archaeologists again referred to landa's book. bishop landa said that, hey, these people are celebrating new year's day on 12 kan, zero pop, and that's july 16, 1556. and knowing that, and knowing that an eclipse is mentioned on a certain date in the dresden codex, we can begin to put all of those together and come up with a system that matches and is consistent throughout. keach: archaeologists could now place the maya in the context of world history. most maya inscriptions date from a.d. 300 to 900. but what had they written ? the meaning of the other glyphs remained a mystery. a bizarre picture of the maya was beginning to emerge. stuart: these texts were accompanied by figures, scenes. and since they didn't understand anything but the dates, there was no way of telling who was depicted or what the scene was about. and thinking that perhaps the figures were priests, and here was a gentle people obsessed with time and nothing else, the maya began to take on a non-human aspect. here was the strangest race of people that ever live

de landa with the spanish alphabet. (david stuart) it was a fundamental sunderstanding of what mariting 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