The cities of the Maya were abandoned to the jungle 1000 years ago. They were rediscovered in the 19th century. Explorers came to try and learn what was here and what it meant. It has taken this long for the answers to be discovered but now at last the evidence is appearing and being understood. The carvings are beginning to speak, and scholars are discovering the history of the Maya. The story is suddenly appearing, faster than it can be published. Now scholars are beginning to see the individuals involved, their names, the dates, their arrivals, all of this very specific information is now coming out through epigraphy, the study of hieroglyphics. The Maya ruins of the central American jungle are are full of hieroglyphs, but the missionaries of the Spanish conquest deliberately wiped out the memory of how to read these stones. Museums collected casts of impressive Maya monuments and baffling hieroglyphs and stored them away like a library of unreadable books. The only thing that could be understood was that there were numbers, the numbers would eventually be deciphered as dates. The Maya kept calendars of immense complexity and accuracy. They were using zero in their mathematics before anyone else in the world, and predicting eclipses and movements of the planets with great accuracy. The view developed that these cities were centers of a wise and peaceful civilization that had a deep understanding of nature and the universe. But now we are learning the truth about the classic Maya cities, and the truth is that Lords of the Maya, that called themselves divine, set up a form of rule that destroyed human lives and even nature itself. This documentary charts the rise and fall of a specific Mayan Lord Yax K’uk’ Mo (pronounced yash-cook-moe), and through it the brutal world the Mayans lived in without passing judgment on the Mayans themselves.
