TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: April 8, 2008
The ancient Maya civilization of Central America left behind
an intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script, carved on
monuments, painted on pottery, and drawn in handmade
bark-paper books. For centuries, scholars considered it too
complex ever to understand—until recently, when an
ingenious series of breakthroughs finally cracked the code and
unleashed a torrent of new insights into the Mayas' turbulent
past. For the first time, NOVA presents the epic inside story
of how the decoding was done—traveling to the remote
jungles of southern Mexico and Central America to investigate
how the code was broken and what Maya writings now reveal.
(Get your bearings with our
Map of the Maya World.)
The Maya script is the New World's most highly developed
ancient writing system, and it is "our one and only
opportunity to peer into the Americas before the arrival of
Europeans and hear these people speaking to us," says Simon
Martin, a specialist in Maya inscriptions at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Yet
records of this written language were all but destroyed by
European conquerors, who burned an untold number of Maya
books. Today, only four known, partial examples survive.
Unlike the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the secrets of
Egyptian hieroglyphs in practically one fell swoop,
deciphering the Maya script involved a long series of hunches
and tantalizing insights as well as false leads, blind alleys,
and heated disagreements among scholars (see
Time Line of Decipherment).
A significant breakthrough came with a brilliant discovery by
David Stuart, now at the University of Texas at Austin but
then just out of high school and the youngest-ever recipient
of a MacArthur "genius" grant. Gradually, the glyphs began to
speak again, a process that accelerated enormously in the
second half of the 20th century and continues to yield new
information.
Along with Stuart and Martin, NOVA interviews other experts at
the epicenter of perhaps the greatest of all archeological
detective stories, including the late Linda Schele of the
University of Texas at Austin, Peter Mathews of the University
of Calgary, and Michael D. Coe of Yale University.
The program also covers an earlier generation of scholars,
such as English archeologist J. Eric Thompson, who dominated
Maya studies in the mid-20th century with his interpretation
of the glyphs as a limited system of signs and concepts,
nearly all relating to calendrical and astronomical affairs.
Thompson depicted the Maya as an empire of peaceful people
ruled by wise astronomer-priests. (See mythological figures in
a newly discovered
Maya mural.)
But this orthodoxy was challenged in the 1950s by the Soviet
linguist Yuri Knorosov, who showed that Maya writing was a
combination of signs for complete words and symbols for
syllables, and was, in theory, capable of conveying any word
in the Maya language and therefore a rich range of content.
(Read and hear ancient Maya
from an eighth-century carved stone monument.)
As Mayan inscriptions have been slowly deciphered, it has
become clear that this was an empire of divine rule and blood
sacrifice, with warrior-kings waging constant battles,
conquests, and power struggles with rival lords. Today, the
decoders are working with the descendants of the ancient Maya
to link their spoken language with the deciphered glyphs, and
modern Maya are reclaiming the rich and complicated history
that has finally been unlocked.
Program Transcript
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