"For thousands of years." "Southeast Mexico and Central America sheltered the Maya culture one of humanities richest and most original" "Here without metal tools or the wheel the Maya built majestic cities" "In nearby caves descendants of the ancient Maya pray to the gods they have worshipped for more than 100 generations" "Many of the cities were abandoned in the late ninth and early tenth centuries" "Since that time the forest has been the silent guardian of the mystery of the Maya" "Today, these ruins are the inheritance of the Maya people" "The drawing if the glyph you asked me for is finished" "Well, let's go see what the experts in writing can tell us" "You know what my ancestors wrote with this glyph?" "Interesting question" "That's been a mystery for hundreds of years" "You're very much interested in our work" "Yes!" "Principally we archaeologists are dedicated to digging up the past to save the mystery of the Maya" "It's like a puzzle that is solved piece by piece" "Only here in Chichen?" "No, no." "We've been working" "In different sites here, there" "We've been studying for more than a hundred years" "During the early 19th century reports of ancient monuments hidden in the jungle circulated round the world" "Explorers who occasionally came across these ruins tried to explain their mysterious presence with fantastic theories" "Tales of these lost cities attracted North American John Lloyd Stephens an explorer who had published books about his travels" "In 1839, Stephens organized an expedition to Central America accompanied by the talented English artist" "Frederick Catherwood" "He wrote of the respect he came to reel toward the people who guided him and of the surprise at what he found" "He recorded all the details of his explorations with great elegance" "For the first time we came to a building constructed long before the Europeans knew of the existence of this continent" "I was filled with amazement and admiration for the beauty and solidity of the architecture" "Here was a true palace with royal apartments surrounded by magnificent courtyards." "The walls and pillars were richly ornamented with reliefs and figures so beautifully created that it was easy to see the artistic ability of the Maya people." "With the aid of a camera lucida" "Catherwood made many drawings." "Historians say America was peopled by savages" ""but savages never rained these structures" ""Savages never carved these stones." ""Their accomplishments were worthy to stand beside those of Egypt, Greece and Rome."" "In 1841, Stephens published his book illustrated by Catherwood and contributed important information toward the knowledge of the Maya cities." "Stephens recognized the native origins of the ruins and admired the beauty of the cities." "Alfred Maudslay was one of the first to study the ancient Maya cities with a scientific approach" "Maudslay drew derailed plans and made sketches of the monuments" "In this manner he established a base for later archaeological studies" "He carefully analyzed the sculptured motifs which decorated the walls of the buildings" "His attention was caught by the frequent representation of the serpent" "The molds of reliefs and glyphs which he made enabled the study of the inscriptions" "The best of my tools was the camera" "The dry gelatin negative had just been invented and this enabled photographers to work in previously inaccessible places" "The major contribution of Maudslay was his photographs which have since been used in the restoration and preservation of many objects believed to have been lost to erosion, vandalism and theft" "Some of the monuments photographed by Maudslay reveal the richness of design carved in stone" "For many years, it was thought" "That these carving represented gods and priests and that the glyphs were concerned only with the calendar" "Much later, we came to know their real significance" "Some of these designs were also found in the Maya books we call codices" "Only four of these have survived" "They contain glyphs" "We must send yours away for deciphering" "Most of the knowledge we have of ancient Maya life comes from the writings of a Franciscan-Diego de Landa- a monk who came to Yucatan in 1549" "He used to observe the Maya and noted their use of glyphs and later, tried to translate them into Spanish" "In his writings" "Landa established the base for deciphering the glyphs which were a mixture of syllables and words" "They wrote in their books about their sciences" "The sciences they taught were the counting of days, months and years festivals and ceremonies cures for illness and the art of reading and writing" "We found a great number of such books" "Since they contained nothing but the words of the devil we burned them all which caused them much grief" "In his attempt to convert the Maya to Christianity" "Landa destroyed their religious possessions burning many of the codices" "What happened to the writing if the books were destroyed?" "Fortunately, the Maya wrote not only in books we find writing on their stone monuments and on pottery as on this plate found in the Yucatan area" "It's a passage from the "Popol Yuh," a Maya legend" "The glyphic writing was forgotten" "After the burning of the codices" "50 years after Maudslay's photos were published they were also used by scholars to study the glyphs and inspired many expeditions to the region" "As the first glyphs were decoded it was believed that all the texts were religious in nature concerned with the passage of time and the observation of the stars" "It was thought the Maya were peaceful people living in harmony with nature scattered in the jungle" "In 1946, a discovery was made which cast more light on the mystery of the Maya" "The theories were about to dramatically change" "Photographer Giles Healy was making an expedition to jungle in habited by the Lacandon" "I spent more than two years" "In the region with the Lacandon Indians filming their daily life" "I noted that from time to time the men would disappear for a couple of day" "They were making a pilgrimage to a temple but it was impossible to follow them so I gave them shotguns with a smell amount powder and left for a month two" "When I return they said" ""We like your guns, but we're out of powder"" "So I said "I'll give you more powder"" "if you'll show me more temples" "I'll never forget being guided to Bonampak" "They looked to the temples with much reverence conducting a ceremony as we arrived at each one" "As my was become accustomed to the dim lamplight" "I saw that each room was painted with frescos that showed a file of Maya chiefs in full regalia" "These paintings changed many of ideas which were held about the Maya" "Never before had we seen scenes of battle, slavery and torture painted of the Maya themselves" "Ah, here's the response" "So rapidly?" "Yes." "Let's see what it says" ""This is a glyph of fire, and this is a rodent" ""Haleb"in Maya or 'tepescuintle'" ""but we can't know the full meaning without the missing portion."" "That translation looked easy" "But is was the work of people of many countries over many years" "The first clue to the Maya writing was the numbers" "The Maya established their units based on man's 20 digits" "They were one of only four civilizations to develop the concept of zero" "Numbers were put in different positions" "Dots were worth one" "One, two, three, four and five was a bar" "15 is three bars 19 is three bars and four dots" "20 is one dot in a higher position with a shell for zero below" "A dot above with a dot below is 21" "A dot above with a bar below is 25" "Two dots above means two 20s, or 40" "A bar in the upped position means five 20s-100" "A dot with two zeros below is 400" "A dot with three zeros below is 8,000" "8,421" "The Maya were great mathematicians and astronomers" "They calculated the length of the solar year with an error of only 23 seconds the cycle of Venus with a margin of error of only one day in 6,000 years" "Some of the buildings of Chichen Itza were so constructed as to mark the equinox and solstices" "They also knew the cycle of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and were able to calculate eclipses of the sun" "33 years ahead" "All this was recorded in their books and fortunately on stone, too" "In 1921 the decoding of the tablet of 96 glyphs at Palenque began" "By 1935, Enrique Palacios had accomplished the deciphering of the first few" "Eric Thomson solved others in 1944 while the linguist Yuri Knorosof discovered phonetics in the Maya writing" "By 1958, half the glyphs could be read in the '60s, Heinrich Berlin and Tatiana Proskovriokoff" "In the '70s Linda Schele and Floyd Lounsbury with Peter Mathews discovered title glyphs of the royal family" "Finally, in 1990 the whole panel could be read" "The panel told the history of royal family of Palenque their wars, and the transmission of power to young kings" "Among these was Pakal ruler of Palenque king from the age of 12 and governing until 80" "It was ceremonies such as this" "Which were recorded in stone in all the Maya cities" "Plaenque was studied intensively by the Mexican National Institute of Anthropolgy and History" "In 1949 the Mexican archeologist" "Alberto Ruz decided to investigate the temple of the inscriptions to see if it had been built on top of another building" "Ruz noticed that the wall of the temple did not finish at the floor but appeared to continue below" "Intrigued, he discovered that one of the huge stone slabs had plugs which enabled it to be moved" "As the slab was moved a narrow opening was revealed a secret passageway" "As we cleared the passage several steps appeared" "I immediately resolved to follow the stairs to its end in spite of the exhausting work this implied" "During the next three years" "The work progressed painfully slowly 400 tons of rubble was removed by hand" "By the end of the third season we had not found a single clue" "I imagined that the stairs had been deliberately sealed to conceal their original purpose but I had no idea what this purpose was" "In 1952, while working deep inside the pyramid we found a room which seemed to have no exit" "The floor was completely covered by a monumental slab of carved stone" "This slab was supported by an immense block with carved reliefs" "Oh, fantastico" "Extraordinario" "As the stone was lifted centimeter by centimeter my excitement grew" "A smaller lid was hidden beneath" "We had discovered the tomb of a king the first to be discovered in a Maya pyramid" "The buried king was Pakal" "The scene carved on the lid of the sarcophagus described the descent of the king on his journey to the world of the dead" "the Maya still worship the gods of the underworld Xibalba:" "The place of fright" "When the sun slides below the horizon the sun god ltzamna becomes jaguar god of the underworld which has nine levels each with its respective god" "The sky has 13 levels" "The earth is flat and ruled by Chacs, gods of rain" "The physical and supernatural worlds are interwoven" "The work of archeologists, epigraphers and scientists continues" "The archeologists use the latest technological advances to assemble the jigsaw puzzle of the ancient civilization" "The remains of buildings from thousands of years ago can be traced and maps of them produced with the help of computers" "There are many sites which have been studied" "And contrary to what was thought for a long time these were not only ceremonial centers but real cities-some enormous and densely populated" "Look, let me show you" "The Maya built many huge cities some with populations of about 40,000 inhabitants ruled by supreme governor the divine Ahau" "The buildings were brilliantly colored and covered with symbols" "These marvelous cities were abandoned" "In the ninth and tenth centuries" "Why, remains a mystery" "The culture of the ancient Maya builders of the majestic cities disappeared" "But the Maya culture, knowledge and artistry is still present in the life of today's Maya who link the past the present and the future"