Thomas Barthel

Thomas Sylvester Barthel (4 January 1923 – 3 April 1997) was a German ethnologist and epigrapher who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered rongorongo script of Easter Island.

Life and career Barthel was born on 4 January 1923, in Berlin, and graduated from secondary school in 1940. During World War II, he worked as a cryptographer for the Wehrmacht. After the war, he studied folklore, geography, and prehistory in Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. He received his doctorate in Hamburg in 1952

Along with J. Eric S. Thompson, Barthel was a strong critic of the "phonetic approach" to Maya decipherment, and held the view that the Maya script lacked phoneticism and did not constitute a "true" writing system. In particular, Barthel stood solidly against the phonetic decipherment methodology put forward in the early 1950s by the Soviet epigrapher Yuri Knorozov, who like Barthel had also worked on both the Maya and rongorongo scripts. At a 1956 meeting of the International Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen attended by Knorozov, Barthel's criticism of the phonetic approach contributed to the continuing dismissal of Knorozov's ideas—ideas that would later be proved essentially correct when the phonetic approach championed by Knorozov provided the breakthrough in Maya decipherment from the 1970s onwards. Barthel and Knorozov would remain at-odds for the remainder of their respective careers.

Personal life Barthel was married three times and had four children. He died on 3 April 1997, aged 74, in Tübingen

Published works 1958a. Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift. Hamburg : Cram, de Gruyter. 1958b. "The 'Talking Boards' of Easter Island." Scientific American, 198:61-68 1971. Pre-contact Writing in Oceania. In: Current Trends in Linguistics 8:1165-1186. Den Haag, Paris: Mouton. 1978. The Eighth Land: The Polynesian Discovery & Settlement of Easter Island. Honolulu: the University Press of Hawaii. 1990. "Wege durch die Nacht (Rongorongo-Studien auf dem Santiagostab)", in Esen-Baur, Heide-Margaret (ed.), State and Perspectives of Scientific Research in Easter Island Culture. Courier Forschungsinstitute Senckeberg 125. Frankfurt am Mein: Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, 73–112.