(david stuart) it was a fundamental sunderstanding of what mayariting is cause the maya never used an alphabet. landa only knew alphabets-- that's all that he could really imagine writing could be. and so he wrote down an a, b, c but he was writing down signs that made no sense as an alphabet. the glyphs were associated with maya rigion directly. he saw thelyphs as a reflection of that idolatry that had to be destroyed. and so he's very famous, for gathering together these... these manuscripts and having a bonfire-- destroying them all. (narrator) only three or four codices survived-- manuscripts made from the bark of fig trees. cracking the maya code has been a long and painstaking process. scholars gradually have identified sentence structures and realized that the mayan language was far more sophisticated than any other mesoamerican language. it's a complex system based on more than 500 hieroglyphs. it has sentences. it has verbs. it has adjectives. just like any other language. and deciphering the individual sounds eventually has allowed us to read whole texts. (narrator) those te

david stuart, george stuart's son, has been decoding maya glyphs since he was a boy. today, he is one of the world's leading epigraphers, scholars who decipher ancient texts. stuart: the decipherment process may begin with a single inscription or a single glyph in an inscription that will provide a really telling clue about what the phonetic value for the sign might be. to look at an example, there's an inscription from a site in northern yucatan that has a glyph that makes use of this sign that no one can read or could read before. and it's one of two signs in the spelling. the first one is one we actually know from landa's original alphabet, "ma." and here is our unknown sign. and we know from the glyphs around it that it's talking about a certain individual who is an artist. keach: together, these two glyphs form a word that describes an individual. it begins with the glyph on the left, "ma." in a mayan-spanish dictionary, stuart looks for mayan words that begin with "ma." stuart: and it turns out that "mats" means one who is knowledgeable or wise. and so "mats" se

(david stuart) scholars got from this, this idea that the maya were obsessed with time and that's really all they wanted to record. but they weren't just recording time, of course, they were using it to express all of these other things. they wanted to anchor their history, their kings and their wars and records of these things in cosmology. so this image of the stargazing maya, the priest astronomers obsessed with time, this is a bit of a false image. (narrator) in 1946, the photographer giles healey went to chiapas to make a film about the lacandon indians. they led him to a group of temples perched atop ruined pyramids at bonampak. the interior of the largest building on the site was sheathed in wall paintings that shattered the peaceful image of the maya. (mary miller) when they came to light in forties, at that moment, everyone had thought that, "oh, the maya had lived in a time of peace. they were people of enormous decorum and personal reserve." and suddenly, when these paintings emerged on the scene and you could see that they were, in some ways, intimate portraits of life at cou

stuart varney. thank you, sir. alisyn: fox news alert for you. we want to talk take you to the white house now where british prime minister david cameron just showed up for a official visit. the president and prime minister took in a basketball game. a little march madness recently, a couple nights ago. now they're doing more official business at white house. there you can see hillary clinton, secretary of state, speaking i believe to tim geithner and, we will let you know what happens at the white house. bill: talk about your march madness, huh? they were at university of dayton arena, taking in a play-in game for the tournament that gets underway full force on thursday. great game. winning shot came 30 seconds left in the game. alisyn: always exciting. bill: i don't know if he is a big basketball fan. alisyn: the president we do. >> 10 minutes past the hour. just getting start right here. show you a new look of a meltdown on a airplane. a flight attendant threatenses to kill everybody on board before takeoff. newly-released 911 calls on that. you will not believe this. alisyn: new report. the cost of president obama's health care overhaul. why i