Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg | |
|---|---|
 Abbé Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. Lithograph from J. Windsor's 19th-century publication,Aboriginal America. | |
| Born | (1814-09-08)September 8, 1814 Bourbourg, France |
| Died | January 8, 1874(1874-01-08) (aged 59) Nice, France |
| Occupation | Catholic priest; writer,ethnographer, historian andarchaeologist. |
| Subject | Mesoamerican studies |
AbbéCharles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (8 September 1814 – 8 January 1874) was a noted French writer,ethnographer, historian,archaeologist, andCatholic priest. He became a specialist inMesoamerican studies, travelling extensively in the region. His writings, publications, and recovery of historical documents contributed much to knowledge of the region's languages, writing, history and culture, particularly those of theMaya andAztec civilizations. However, his speculations concerning relationships between the ancient Maya and the lost continent ofAtlantis inspiredIgnatius L. Donnelly and encouraged the pseudo-science ofMayanism.
He was born inBourbourg, a small town with manyFlemish influences nearDunkirk, France, as theFirst French Empire was ending.
As a youth he went toGhent in newly independent Belgium to study theology and philosophy. He became interested in writing during his studies there. Enthusiastic about Flanders' history, he wrote several essays about local folklore, which enabled him to enter literary circles. In 1837, aged 23, Brasseur traveled to Paris with the support of French poetAlphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat Lamartine. In Paris, he became involved with political newspapers that sought the democratization of power such asLe Monde.[1] During this time, he began contributing essays to a Parisian journal. He wrote several historical accounts (using a pseudonym), including one concerningJerusalem. He published several novels ofRomantic style which was then very much in vogue. One of these,Le Sérapéon, received reviews which implied it had a very close resemblance toFrançois-René de Chateaubriand's 1809 novelLes Martyrs. Such near-allegations of plagiarism and inaccuracies in his works were to be made several times during his career.
Despite such criticisms, his reputation as a notable young writer and intellectual continued to develop. He transferred his studies and residence to Rome, where in 1845 he was ordained into theRoman Catholic priesthood, at the age of 30.
A year previously he had come to the attention of the Canadian Abbé, Léon Gingras, whom he had met (and apparently impressed) in Rome. Abbé Gingras entreated his friend and colleague the vicar-general ofQuebec, Abbé Charles-Félix Cazeau, to have Brasseur de Bourbourg assigned to a job in theseminary there. Correspondence began in late 1844, with Abbé Gingras claiming that the seminary should"...move heaven and earth to ensure that such a splendid bird does not escape us and fly to Montreal, where it would be so highly thought of".
A year later after having obtained his ordination, Brasseur de Bourbourg's job in Quebec was approved by theArchbishop,Joseph Signay, and in the autumn of 1845 he left Europe for theBritish colony of theProvince of Canada, stopping briefly inBoston along the way.
Upon his arrival inQuebec City he began work as a professor of ecclesiastical history at the seminary (the Séminaire de Québec, founded in 1663). After only a brief time however, his series of lectures was discontinued, for some unspecified reason.
Perhaps having extra time, Brasseur de Bourbourg began a programme of research of the history of thearchdiocese of Quebec, and in particular of its 17th-century founder,François de Laval, the firstRoman Catholic Bishop of Quebec (after whom the seminary's later incarnation as a University, theUniversité Laval, is named). The results of his archival investigations were published in early 1846 as a biography of Laval. The contents of this pamphlet seemed to displease his Canadian colleagues somewhat, for a dispute began which made his position there uncertain, or at least uncomfortable. Also, he apparently disliked the harsh winter climate (to judge by some comments he made in the dedication of his laterHistory of Canada), and may also have been a factor in his departure which was soon to ensue.
He left the seminary later in that year, returning to Boston where he found a job with thediocese of Boston. The then current bishop,John Bernard Fitzpatrick, with whom he was evidently on better terms than with his previous superiors, made him vicar-general of the diocese.
Towards the end of the year Brasseur de Bourbourg returned to Europe, to spend some time conducting research in the archives of Rome and Madrid, in preparation for a new project—travel to Central America.
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From 1848 to 1863 he travelled extensively as amissionary in many parts ofMexico and Central America.
During these journeys he gave great attention toMesoamerican antiquities and became well-versed in the then-current theories and knowledge about the history of the region and thePre-Columbian civilisations whose sites and monuments remained, yet were little understood.
Using information he had collected during his time spent travelling there, as well as that compiled by other scholars of his time, he published during 1857–1859 a history of theAztec civilization, containing what was then known or speculated about the former kingdom, which had been conquered some three hundred years previously by the Spanishconquistadores in alliance with local enemies of the Aztecs.
He also conducted research into the local languages and their transliteration into theLatin alphabet. Between 1861 and 1864 he edited and published a collection of documents in the indigenous languages.
In 1864 he wasarchaeologist of the French military expedition in Mexico, and his resulting workMonuments anciens du Mexique was published by the French Government in 1866.
In 1862 while searching through archives at the Royal Academy of History inMadrid forNew World materials, he came across an abridged copy of a manuscript which had originally been written by the Spanish clericDiego de Landa sometime around 1566. De Landa had been one of those charged with disseminating theRoman Catholic faith amongst theMaya peoples in Spain's new Central American possessions during the period after theSpanish conquest of Yucatán, and had lived there for several years. His manuscript (Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán) had been written upon his enforced return to Spain, where he was charged with illegally or improperly conducting anInquisition (he was later absolved, returning to the New World as the appointed Bishop ofYucatán). In the manuscript de Landa had recorded much information about the Maya peoples and customs, based on his own observations and discussions with Mayan informants. Brasseur de Bourbourg's main interest in the document, however, was a section in which de Landa reproduced what he termed "an alphabet" of the as-yet undecipheredMaya hieroglyphics, thewriting system of the ancientMaya civilization. In this passage de Landa had annotated the Mayan symbols (orglyphs) which supposedly corresponded to the letters of theSpanish alphabet, as given to him by a Maya informant who he had quizzed. Brasseur de Bourbourg realised that this could prove to be basis of deciphering the Maya script, and he announced this discovery when republishing the manuscript (in a bilingual Spanish-French edition) in late 1863 with the title,Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa.
However, upon initial analysis by Brasseur de Bourbourg and others, the so-called "de Landa alphabet" proved to be problematic and inconsistent, and these immediate attempts to use this alphabet as a kind of "Rosetta Stone" to read the glyphs failed. Nevertheless, Brasseur de Bourbourg's uncovering of this document and de Landa's alphabet would much later prove to be vital in the eventual decipherment of the Maya glyphs. Brasseur de Bourbourg's attempts, and those of others which followed, were misled insofar as they interpreted the signsalphabetically. When the signs were recognised to be mainlysyllabic, significant progress was made.
In 1861 he published another significant work: a French translation of thePopol Vuh, a sacred book of theQuiché (Kʼicheʼ) Maya people. He included agrammar of theKʼicheʼ language and an essay on Central Americanmythology.
Brasseur began to write aboutAtlantis in his publicationGrammaire de la langue quichée (1862), in which he expressed his belief that the lost land described by Plato had existed with an advanced degree of civilization before the beginning of civilizations in Europe and Asia. He suggested that the origins of European and Persian words could be traced to indigenous languages of the Americas and that the ancient cultures of the New and Old Worlds had been in constant communication with one another.
In 1866,Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l'ancienne civilisation du Mexique) was published with a text by Brasseur de Bourbourg accompanied by lavish illustrations byJean-Frédéric Waldeck. Although Waldeck's depictions of the ruins at Palenque were based on first-hand knowledge, his artistic reconstructions and embellishments implied a close relationship between Maya art and architecture and that ofClassical antiquity Greece and Rome. This was subsequently demonstrated to be spurious, but not before Waldeck's artwork had inspired speculations about contact between New and Old World civilizations, specifically via the lost continent ofAtlantis.
These speculations were reinforced by Brasseur de Bourboug's own references to Plato's descriptions of the culture and society of Atlantis, which Brasseur believed was continued by ancient Maya civilization, in his bookQuatre Lettres sur le Méxique (1868). In this publication, Brasseur de Bourbourg made extensive parallels between Maya and Egyptian pantheons and cosmologies, implying that they all had a common source on the lost continent of Atlantis. He developed these ideas further in his publicationQuatre lettres sur le Mexique (1868), which presents a history of Atlantis based on his interpretation of Maya myths. His writings inspiredAugustus Le Plongeon and alsoIgnatius L. Donnelly, whose bookAtlantis: The Antediluvian World contains numerous references to Brasseur de Bourbourg's scholarship. However, an academic wrote in 1875 that not a single contemporary scholar accepted Brasseur de Bourbourg's theories about Atlantis.
The combination of Brasseur de Bourbourg's interests inspiritualism and these speculations about relations between the ancient Maya and Atlantis provided the basis forMayanism.
In 1866, Brasseur de Bourbourg had an opportunity to examine an artefact in Madrid which was in the possession of a Spanishpaleography professor named Juan de Tro y Ortolano, who had purchased it some six years earlier. This artefact was an oldcodex, a book made from paper-bark in the form of a folded screen of continuous pages, several metres in length when extended. The codex contained numerous signs and drawings, which Brasseur de Bourbourg was readily able to identify as being Mayan in origin, having seen and studied many similar markings and glyphs while in Central America.
Tro y Ortolano gave him permission to publish the codex in a reproduction, and Brasseur de Bourbourg gave it the nameTroano Codex in his honour. His identification of the codex was significant, as it was the only third suchMaya codex to have been uncovered (the second, theCodex Paris, had been discovered by the French scholarLéon de Rosny only a few years before). In particular, Brasseur de Bourbourg recognised its exceeding rarity, since de Landa'sRelación, which he had earlier rediscovered, gave an account of how he had ordered the destruction of all such Maya codices he could find, and many volumes had been burned.
During 1869–1870 Brasseur de Bourbourg published his analyses and interpretations of the content of the Troano codex in his workManuscrit Troano, études sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas. He proposed some translations for the glyphs recorded in the codex, in part based on the associated pictures and in part on de Landa's alphabet, but his efforts were tentative and largely unsuccessful.
However, his translation would later inspireAugustus Le Plongeon's pseudo-science and speculation about thelost continent of Mu. The nameMu was actually used first by Brasseur de Bourbourg.
A few years later, another Maya codex was found possessed by another collector, which became known as theCodex Cortesianus (in the belief that it had been in the possession ofHernán Cortés). When Léon de Rosny examined it later, he determined that it was actually a part of the Troano codex, the two parts having been separated at some indeterminate time in the past. The two parts were later rejoined and are known collectively as theCodexMadrid orTro-Cortesianus; they remain displayed in Madrid.
In 1871 Brasseur de Bourbourg published hisBibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, a compendium of literature and sources associated with Mesoamerican studies.
His last article, "Chronologie historique des Mexicains" (1872) refers to theCodex Chimalpopoca and identifies four periods of world cataclysms that began about 10,500 BC and were the result of shifts of the Earth's axis (a concept related topole shift theory).
He died atNice at the beginning of 1874, at the age of 59.
His archaeological fieldwork, as well as his diligent collection, discovery and republication of source materials, proved to be very useful for subsequent Mesoamerican researchers and scholars. The interpretations and theories he advanced proved to be mostly inaccurate.
A listing of his publications (either original works or reproductions of historical documents), by original publication date. The place of publication is annotated (in brackets), and the shorter or common name of the publicationis bolded. The list is not necessarily complete.
A collection of travel accounts and reports which Brasseur de Bourbourg sent to the French Minister for Education and Religion from Mexico, Guatemala and Spain is stored at theArchives Nationales (Paris), F17, 2942.
