Thomas Barthel

Thomas Sylvester Barthel ( born January 4, 1923 in Berlin, † April 3, 1997 in Tübingen ) was a German anthropologist and university professor. He became known worldwide through its basic research to decipher the Rongorongo font.

Biography

Barthel was born as the son of the workers poet Max Barthel in Berlin -Wedding. In 1940 he completed the upper secondary education from the Lessing -Schule in Berlin with the High School and in the same year he was drafted into the Reich Labour Service in Poland. During World War II he worked as a descrambler, which was very helpful for his later professional interest in deciphering foreign journals. 1946 Barthel studied Ethnology in Berlin with Richard Thurnwald and Sigrid Westphal - Light Busch and geopolitics at Albrecht Haushofer and Anthropology in Leipzig from 1949 to Julius Lips and his wife Eva Lips. In 1950 he took up the study of ethnology with Franz on Termer in Hamburg and received his doctorate in 1952 for a study of the Dresden Codex ( " studies to decipher astronomical, and calendrical augurischer chapter in the Dresden Maya manuscript ").

A scholarship in 1957/58 as a guest researcher at the Universidad de Chile allowed ethnological research on the Atacameños locally and on July 4, 1957 to February 1, 1958, he traveled with the Chilean sail training ship Esmeralda on Easter Island. The acquired knowledge there he worked on his book " The Eighth Land", a scientific analysis of the colonization myth Hotu Matua.

His 1958 published habilitation thesis "Basics to the decipherment of the Easter Island script " is a worldwide leader in large parts still valid basic work. The meticulous treatise presented for the first time systematically obtained all written records of Rongorongo font together with information about their origin, exact sign-offs and a complete list of known characters. For cataloging the Rongorongo glyphs Barthel developed a number system with which each character can be represented as a three -digit number. In extended and supplemented form, it is still standard in Easter Island research.

Barthel also worked extensively with the deciphering of Maya writing. From 1965 to 1966 he traveled to field research in Mexico. He identified the first the emblem glyphs of Classic Maya centers and thus contributed significantly to the deciphering of the political structures of the Mayan empire at. Together with the British explorer John Eric Sidney Thompson Barthel, however, was a staunch opponent of the hypotheses of the Russian scientist Yuri Valentinovich Knorosow whose phonetic approach, however, ultimately led to a breakthrough in the decipherment of Maya writing.

1959 Thomas Barthel went to the University of Tübingen as a professor at the Ethnographic Institute, which he served as professor from 1964 until his retirement in 1988, and built up the collection of Oceanic art on.