Linda Schele; Pioneering Scholar on Mayan Writing

Linda Schele, a pioneering scholar whose groundbreaking interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphics has enabled archeologists to read about 85% of the extensive records left by the Mesoamerican society, has died of cancer. She was 55.

Officials at the University of Texas at Austin, where Schele taught, said Monday that she died Friday of inoperable pancreatic cancer.

Schele, an art historian born in Nashville, Tenn., was introduced to the Mayan world in 1970 while vacationing in Mexico with her husband, David Schele.

A planned two-hour visit to the Mayan ruins in Palenque, Chiapas, turned into a 12-day stay that changed her life. In a 1995 interview with Omni Publications, she rated Palenque’s Temple of Inscriptions, a prime source of Mayan translations by Schele and others over the last decade, as her favorite Mayan ruin.

“I became so fascinated by the art of the Maya that I was compelled to try to understand who did it, when they did it and why they did it. In short, I was obsessed with the Maya,” she wrote in a short autobiography.

Her books, such as “The Blood of Kings,” “Maya Cosmos” and “A Forest of Kings,” helped popularize the Mayan past.

A Times reviewer praised the first, “The Blood of Kings,” in 1986, as a “brilliant study . . . [that] transformed our view of classical Mayan civilization as a peaceful kingdom.”

Schele’s final book, written with archeologist Peter Mathews, was “The Code of Kings: The Language of Seven Sacred Maya Temples and Tombs,” published in February.

Although a Spanish bishop first recorded a Mayan alphabet in 1566, Schele once said, it took scholars more than 400 years to figure out how to use its symbols to read Mayan carvings on stone monuments.

“If our only record of American history were what’s written on monuments in Washington, you wouldn’t find out much about the average American,” she said in 1995. “Similarly, there’s much the Maya did not write about: taxes, trade, thoughts about everyday life. But we can learn who was victorious in war and had the power to commission public monuments and buildings--or at least what they wanted to tell about themselves.”

In March, a frail Schele was cheered at her annual international Maya Meeting, which she had staged in Austin for the last 22 years. That month, the Guatemalan government presented her with the Order of the Quetzal, its highest honor for non-Guatemalans.

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