missionaries like diego de landa trietowith ta ierpret the hierogl was t fst ttry orlate them with the spanish alphabet. (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