Breaking the Maya Code
Director: David Lebrun
United States/2007/115 min/English
An excellent WGBH documentary on the linguistic / archaeological / anthropological quest to find the “Rosetta stone” for the ancient language encrypted in the hieroglyphs of the central American lost Mayan cities. After Spanish monks burned all but four paper books, forced linguistic conversion to Spanish meant that Mayans could no longer read their ancient texts. Over four hundred years of research, with periodical insights and theoretical missteps, advances and canonically imposed wrong theories, gradually brought back the ancient script to a point where today, ninety percent of the language can now be read in the original. The amazing circumstances of chance through history that involved so many insightful (if, at times, wrong) people makes the story that much more amazing, especially since the last big breakthrough was solved by a precocious teenager. The director was on hand to tell us he’d just completed the film tens days previously after ten long years of work, and that this was the second time he was watching it in full. Very detailed and methodical, but completely fascinating watching the nature of scientific study and epiphany unfold over the course of time.
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