National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - Code of the Maya Kings (1999)

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National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - Code of the Maya Kings (1999)

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Code of Maya Kings

They would tantalize explorers

for hundreds of years,

ruined cities lost in the jungles

of Central America and Mexico.

Inscrutable faces etched in stone.

Mysterious writing.

Who had left these messages

from the past?

It would take more than a century to

unlock the secrets of the ancient Maya.

Two extraordinary people

would lead the way.

Separated by 100 years,

they would unveil one of the greatest

mysteries of archeology.

Code of Maya Kings

Chichen Itza, Mexico 1842.

An American lawyer named

John Lloyd Stephens

wanders the empty ruins

looking for clues.

He knows what he wants to find.

It has kept him going

through two harrowing journeys,

exploring the desolate jungles

of Central America.

Kept him pushing on

through mud and malaria,

poisonous snakes, and insect-plagued

nights under the stars.

Stephens, the lawyer,

was looking for proof,

undeniable evidence that these ruins

were not built by the Egyptians

or the Phoenicians or the Lost Tribes

of Israel.

And here at Chichen Itza he thinks

that he's found it at least.

Writing unlike that of

any other civilization he knows.

The same writing he'd seen at other

ruined cities hundreds of miles away.

Proof of an ancient empire

of Native Americans

more sophisticated than anyone

believed possible.

Stephens himself was a product of

the New World.

He was born in 1805, the son of

a wealthy New York merchant.

The city wasn't much more than

a Dutch village,

but it was the hub of a new nation.

Stephens grew up

along the Hudson River

watching the ships come in

from around the world.

After reading law,

he opened a practice on Wall Street.

Soon he got into politics,

campaigning vigorously for

Andrew Jackson for President.

But months of shouting to the crowds

gave him a serious throat infection.

His doctor prescribed a common remedy

for wealthy young men-

a grand tour of Europe.

The ancient ruins of Italy and Greece

only piqued his curiosity.

Stephens went on to Egypt,

and spent three months

floating up the Nile,

visiting the temples and monuments

along the way.

Only a decade before a Frenchman

had deciphered the hieroglyphs,

revealing the rich history

of Egypt's kings and queens.

Stephens was fascinated,

and he still wasn't ready to go home.

He'd seen pictures of

a fantastic ancient city in Arabia,

lost for century to all

but the Bedouins.

Everyone told him the journey was too

perilous for an unaccompanied American,

so Stephens disguised himself

as a Turkish merchant

and took the name Abul Hassis.

In 1836, John Lloyd Stephens

was the first American to set eyes

on the ruins of Petra.

In Roman times it had been one of

the greatest cities of the East.

Stephens still found it dazzling:

"A temple delicate and limpid,

carved like a cameo

from a solid mountain wall,

the first view

of that superb facade

must produce an effect

which will never pass away."

Stephens letters home

were so vivid and imaginative,

they were published

in a monthly magazine.

Soon, he was writing books recounting

his exotic adventures around the world.

The lawyer had become

a literary sensation.

He was a seasoned observer,

he was an incredible observer.

In fact, Herman Melville

of Moby d*ck fame, recalled one time

when he was in church,

Herman Melville was, he was a kid.

He heard that Stephens

was in the front row.

And when Stephens left,

Melville writes,

"I thought this man must have great

huge eyes that bulged through his head,

he was such a good observer,"

because Melville had read his stuff.

Back in New York the life

of a sedentary lawyer

no longer held any charm for Stephens.

Instead, his mind was filled with

thoughts of another journey,

not so far away, but even more

remote and daring.

On his way home through London,

he met an artist named

Rederick Catherwood

who'd spent ten

years in the Near East.

They shared their interest

in exotic travel.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Catherwood

had showed him a curious book

about a lost city in Central America

hidden in the jungle.

The book's authors thought

the fabulous ruins of Palenque

had been built by Egyptians,

Carthaginians, maybe even

the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Anyone but the Native Americans.

There was sort of a racism in here

that said that

everything great had come

through the Greeks, the Egyptians,

through the European tradition.

And anything different

appeared relatively

to be a bunch of naked savages

wandering through the woods.

In 1839, no one believed

the Native Americans

capable of building

a sophisticated civilization.

Stephens' own government

had little use for them.

Only a year earlier

they had uprooted thousands of Indians,

sending them westward

along the infamous Trail of Tears.

The thought of a great ancient

civilization in Central America

seemed even more preposterous.

A few travelers had reported

sighting ruined cities like Palenque,

but Stephens could find

none of them on the map.

It was a travel writer's dream,

but only this time

he would have to bring back

evidence of whatever he found.

But who better to accompany him

than the artist Frederick Catherwood,

now practicing architecture

in New York?

Only one small problem remained,

the newly formed

Central American Federation

was fighting a bitter civil w*r.

Using his political connections,

Stephens secured a post

as a Confidential Agent.

He figured his diplomatic coat would

protect him in dangerous territory.

So in October 1839,

Catherwood bid farewell to

his wife and two young boys,

and now they were here,

deep in the jungles of Central America.

The ruins of Copan was

their first goals.

But when they found

the little village of the same name,

no one there had ever head

of nearby ruins.

Finally, a knowledgeable Indian

offered to guide them.

But that was hours ago.

Now they were beginning to think that

the ruins were nothing but a legend.

When suddenly, there they were,

grander than their wildest dreams,

the Ruins of Copan.

Pyramids rose majestically

out of the jungle.

Great stone faces peered at them

from intricately carved monuments,

twice the size of a man.

Stephens noticed hieroglyphs

and judged them

to be as fine

as any he'd seen in Egypt,

yet his experience told him

that these carvings were unique.

The silence of the once

majestic city overwhelmed him:

Copan lay before us like a shattered

bark in the midst of the ocean,

her masts gone, her crew perished,

and none to tell whence she came.

I think the description of Copan

is the single most poetic description

of a place he visits,

for it is though he is walking

around inside the Titanic,

and he's looking at the shipwreck

of a civilization.

He walks from monument to monument.

It is through he's looking into

the faces of those

who have recently been

ruling this place:

America, say historians,

was peopled by savages.

But savages never reared

these structures,

savages never carved these stones,

architecture, sculpture and painting,

all the arts which embellish life,

had flourished

in this overgrown forest,

and yet none knew that

such things had been,

or could tell of

their past existence.

He's the first who is

really able to say,

Look at these stone figures;

these must be portraits of

their kings and queens.

And he uses the word queen

which is really quite astonishing,

in seeing men and women in the

monuments, for 100 years later,

all the men and women that Stephens

saw will have been reduced

by 20th century archeologists to

a group of anonymous calendar priests.

Stephens has this kind of Yankee

can-do observation.

The best part of many of

Stephens' insights is that

they prove to be absolutely true.

Yet Stephens was deeply puzzled

by the mystery at the heart of Copan.

Who could have built

this extraordinary city?

The local Indians didn't seem to know.

Stephens needed their help

to explore the ruins,

but the owner of the land interfered.

Finally, it seemed that the only

solution was to buy Copan.

So the lawyer put on

his diplomatic coat,

and went to the village to negotiate.

You are perhaps curious to know

how old ruins sell in Central America.

I paid $50 for Copan.

There was never any difficulty

about price.

I offered that sum, for which

Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool.

If I had offered more,

he would probably have considered me

something worse.

Ownership settled, the team set about

surveying the ruined city,

measuring and mapping its buildings.

Catherwood is a remarkable

character as well.

I wish we knew more about him.

One gains some sense of the

Stephens personality,

just from the written word.

The Catherwood personality

doesn't emerge much.

Stephens treats him very formally,

and he appears as Mr. Catherwood.

At first Mr. Catherwood found it

almost impossible to draw the monuments.

Their tropical luxuriance defied

his restrained British hand.

Stephens mentions coming upon him

in the woods one day.

Catherwood is standing in front of

a big upright monument.

It is a statute of one of the Copan

rulers, and all intricately carved.

Catherwood's standing there almost

obscured by a pile of crumpled paper,

which represents the output so far

that day of unsuccessful attempts

to draw this thing.

Fortunately, Catherwood had

brought along a camera lucida a box

with a prism inside which allowed him

to trace a reflected image.

To please the perfectionist

Mr. Catherwood,

every detail had to be correct.

With the coming of Spring,

they were ready to begin

the search for the next great goal,

Palenque.

The territory to the north,

through the Sierra Madras Mountains,

was wild and uncharted.

As one local said, the road to

Palenque were only for birds.

Snakes and clouds of mosquitoes

dogged their steps.

To Stephens the worst part was

the local custom of carry a visitor up

the steepest trail on a chair,

strapped to the back of an Indian.

I rose and fell with every breath,

felt his body trembling under me,

and his knees seemed giving way.

The slightest irregular movement on my

part may bring us both down together.

I would have given him a release

for the rest of the journey

to be off his back.

On and on they traveled.

It took more than a month

to reach the fabled ruins

that had first inspired their journey.

Palenque seemed to hang on

the edge of the mountains.

It's graceful buildings dominating

the plain below.

Wherever we moved,

we saw the evidence of their tastes,

their skills in arts,

their wealth and power.

In the midst of desolation and ruin,

we looked back to the past,

cleared away the gloomy forest

and fancied every building perfect,

lofty and imposing.

Palenque's architecture

was different from Copan's,

but Stephens noticed many similarities,

particularly the mysterious writings.

Examining it carefully,

he reached a remarkable conclusion:

There is room for the belief that

the whole of this country

was once occupied by the same race,

speaking the same language,

or at least having the same

written characters.

The Indians Stephens met

spoke many languages

and were as mystified

by the ruins as he was.

Yet, intuitively, Stephens seemed

to sense a link between them.

Stephens, I think, is the first person

who can make the connection

between the Indians that he sees

and meets and the ancient ruins.

Whereas other people want to say,

oh, these pathetic peasants,

these miserable Indians,

they could never have built this.

We must look for some

alternative solution

to where these things

would have come from.

He believes that here

is complete continuity.

And that, I think, is one of the most

radical ideas to come out of his book.

At night, Stephens and Catherwood

slept in the imposing ruin

they called The Palace.

The rainy season had begun,

and the mosquitoes,

venomous during the day,

were even worse at night.

Catherwood was already

racked with malaria,

but somehow they kept on working,

for 22 days and sleepless nights,

bewitched by the beauty of Palenque.

Exhausted, they pushed on,

further north and east to the Yucatan,

but Catherwood was too ill

to continue.

Vowing to return,

they headed home to New York.

In 10 months the two explorers

had accomplished the impossible.

They had rediscovered an ancient

American civilization grander

than anyone had ever dreamed.

Now they were ready to

astound the world with its story.

Stephens's books was incredible popular

when it appeared in the summer of 1841,

Incidents of Travel

in Central America,

Chiapas, and Yucatan.

Harper and Brothers had printed up

a goodly print run,

and it sold out pretty quickly.

Stephens writes a real page-turner.

It is such a personal view,

and it becomes one of the great

bestsellers of the entire 19th century.

It goes through dozens of editions.

And there is an enormous American

desire to know more about

this part of the world.

They were lionized

after the publication.

They were quite the thing

in New York.

It was reviewed everywhere.

Just an amazing publication epic,

so the trip was a success

and they planned to go again.

Seventeen month after they'd left Mexico,

Stephens and Catherwood

were back in the Yucatan,

exploring the city of Uxmal.

On this second journey,

they concentrated their efforts

on this one region of Mexico.

Inching their way through the jungle,

they discovered many ruined cities

entirely unknown, with names

like Coba, Labna, and Sayil.

Stephens felt they were

racing against time.

Everywhere they went, they found

ruins collapsing into piles of rubble.

Catherwood even learned how to sketch

from his mule to save time.

At Uxmal, the artist drew the face of

a god on the side of a pyramid.

Years later, it was destroyed.

Catherwood's illustration is

our only record of it.

They performed the greatest service,

perhaps, in freezing in time

a set of observations

and images of a land that

no longer exists.

They're romantic pictures,

yet at the same time

they're remarkably accurate.

Many of Catherwood's renderings,

for examples, of the Maya at Uxmal

and Magna and other sites

are the first depictions

that we have of what Mayan people

looked like.

We had no earlier record.

In the town of Balankanche,

the explorers visited

an ancient well deep underground.

Catherwood was so inspired,

he began his memorable sketch

at the foot of the ladder.

It was the wildest setting

that could be conceived,

men struggling up a huge ladder

with earthen jars of water

strapped to back and head,

their sweating bodies glistening

under the light of the pine torches.

One of the last places they explored

was Chichen Itza.

Its architecture moved them more than

any other city on this second journey.

Most exciting of all was the revelation

that this city had been linked

to Copan and Palenque hundred

of miles away.

It was the first time in Yucatan

that we had found hieroglyphics

sculptured on stone

which beyond all question

bore the same type

with those at Copan and Palenque.

If one but could read it.

Finally, Stephens felt he had the

proof he'd been looking for.

The mysterious writing was unique,

unlike any he'd ever seen.

Now he could convince the skeptics

that the ruined cities had been built

by Native Americans.

These ruins are different than the

works of any other known people.

Of a new order, they stand alone.

In the nine months

of their second journey,

Stephens and Catherwood managed

to visit 44 ruined cities.

And gather some treasures for

an exhibit on their return.

But they paid a heavy price

for their adventures.

Malaria would haunt both men

for the rest of their lives.

John Lloyd Stephens would fight

the dread disease for ten years

before succumbing to it in 1852.

Frederick Catherwood

would die tragically

a few years later in a shipwreck.

This is the only image we have of him.

For there was another sad chapter

to their story.

The fate of the great exhibition

they held on their return to New York.

This fire started one night

in July of 1842,

and literally overnight it wiped out

the physical originals-

The drawings,

some of the archeological stuff,

the limestone carvings they had

brought back at great labor.

Thank goodness for the books.

And I thank the Fates everyday

that somebody at Harper and Brothers

Publishers in New York

had the foresight to heavily

illustrate the book,

because what a shame

if the drawings had been lost.

Fortunately, before he d*ed,

Catherwood issued exquisite folios

of some of the drawings.

They inspired generations of

explores to follow the intrepid pair

to the land of the Maya.

But Stephens' insights would have

a different fate.

His greatest intuition-that

the Maya had written the real stories

of their lives on the monuments-

would be ignored.

The legions of archeologists

who came after him were able

to decipher some of the glyphs,

but only those that spoke of numbers,

dates and the stars.

Carried away by the discovery that the

ancient Maya were great astronomers,

archeologists fashioned a picture

of them as peaceful stargazers,

obsessed with calendars and time.

When John Lloyd Stephens

had looked at the monuments,

he had seen real kings and queens.

One hundred years later,

archeologists saw only the calculations

of anonymous timekeepers.

It would take a fresh set of eyes

to finally unravel the secrets of Maya

carvings and prove that

Stephens was right.

The story of Tatiana Proskouriakoff

is not well known

outside the realm of Maya studies.

Yet, in that field she is a giant,

a woman in a man's world

who saw further

and deeper than her

more famous contemporaries.

What we know of

the ancient Maya today,

the exciting revelations emerging

from dozens of excavations

is built on her work.

Speaking of Copan, she was the first

to describe its ruins as a puzzle.

She was the one who supplied

the missing piece.

Tatiana, or Tanya,

as her friends called her,

was born in Tomsk,

Siberia in 1909.

Her mother, the daughter of

a prominent general, was a physician.

Her father, a chemist.

World w*r I shattered

their peaceful existence.

In 1915, Tanya's father was sent

to the United States

to supervise arms manufacturing

for the czar.

With the coming of

the Russian Revolution,

the family was trapped and began

a new life in suburban Philadelphia.

At work on the first biography

of Proskouriakoff,

Char Solomon has been uncovering

these early details of her life.

Tanya's story is compelling to me

because she was born in Russia

at such a tumultuous time.

She came to the United States.

She acquired English

as a second language,

and mastered it in such a way that it

became the equivalent of

her first language.

She chose a profession

that was dominated by men at a time

when many women did not

choose to go that route.

Tanya majored in architecture

at Pennsylvania State University,

one of the only women to do so

in her graduating class.

It was 1930, the height of

the Great Depression.

Tanya spent several dispiriting years

looking for work,

then settled for a job making drawings

for a needlepoint shop.

The search for good subjects led her

to the Archeological Museum

at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tanya's skillful drawings attracted

the attention of Linton Satterwaite,

an archeologist looking for

an artist to work at his dig,

deep in the jungles of Guatemala.

The ruined City of Peidras Negras

was a big jump

from her close-knit Russian family,

but Tanya was ready for an adventure.

The small party set off for Guatemala

in the winter of 1936.

On their way,

they stopped at Palenque,

the graceful ruined city

that had captivated

the explorers Stephens

and Catherwood almost 100 years before.

Tanya was equally entranced.

She, in older years, said that

when she first saw the elegant

little Temple of the Sun,

she knew she had found her vocation,

that there would never be anything else

that would get her as much as that.

Tanya's pencil responded easily

to the intricacies of Maya art.

The young Russian American had felt

the pulse of an ancient mystery.

But settling in the Peidras Negras

wasn't easy.

Tanya had to learn how to survey

and draw the dilapidated ruins.

As an outsider, as a woman

who had learned a profession

and trying to find a way into it,

I'm sure she was clearly little Tanya,

allowed to sit there

with her drafting pen

and make observations

about Peidras Negras.

I think she had to pay for

every step she took, but she really,

I think, was someone who was able to

compete effectively with the boys.

In Mayan archeology in the 1932s,

'the boys' were

a pretty formidable bunch.

This was a group of people

that came together,

people from mostly Ivy League,

Harvard and Penn and other places.

They were all great friends.

They were all, as most archeologists

were at the time,

people of independent means.

They could do what

they darn well pleased.

Even in the bush these silver-spoon

archeologists managed to live well.

At Peidras Negras,

dinner was a formal occasion,

beginning with cocktails.

Somewhere around 5 o'clock

they would dress,

and they would dress elegantly.

Tanya had a white dress,

full-length dress,

that she packed along with her.

She would slough through the mud

to get to the dining hut,

and then sort of tuck the muddy bottom

of her dress down behind her feet,

so that no one would notice.

There was a little bit of challenging

banter also between Tanya and Linton.

He had suggested that

one of the structures

did not have a staircase

going up one side,

and she felt strong that

there would have been

and challenged him on that point.

So he said, well,

if you really believe that

there was a staircase there,

then you have to dig and find me

the proof, which she did.

And to her delight,

she found the staircase.

Tanya began to sketch reconstructions

of the ruins

based on the archeological data.

Her drawings were so impressive,

they earned her a sketching tour

of other Maya cities.

Her first stop was Copan.

Noted Mayanist Ian Graham shared

an office with Tanya in her later years

at Harvard's Peabody Museum.

He remembers her tails of Copan

in the thirties.

Anyway, she landed,

the sole female in this isolated camp.

There were some fairly

spirited characters there.

One was an amazing man

called Gus Stromsvik.

Gustav Stromsvik,

the Norwegian archeologist

who worked for the

Carnegie Institution,

fell deeply in love with her.

And Tanya had a period

in which she tried to decide

what this relationship

was going to mean in her life.

Stromsvik was

a very dynamic personality.

He was very outgoing.

He was a raconteur, and she loved

people who could tell good stories,

she loved to laugh.

So she was drawn to him.

But on the other hand, Stromsvik had

a very serious drinking problem.

Particularly on Saturday nights,

the life there was spent pretty wild.

Tanya seemed to handle it

perfectly well.

It's amazing.

She led such a protective life

in her Russian family

and in her suburban life

in Philadelphia.

But she had grit.

Tanya's next stop was Chichen Itza,

center of the Mayan world

in this golden age of archeology.

The ancient city

was undergoing a renaissance,

as archeologists from

the Carnegie Institution

pieced it back together.

Half of rebuilding has gone

hand in hand with the work of

Welcoming the throngs

of visitors was the man

who would serve

as the spokesman for the Maya

for more than 20 years,

Carnegie's Sylvanus Morley,

known for his oversized straw hats

and ebullient personality.

At Chichen Itza,

he lived in grand style

in a Spanish colonial manor house.

Every evening a Chinese cook

would prepare dinner for Morely

and his band of archeologists.

Envious colleagues referred to them

as the club.

On special evenings Morley

would lead his guests to the ruins

of the Maya ball court for a concert,

amplified by the court's

amazing acoustics.

Tanya would join the others

in the moonlight in this fitting place

to conjure the spirits

of the departed Maya.

For to the Carnegie Club, the Maya

were a band of priestly stargazers,

unlike any other people

who had ever lived.

These ancient wise men

had never fought wars.

Instead, they had spent their time

inventing an elaborate calendar

and a system of writing used

for nothing but recording time.

The author of this view of the Maya

was Sir Eric Thompson,

an acerbic Englishman

whose intellect dominated Maya studies

for nearly 50 years.

No one, not even Morely

questioned his authority.

As Thompson began to

formulate his ideas,

no one had the strength

of character to resist.

Morely was the one who tried.

In Morely's early works

he offers a rather different picture.

He is overwhelmed by Thompson's

point of view and adopts it.

This makes it very difficult

for a new voice to find a path,

and particularly when one can imagine

that the name of Tanya

is probably generally preceded

by little.

Thompson may have been able to cow

the other members of the Carnegie Club,

but he hadn't bargained

on Tanya Proskouriakoff.

My general sense of her is absolutely

contrary in a kind of way that if you said,

well, it looks like rain,

she would say,

ah, there's not a drop of

rain in that cloud.

She was the kind of person

if you said,

Oh, it's too warm in here,

she would immediately go turn up

the thermostat

and make it a little warmer.

She just had a kind of

contrary personality.

I think that helped her also then say,

well, if you say the Maya are peaceful,

let's look at them

from another point of view.

Bit by bit, Tanya began to ask

different questions than her colleagues.

She also started to study

the living Maya,

convinced that they had something

to teach her as well.

When she was in highlands Chiapas,

she took some lessons learning

how to weave on the hand loom

that the Maya work with.

At the same time, the same young woman

was helping her to learn Maya.

This is something a lot of people

don't know about Tanya is that

she did study Yucatex Maya.

Tanya's intuition that the living Maya

could provide the valuable link

to the past was borne out by

a fabulous discovery in 1946.

An American filmmaker named

Giles Healey persuaded a Maya Indian

to show him one of their secret place.

The Indian lead Healy to Bonampak,

a lost city buried in the jungle.

Peering into a building,

Healy was astounded to find faces

looking back at him from the walls.

Armies were locked in a furious battle.

Other scenes showed prisoners of w*r

and victims of human sacrifice.

Try as Thompson might, it was

impossible to convince anyone, I think,

that these depicted a peaceful Maya,

for in the Bonampak murals

we see one of the greatest

battle paintings

ever created in the history

of humankind.

Proskouriakoff had not been allowed

to write a single interpretive word

on the Bonampak paintings,

but I've always wondered if it did not

play some role

in shaping how she looked at

the Maya world.

Sir Eric Thompson effectively

barred the door at Bonampak,

preventing other Mayanists from

pursuing the bloody implications

of its murals.

Nevertheless, the flaws

were beginning to show

in his vision of the peaceful Maya.

A few years later, another piece of

the puzzle would slide into place.

In a bookstore in Mexico,

Tanya found a revolutionary new book

by a Russian named Yuri Knorozov.

Always interested in things Russian,

she avidly read his new theory

of Maya writing.

Eventually, it would prove the key

to deciphering the glyphs.

But for years Sir Eric Thompson

would condemn the new theory

as Communist propaganda.

In the late 1950s, Carnegie closed down

its Mezo-America program,

a victim of new priorities.

But Tanya was kept on as a research

associate with an office

at Harvard's Peabody Museum.

Her days in the field were over,

but her greatest work had just begun.

In her little apartment in Cambridge,

Tanya was on to something.

When reading through Tanya's diaries,

I can see that in the 1950s

she made a very conscious decision

to become more private in her life.

She began working much more

intensively with the hieroglyphics.

In her mind Tanya had returned

to Peidras Negras,

the site of her first experience

with the Maya.

Puzzling over the monuments,

she noticed a peculiar pattern

with the glyphs.

Over and over, the same glyphs

were linked to dates

and on each of the monuments none

of the dates exceeded a human lifespan.

Suddenly to Tanya the evidence

was clear:

the monuments were marking the stages

of an individual's life.

Where others had seen

only cold calculations,

Tanya Proskouriakoff saw the lives

of human beings.

It was a conclusion that cut

to the heart of everything

Sir Eric Thompson believed.

Tanya marshaled her facts,

then showed Thompson her article

before sending it to the publisher.

And when she talked with him

before he had read it,

he disagreed strongly with

what her ideas of the Maya were.

When he took the article home

and he read it,

he came back the next day and said,

well, actually,

I believe you're right

which were very big words

from someone who was considered

a giant in the field at the time.

And from that time on,

when you saw a Maya monument

you knew that it didn't deal with

gods and priests,

it deal with human beings,

and that was the importance.

In one sense, everything

that we've done since then in hieroglyphy

and in the interpretation

of the hieroglyphs

has been a footnote to what Tanya did.

She did the general breakthrough.

When she and Yuri Knorozov in Russia

came up with through

hieroglyphic keys, that was it.

We went on a roll.

Once the code breakers went to work,

a more human image of the Maya

began to emerge.

Written in the monuments

were the stories of their lives,

their ancestors,

their battles and conquests.

Across the centuries the Maya

came alive,

kings and queens,

rulers of fabulous cities

full of the voices of the people

echoing out of the past.

Things were changing at

such a dramatic rate.

We can read about, I would guess,

that the Maya wrote.

Given that in 1960 we could barely

read any of it, that's extraordinary.

David Stuart began deciphering Maya

glyphs when he was just a boy.

Tanya Proskouriakoff is

one of his heroes.

He met her shortly before she d*ed,

when she was continuing her careful

scholarship at the Peabody.

In 1998, Stewart took her ashes

to Peidras Negras

for burial at a sight high

above the ancient city she had loved.

We didn't realize how poignant

the ceremony was going to be.

Most of us were students

or young people in the field,

in our 30s at the oldest.

And it sort of dawned

on everyone that here

was the remains of this great lioness,

this legendary figure.

The Guatemalans who were

there were very emotional about this

because this was the woman who had

brought the Maya back to history.

At the end of his pioneering journey

to Central America in 1840,

the explorer, John Lloyd Stephens

had been the first to state

with conviction:

One thing I believe, that its history

is graven on its monuments.

More than 100 years later, we finally

knew that Stephens was right.

At Palenque, Copan, Chichen Itza,

and dozens of ruins in between,

the ancient Maya now speak for themselves.
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