by the Carnegie Institution in 1940 and spent the rest of her career as one of its staff archaeologists, working at sites such as Copan, Uaxactun, and Mayapan in Central America.

In 1946, Proskouriakoff published An Album of Maya Architecture, which is a compendium of her reconstruction drawings of classic Maya buildings. In 1950, she published A Study of Maya Art, a brilliant analysis of the motifs and details contained in Maya sculptural art that contained as a major component a technique for “style dating” monuments that had no legible dates. These two books immediately became “classics” in Maya studies.

But Proskouriakoff did not stop there and focused her attention on Maya hieroglyphs. In 1960 she published an article that is perhaps the most important in all of Maya studies. Cogently, and in great detail, she deciphered the dynastic sequence of Piedras Negras, identifying a 200-year succession of kings and their birth and accession dates at the site. Such work might not seem particularly earthshaking, but the article must be seen in the context of the then-current views on ancient Maya society. Increasingly over the previous thirty years or so, Mayanist scholars had come to the conclusion that classic Maya society was not ruled by secular kings but was made up of a peaceful rural peasantry overseen by a priestly class that lived almost as ascetics in otherwise unoccupied “ceremonial centers.” Proskouriakoff’s article changed this view overnight, and since the 1960s there has been a tremendous advance in the understanding of classic Maya society and politics. Scholars can now decipher Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions almost completely, and the intricacies of Maya politics within and between kingdoms are increasingly understood.