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==