Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg
Abbé Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg ( born September 8, 1814 Bourbourg; † January 8, 1874 in Nice ) was a French historian, ethnologist and archaeologist.
Life
Brasseur de Bourbourg, as it was mostly just called, studied the subjects of theology and philosophy in Belgium. In 1845 he was a teacher at the Catholic seminary of Quebec. He particularly excelled in the following years through its Central American studies. In 1854, he found in the library of Guatemala City, the Mayan Popol Vuh manuscript. In 1862 he discovered in Madrid the lost manuscript by Diego de Landa de las cosas de Yucatán Relación, which later became one of the bases for the decipherment of Maya writing was.
In his Grammaire de la langue quichée (1862 ), he began a relationship between the Mayan culture and the island nation of Atlantis described by Plato produce. 1866 Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l' ancienne civilization du Mexique ) was published, the rich illustrations came from Jean -Frédéric Waldeck. Also because of the illustrations, a connection with the architecture of the classical Greco-Roman antiquity was insinuated. The books had great success and inspired reverberation and Augustus Le Plongeon, among others Ignatius L. Donnelly and localization hypotheses on Atlantis. Together with Brewers first translation of the Popol Vuh they are one of the basis for a New Age myths about aftermath of the Maya culture in the present.