Cracking the Maya Code: Deciphering Ancient Hieroglyphs | NOVA

[00:00:00][Music] imagine explorers arriving to find our city's deserted our books have perished in some unknown catastrophe all that is left to speak for us are the written words we have carved in stone the travelers cannot make sense of our mysterious script but if they could would they comprehend who we were in the jungles of southern Mexico in Central America the ancient ruins of the Maya posed such a mystery they revealed the civilization of stunning achievements created in isolation from Europe and Asia their cities were full of strange inscriptions fantastic twisting forms called hieroglyphs they were carved on monuments and objects painted on pottery and written in bark paper books [Music] for centuries the hieroglyphs confounded explorers what secrets did they hold were they pictures and symbols or in fact true writing expressing an ancient language people threw their hands up and said nobody's ever gonna crack this script it just can't be done the quest would obsess artists and adventurers archeologists and linguists and the youngest recipient ever of the MacArthur Genius award it became very clear to me that the real task of code-breaking was getting through this morass of the tangled visuals of the script after centuries have struggled the stories of the Maya scribes are coming to life we've began to see blood everywhere in the hieroglyphic it was a rather darker view of the Maya that shocked a lot of people as the hieroglyphs reveal their meaning a history of a lost world is emerging transforming our view of the ancient Maya these were literate people they had these fantastic stories to tell we really got an amazing understanding of how the Maya saw their world up next on Nova cracking the Maya code major funding for Nova is provided by the following [Music] Pacific Life has been the power behind successful individuals for more than 140 years providing strengthen performance and protection for generations so when it comes to planning for retirement your financial professional and Pacific Life can help you reach your goals Pacific Life the power to help you succeed natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel yet a lot of natural gas has impurities like co2 in it controlled free zone is a new technology being developed by Exxon Mobil to remove the co2 from the natural gas so we can safely store it where it won't get into the atmosphere Exxon Mobil is spending more than hundred million dollars to build a plant that will demonstrate this process I'm very optimistic about it because this technology could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly and David H coke and discover new knowledge HH Am I major funding for cracking the maya code is provided by the National Science Foundation where discoveries begin and by the National Endowment for the Humanities because democracy demands wisdom additional funding for this program is provided by the solo art and architecture foundation major funding for Nova is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by PBS viewers like you thank you [Music] in the 16th century the flames of the Spanish Inquisition scorched the new world decimating the Maya civilization one place was ignited by diego de Landa a zealous friar bent on destroying one of the most original writing systems ever invented Maya hieroglyphics he looked at these writings of the Maya then he saw them as tools of the devil and Blondo felt that he had to take a firm official political stance vonda's mission was to convert the Maya to Catholicism in the Yucatan Peninsula [Music] upon learning they were still making offerings to ancient gods he arrested and tortured thousands of Maya for crimes of devil-worship he inflicted a primitive Inquisition on them there was an incredible in its ferocity at the same time well destroy everything that he could find that was what he would call superstition in other words a good part of their culture so they had a great ceremony of destruction in the plaza and burned hundreds maybe thousands of books we will never know and of course out of all of that only four books or partial books survived my ascribes were forced to learn European script the writing system totally died out in the centuries that followed the Spanish conquest I mean people were probably burned at the stake for writing in the old system by the 18th century I don't think anybody could write knowledge of the ancient Maya script soon vanished it would take centuries of struggle before the hieroglyphs could be read again [Music] today in the highlands of Guatemala Maya villagers still make offerings to ancient gods they seek guidance about favourable days for planting and harvesting business and travel courtship and marriage although they hold on to their heritage the Maya have been a people cut off from the written words of their ancestors now the decipherment of the hieroglyphs is bringing their past to life the hieroglyphic records have so many stories to tell about just who the actors learn on the stage of my history and what the major events were those cliffs give the Maya 1500 years of history written in the words of their ancestors not in the words of white people from Europe this is our one and only opportunity to peer into the Americas before the arrival of Europeans and here these people speaking to us since ancient times the Maya have lived in a region that extends from southern Mexico through much of Central America the heart of their civilization lay between the highlands of Guatemala and the plains of the Yucatan much of it a vast region of dense jungle here around AD 200 they began building their great cities Tikal copan and Palenque they were renowned for their monumental architecture pyramids and temples towered over plazas and ball courts where kings ascended to the throne and warrior athletes competed for their lives there were dramatic kinds of ceremonies and public events for public consumption the exercise of power in its most dramatic forms Maya civilizations thrived for over 2,000 years distinguished by a sophisticated culture the art involves a level of graphic imagination and expertise that is unparalleled as Europe entered the Dark Ages these city-states reached the height of their glory some supporting hundreds of thousands of people there were the greatest of all new world civilizations and the only fully literate society in the new world yet mysteriously in the ninth century the Maya abandoned many of their cities the temples and pyramids in the central lowlands were swallowed by the forest and forgotten [Music] almost a thousand years later a Spanish explorer named jose calderon stumbled upon the jungle city of Palenque inside its abandoned temples Calderon and his men found huge stone tablets carved with figures and hieroglyphic writing it's really clear that they're looking at something that's totally alien to them and they're wrestling with this idea whether it's picture writing or whether it's something more than that as news of the strange text spread French artist John Frederick valdek traveled to Palenque in 1832 to sketch its hieroglyphs believing that Babylonians Phoenicians or Hindus had built the Maya cities Val Dex drawings even included Indian elephants we now know that the Maya weren't even writing anything that visually looked like an elephant he was not understanding the forms of the signs and this is the the theme that you see time and time again with artists trying to record my inscriptions up until the 20th century [Music] as more sites were discovered explorers did their best to draw the unfamiliar glyphs but their work lacked the detail needed for decipherment everything would change in the 1880s when Alfred Maudsley arrived with a glass plate camera motley was taking full advantage of the new developments in photography he had gone into all of the sights fully equipped with large format glass plate negatives and immense effort these caravans of equipment you see these lovely photographs with the entire great plaza cleared well it wasn't that way when he got there he had to set a lot of people that weren't clearing these areas so that he could get decent photographs mods Lee's photos captured the hieroglyphs in exquisite detail if you're going to deal with an ancient body of inscriptions and try to crack an unknown script you have to have a really good record and he was the first one to bacon but unknown to many scholars poring over Mott sleaze photos the work of decipherment had already begun with the rediscovery of Maya books that had survived the Spanish conquest three surfaced in Madrid Paris and Mexico but the most exquisite manuscript made its way to the Royal library of Dresden Germany it is called The Dresden codex it was forgotten until 1810 when a massive volume on the Americas was published in Paris and included five of its pages [Music] it's strange hieroglyphs pushed an eccentric scholar Konstantin Ruffin esque to try and crack the Maya code he looked at these boring dot numbers and he said to never get more than four dots a bar probably stands for five one would be a 1 dot 2 would be 2 dots 3 would be 3 dots for 4 dots then you'd have a bar and then a dot would make it six two dots in a bar of seven and that was the first time anybody had ever deciphered a Maya hieroglyph that is a beginning of the decipherment the quest would move to Dresden Germany when Ernst first illan a librarian stumbled upon The Dresden codex the priceless book had sat in the library overlooked for decades can you imagine being able to pull out one of the most important primary sources in the prehistory the new world and to have it there in front of you and just look at it and work with it first amended the Maya had developed a calendar to mark time and even pursued astronomy in The Dresden codex he found precise predictions for the dates of lunar and solar eclipses and there were tables tracking the cycles of the planet Venus which was linked with warfare but first a man's greatest feat came when he figured out that very large numbers in The Dresden codex were counts back in time to a date the Maya believed the universe was created for a how eight punku by correlating this to the Western calendar date of August 13th 3114 BC archeologists could now date the carvings on stone monuments called Stila [Music] one expert in Maya glyphs was Jay Eric Thompson a brilliant British archaeologist and a pig referred Thompson dominated Maya glyphs studies from the 1930s up until the 1960s he was the figure no one else at that time had any idea what Maya writing really was thompson created a meticulous classification system assigning what scholars called thompson or t numbers to over 800 my assigns [Music] after living among the Maya in Mexico and Belize he came to deeply admire their culture [Music] he created a kind of a picture of the Maya as a gentle folk rather unlike anybody else that ever lived in the world who were constantly gazing toward the skies and obsessed with astronomy and time [Music] Thompson's view of the Maya was influenced by his experiences in World War one anybody who had actually been in the trenches in the First World War never really wanted to hear anything but peace after that so he had a mindset that was looking for a peaceful people Thompson concluded that the focus of the Maya civilization was time and that their steely were built to commemorate its passage the figures in their art were priests and gods and their glyphs were symbols recording the mysteries of the heavens Thompson tries to convince us that there isn't a system here at all other than the dates and other than the astronomy that basically it's a kind of mystic exercise on the part of the Maya for getting in touch with their gods most scholars accepted Thompson's theory and presumed that beyond dates the glyphs were simply inscrutable people sort of threw their hands up and said nobody's ever gonna crack this script it's basically too much of a hodgepodge and it just can't be done the woman who would challenge Thompson's vision entered the field of Maya studies by chance tatiana proskouriakoff had studied to be an architect but when she graduated in 1930 the country was in the grip of the Great Depression she had no real job ahead of her she wandered into the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania and saw that there was an advertisement for an artist to go and do drawings or reconstructions and so forth of the ruins at Piedras Negras have major major classic myocyte and tanya began her work there in the field and she started to do reconstructions of what it would have looked like in the past she was a skilled surveyor and draftswoman her reconstruction drawings were so architectural II precise they brought the ancient Maya city to life it's almost as if she had some sort of x-ray vision you know built into her brain so that she could look at a ruined temple and guess how many terraces there were supporting the superstructure at the top and she turned out to be remarkably prescient for nearly 20 years pro skier coughed toiled as a lone woman archaeologist in a field dominated by men she left field work in 1958 to join Harvard's Peabody Museum spending her time in the basement where the Maya files were stored one of her projects was to piece back together all the fragments of jade that had been shattered into various bits and pieces and it was at that point in time when she was laboring away almost anonymously that she came up with her great breakthrough proskouriakoff had photographs of dozens of Stila at Piedras Negras when she arranged them by the dedication dates she began to notice a pattern the Maya would set up a series of Steel a in front of a temple one every five years the first Stila in each series always showed a figure seated in a carve niche at the bottom of the Stila was a sacrificial victim a ladder ascended to a seated figure above proskouriakoff resolved to make sense of the scene each Stila in a series stated the date of its dedication several steel eight also had another mysterious date it was followed by a glyph of a bird head wrapped in a cloth thompson nicknamed it the toothache glyph but what did it mean Prospero a cough found a clue when she discovered another date that fell anywhere from 12 to 31 years before the toothache event the glyph following this earliest date was always the upended head of an iguana and what she had prophesized was that the first one was a birth clip and then the next glyph might be visit the date on which he acceded to the throne the dates fit her theory perfectly the time from the birth of one king to the accession of the next was never more than 60 years a reasonable human lifetime her hypothesis then was that each one of these series were the life story of a particular ruler there was a dynasty she was dealing with it was history for the first time [Music] suddenly proskouriakoff brilliant insight transformed the images on the stele a the alcoves were Thrones the figures were not gods and priests as Thompson believed but kings and queens this was a family history ruler one ascends the throne in six oh three five years later he is a warrior with prisoners at his feet 15 years later ruler 2 takes the throne he is 12 years old his mother stands beside him at age 26 he is dressed for battle 10 years later he is still a warrior but considerably heavier he reigns for 47 years proskouriakoff story followed the reigns of seven kings she laid it out all the days with all the sequences for each series and I looked at it my knees went weak I said Tanya you've done it it's the most important discovery of all time she presented the paper to Eric Thompson and Eric Thompson said old Tania you know that can't possibly be true there is no history in the inscriptions and she said that the next morning she came back to work to be greeted by Eric Thompson he said you are absolutely right which is amazing for somebody like that who'd been a lifelong opponent of the idea that this was history and that was it that just changed everything we now know that where we're dealing with history on these monuments the next advance in breaking the code came in May of 1945 when the Russian army marched into Berlin in the ranks was a young officer named Yuri valentinovich Kohinoor Azov he told me once that in the ruins of the National Library he found a book lying there that had survived the the fires and all the rest of it that he picked up which was a very good black-and-white reproduction of the three men known codices The Dresden the Madrid codex and the one in Paris Canora sounds fascination with the book grew when he read an article concluding that Maya glyphs were undecipherable he took it as a challenge and obtained a degree in linguistics to become a lone Russian my inist in a field dominated by Eric Thompson because he was behind the Iron Curtain during the Stalinist period he also was intrinsically very isolated he didn't have a lot of ideas floating around that he had inherited from other people ideas that in Thompson's case were quite simply wrong it gave him a fresh perspective he was kind of a clean slate you might say as a linguist Canora soft knew the first step in analyzing an unknown writing system is to count the signs if a script has 20 to 35 signs it is probably alphabetic representing simple sounds if there are eighty to a hundred signs it is probably based on syllables but if a script has several hundred signs it is surely log a graphic were based on signs for whole words a law the graphic system like Chinese has thousands of signs for thousands of words the Maya script has about 800 signs too many to represent an alphabet and far too few to have signs for each word of a language so scholars assumed that it was a limited logger graphic system with signs for only a few hundred words but Canora soft knew that no writing system consists cure Lee of one kind of sign our own alphabet uses numerals and lager grams Canora soft realized the maya script was also a mixed system combining word signs and phonetic signs with this insight he turned to the madrid codex where the glyphs for the four directions had been identified he focused on the glyph for west searching for syllables it was made up of two signs on the bottom was the Sun sign depicted in all its variations by four spokes or petals on the top was a hand with thumb and forefinger touching [Music] Eric Thompson had argued that the hand sign meant completion and read the glyph as completion of Sun or sunset therefore west for Thompson glyphs represented ideas not sounds Harry was kind of bullheaded about things like this he had determined to his own satisfaction that the hieroglyphs were not phonetic and could not be phonetic and he stuck with that but Canora soft disagreed he suspected that the glyphs might in fact be tied to the sounds of spoken maya he knew that in maya the word for west is chicken and the word for sun is keen so he suggested that the hand sign should be read not as the concept completion but as the syllable chi when combined with the laga gram for son it forms she came to rule out coincidence Canora soft identified syllables in other glyphs proving that at least some corresponding to the sounds of spoken Maya [Music] and of course the Soviet propaganda apparatus jumped on this and said look inspired by the wonders of Marxism Leninism this young scholar has done what none of the imperialist scholars at Britain or the United States or Germany could ever do he's shown how the Maya wrote and Thompson a lifelong anti-communist decided that this was a total fraud oh that the world should be straightened out about this some of Canora soft specific readings were questionable seizing upon them thompson discredited his entire method tragically Canora softs priceless insights went unrecognized in the West but the era of lone scholars scattered across the world was coming to an end the change began in palenque driven by merle green robertson she had spent years documenting the sights art for future generations while she was working an art professor named Linda Sheila visited when I walked him on Pauling keys buildings I saw a culture where the art was central and I really was driven to understand who had done it and why and how [Music] Schiele began to help robertson as they worked she gained an intimate knowledge of the site it would be put to use in 1973 when Robertson hosted a conference at Palenque there she lee met Peter Matthews who had spent the past winter analyzing books of Pollock Hayes glyphs [Music] basically by the end of that process I had three huge notebooks filled up with transcriptions in Thompson's wretched tee numbers of all the signs of every single inscription from Palenque Matthews teamed up with Schiele to reconstruct palenque's dynastic history they knew that some royal names at Palenque are accompanied by a title a winged Sun signs and so what we did is we went through and found every example of this title and wrote down the nearest date poring over palenque's inscriptions they found over 40 names with the royal title each was accompanied by a date and glyph describing the event on that date for example a birth shown by the upended head of an iguana as Schiele and Matthews arranged the births deaths and ceremonies by date the patterns emerged one ruler stood out whom they dubbed Lord shield he was born on the 23rd of March 603 his name glyph featured a warrior's shield it led them to palenque's most dominant building the temple of the inscriptions [Music] the meaning of its hieroglyphic tablets had been an enigma for centuries Shaylee and Matthews now saw that the panels were filled with references to Lord shield and key events of his life [Music] suddenly a discovery made in 1948 took on new meaning a hidden staircase was found in the temples inner chamber leading to a crypt with a limestone sarcophagus inside was a human skeleton masked in Jade Shaylee and Matthews realized that this must be the body of Lord shield for the first time hieroglyphs were connected to the remains of a Maya ruin the glyphs Schiele at Matthews grasped traced the life stories of Lord shield and five of his successors and they came out and literally announced that they had sort of cracked the dynasty of Palenque and they had names of the rulers and the times when they ruled we had him with funny names like Sun shield and a lord toothache at that point Moises Morales a local guide jumped up and said why is it that when important discoveries like this are made the name was given an English Lord shield or escudos Spanish he said these people who spoke Maya so they called the King Pakal a Mayan word later confirmed phonetically to mean shield it was just a giddy sort of feeling and I'll never forget it it was a real turning point in my studies after years of work the cracking of the Maya code was within reach but one big hurdle remained to read the hieroglyphs aloud in the language in which they were written the phonetic decipherment begun Baikonur Asaf had to be completed despite decades of effort fewer than 30 syllabic signs could be read with confidence the final key to the sounds of the glyphs would be found by David Stewart whose education is a- began at an early age his father George often brought him along on field trips to Mesoamerica one of David's most memorable expeditions was to Coba in the Yucatan it was just kind of an incredible place to wander around as a kid what really got me though was while we were at coba there were a couple of monuments that were actually discovered my dad would drop everything and work on drawing the monument and I would just sort of look over his shoulder while he was doing that and she you know this is this is pretty amazing he decided he would go out and draw some himself so he'd take his crayons and paper everything and go out and started drawing hieroglyphs by the time we got back to the States my inner soul had been so affected by that experience that I just wanted to keep going back two years later George took David to meet Linda Sheila I remember it kind of sitting there quietly in the office while she was drawing a glyph and I I don't know why I blurted this out but I said oh that's a fire glyph and in celinda kind of paused and I remember she sort of looked behind her shoulder and over at me and said yeah you're right kid that's a fire glyph George said that they would really appreciate it if there was ever a chance that David could study with me or something and so on the spur of the moment I said why didn't he come down to Palenque this summer [Music] in the next summer was one of the most amazing times of my life she allowed me to help her check her drawings see we were in the temples with flashlights with her drawings on clipboard - making corrections now I remember Linda was saying okay kid you know if you want to learn Maya glyphs you got it you got to do it on your own I gave him a tablet of across told him to go out of the back porch and figure out as much as he could about it he came back a couple of days later and had it the same amount of structural understanding of the text that it taken me and three year it's difficult and so I figured then that he was he was really quite good at age twelve David presented his first scholarly paper on Maya hieroglyphs and he gives a paper that was certainly beyond the abilities of about two-thirds or three-quarters of the audience to follow it was a scholarly paper and mostly people were just amazed then after his high school graduation Stewart received an unexpected call he had won a MacArthur Fellowship popularly known as the genius award at age 18 he was the youngest recipient ever of the prestigious prize Stewart delayed college to work on the glyphs full-time it was then that he made his great discovery it came when he focused on a pair of signs already believed to have been deciphered Eric Thompson had pointed out that one of these signs signaled account forward to a new date the other account backward to a prior date the two glyphs shared a common sign but Thompson called either a water sign or the head of a sharp force choke in Maya choke can also mean to count [Music] but Stuart discovered that several other signs also substituted for the shark a human head a monkey and in one instance a bracket shaped sign did all these signs stand for the word count Stuart felt there was a simpler explanation the bracket symbol was also the phonetic sign for the syllable ooh suddenly he realized that all these signs stood for the syllable boo the proof each sign freely substituted for the blue bracket in contexts that had nothing to do with counting what Dave Stewart did was show us that many of these substitutions are purely phonetic substitutions that are spelling exactly the same word in slightly different ways [Music] the backward and forward counting glyphs were phonetically spelled phrases evil T and ot on in Maya he would means and then it happened and ot means since it happened the words that Thompson had viewed as mere dates were in fact telling a story you won't keep and then it happened on the day one c14 conking that she was adorned in marriage in lady cartoon aha lady of naman la horn when allah he hoon a havi and after ten days eleven months one year and one score of years then it happened on the day for kimmy14 whoa that their daughter was born the royal son lady uh if in the how the implications were revolutionary a pig refers had been searching for a single sign for each syllabic sound but if ooh was represented by more than one sign then other syllables might be as well one of the things about my writing which makes it so complicated is their love of substitutions one sound can have 13 14 15 different versions they hated repeating themselves and loved showing new things and the recognition of those substitution patterns was what began to break down the complexity of my writing into something which was a manageable comprehensible system each time a Maya scribe wrote a given word or phrase he could choose from a variety of signs and combine them in new ways a sign could be written abstractly or as the head of a human animal or God one sign could be slipped inside another or partly overlapped two signs could join merging their attributes glyphs even included figures of monsters and gods the art of the system is the genius within which they combine these different possibilities the graphic components of Maya writing is absolutely overwhelming there was an artistry and a playfulness that was as much a part of the system as as the recording of language so visually was complicated but once you organized that visual material into into the system that existed it made perfect sense and you can predict things you could you could really crack the code that [Music] an image of the ancient Maya was suddenly coming to life gleaned from their own words [Music] some glyphs simply described personal possessions whoo - PAH loop his ear ornament whoo baki ubach his bone you lock his plate you keep his drinking vessel they're describing particularly important objects belonging to the royal court they're probably gifts they're received they're given they're part of a social process that helps to bond these societies together it's like having a time machine to be able to read these texts and to me it's a rare privilege to be able to read them out loud in the language in which they were written maybe sometimes I'm the first person to actually say them out loud in a thousand years soon more esoteric ideas emerged in the writing they were glyphs describing frightening otherworldly beings these glyphs were appearing with scenes of these fantastic animals and creatures and spooky looking walking skeletons and this was a different kind of thing from what we were used to reading about in Maya glyphs you know they weren't talking about monuments they weren't talking about warfare they were talking about kind of the inner soles of people as the readings poured out a more complex view of the Maya began to emerge instead of these peaceful stargazing astronomer priests the Maya were shown to be like any other civilization with a great deal of conflict one of their great claims to fame was how many captives they had taken those offerings to their gods and ancestors they would also periodically engage in the most precious offering of all which was in offering their own blood [Music] the importance of self-sacrifice can be seen in this ceremony a royal lady conjures a vision of a serpent with an offering of her own blood she has perforated her tongue with a stingray spine to draw a rope embedded with thorns through the incision in front of her slips of paper soaked in her own blood burned in a ceramic bowl out of the rising smoke forms the vision of a serpent from its mouth emerges the figure of an ancestor the upper text describes the ceremony son go up on March 28th 755 a vision was conjured of the serpent Yoshino Chan the animal spirit of the God Cahuilla and then a vision was conjured of the ancestor Jasha weaned the glyph for conjure shows a hand grasping a fish there's this idea of grabbing something that's elusive for we qing into another realm in a way or even into the underworld and and wrenching something out of that and bringing it into your own world that is conjuring from glyphs and art the psyche of the ancient Maya was emerging we now saw the Maya people as a whole so you could look at a piece of Maya Hart and the inscriptions on the tops of the vases and understand what the heck these people were doing one myth painted repeatedly on Maya vases echoes a surviving 16th century manuscript the Popol Vuh it tells the saga of twin brothers summoned to the underworld they play a ball game against the lords of the underworld in which they are finally defeated and they are sacrificed the head of the main brother there is cut off and hung up in a tree and a young lady comes by who was the daughter of one of the Lords of the underworld she talks to the head and it spits into her head naturally she becomes pregnant banished from the underworld she eventually gives birth to a second set of twins they become skilled warriors and returned to the underworld to fight its Lords after a series of clever tricks they resurrect the body of their father the maize God and bring food back to their people then they rise up to become the Sun and Moon this is the single most important myth that we have from the entire new world probably the most important piece of literature ever produced in the Western Hemisphere the decipherment was not only illuminating the inner world of the Maya but also casting new light on the power struggles tearing apart their great city-states it became clear that from the third to ninth centuries the Maya world was dominated by warring superpowers we began to see blood everywhere in the iconography and in the hieroglyphs they were not a peaceful people but involved with absolutely bloody sacrifice [Music] in this sculpture a captive has been Scout disemboweled and crippled Wood is tied to his back to set him on fire they were well defined groups that were really at each other's throats battling each other and and causing havoc on the landscape the glyphs revealed the mayhem choked to capture who to take down a city pool to burn chalk to decapitate one scribe grimly wrote the skulls piled up and the blood pooled [Music] on the last dated monument of cupon the great king Yosh pasa hands his scepter to his successor signalling the dawn of a new dynasty but this new reign never began the scribe telling its story fled leaving the monument unfinished the kingdom could no longer sustain either rulers or artists as political upheaval engulfed the region the great cities of the southern lowlands finally collapsed [Music] over 1,000 years later in the 1980s Maya villages were again under siege as civil war ravaged Central America the Maya made a desperate effort to save their culture which I visited many times we identify with the glorious past we say I'm Maya I see the Cal copán and various monuments and we identify ourselves as Maya Farrow but many of us don't speak our language now everyday it is slipping away first at that end the Maya had guided explorers and rebuilt monuments they had shared knowledge of their spoken languages and customs now they wanted to reap the benefits of the decipherment [Music] so at this Mayan workshop in Antigua I gave a presentation about a heart glyphic text and I showed how you could read it and the guys came up to her after the paper and said you were showing my hard lifx there on the screens and ya said it looked like you could read those and she says yeah we can pretty well read those now as I said whoa this is our history they said this is what they've always kept from us this is what we want to know can they study okay nunca this is the history they never taught me in school it is very important because it is the history I care about sorry I cannot promise em for centuries Maya culture has been brutally suppressed it's people were pressured to speak and write in Spanish and take Christian names now the Maya are rediscovering the hieroglyphs and their history one of the most precious gifts that any group of humans on the earth has is history the process of actually deciphering it that's only the first tiny step to understanding what this great civilization contributed to the heritage of humanity glyphs represent our one and only window into the pre-columbian past doesn't answer the question and so that we love to have the answers to but it does give us an insider and the indigenous insight into what they thought was important with the cracking of the Maya code the words of their ancient scribes have finally come to life revealing a history and literature of a vanished world [Music] next time on Nova oh my god the shuttle broke up a devastating disaster an explosive investigation the engineers knew how risky this was a management wouldn't listen to him and a controversial debate on the future of the space program if you're gonna risk people's lives it ought to be for a purpose Space Shuttle disaster next time on Nova major funding for Nova is provided by the following natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel yet a lot of natural gas has impurities like co2 in it controlled free zone is a new technology being developed by ExxonMobil to remove the co2 from the natural gas so we can safely store it where it won't get into the atmosphere ExxonMobil is spending more than 100 million dollars to build a plant that will demonstrate this process I'm very optimistic about it because this technology could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly and by Pacific Life the power to help you succeed offering insurance annuities and investments and David H Koch and discover new knowledge h h mi major funding for cracking the maya code is provided by the National Science Foundation where discoveries begin and by the National Endowment for the Humanities because democracy demands wisdom additional funding for this program is provided by the Solow art and architecture foundation major funding for Nova is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by PBS viewers like you thank you to see the companion website for this program or to find out more about Nova visit Nova's website at pbs.org [Music] to order this nova program for 2495 plus shipping and handling call wgbh boston video at one eight hundred two fifty five nine four two four [Music] Nova is a production of WGBH Boston