Breaking the Maya Code

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Starring: Richard Agurcia
Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Type: DVD
Directed By: David Lebrun
Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Release Date: 2008-09-16
Running Time: 116 minutes
For a people to lose their history is a tragedy; to recover it, a miracle.

Breaking the Maya Code is the story of the 200-year struggle to unlock the secrets of the world's last major undeciphered writing system. Based on archaeologist and historian Michael Coe's book of the same title (which The New York Times called "one of the great stories of twentieth century scientific discovery") and filmed in over 40 locations in nine countries, this amazing detective story is filled with false leads, rivalries and colliding personalities. It leads us from the jungles of Guatemala to the bitter cold of Russia, from ancient Maya temples to the dusty libraries of Dresden and Madrid.

The heroes of the story are an extraordinary and diverse group of men and women: an English photographer, a German librarian, a Russian soldier, a California newspaperman, an art teacher from Tennessee, and an 18-year-old boy immersed in the glyphs since early childhood. Surprisingly, the decipherment reveals not peaceful kingdoms but warring citystates in a long struggle for domination. The texts also reveal a strange world of kings and queens who regularly shed and burned their blood to invoke the Vision Serpent, a world shaped by an intricate cosmology that weaves together the lives of humans, the deeds of mythic heroes and the cycles of the planets and the stars.

For the six million Maya alive today, a people who had been cut off from their own extraordinary past, the decipherment is like a time machine - uniting them with their own lost history and opening up an invaluable treasure for all of us.

Highly recommended especially for public library DVD collections
Breaking the Maya Code: The 200-Year Quest to Decipher the Hieroglyphs of the Ancient Maya is a DVD documentary about the scientific and linguistic quest to rediscover the literary heritage of an entire civilization. In the 16th century, Spanish invaders burned Mayan books and remorselessly exterminated their hieroglyphic literacy. For two hundred years, scientists and linguists have worked to relearn the knowledge once lost, and uncover the mysteries and heritage of an ancient civilization. Though scholars from around the world applied their brainpower to the puzzle, the final breakthrough came from an 18-year-old boy who had been immersed in the glyphs since his early childhood. Revealed, the ancient hieroglyphs tell of an astonishing cosmic mythology, held by a people who burned their blood to invoke the Vision Serpent, that interleaves the deeds of mythical heroes with the cycles of planets and stars. Recounting a treasury of cultural heritage not only for history and archaeology, but also for the six million Maya living today, Breaking the Maya Code is highly recommended especially for public library DVD collections.

Stunning documentary on the Maya glyphs
If you saw Cracking the Maya Code on PBS's NOVA series, this is the original for that episode. The NOVA producers had the filmmaker condense this full-length documentary (Breaking the Maya Code) into a one-hour broadcast. Both are stunning, but the full-length documentary gives you even more detail--something you will want. The documentary is assisted by state-of-the-art graphics which allow specific parts of the glyph carvings to light up when they are being discussed, as if the narrator were touching the surface of the carving. By the end of the documentary, when you get to see the deciphered glyphs re-introduced to the Maya themselves, you are almost cheering for a blow against the conquistadores and de Landa--who (almost!) eliminated the culture. The main accomplishment of the film is to lay out the story of how the glyphs were finally unlocked--with many frustrating roadblocks along the way (the key that opened the treasure trove was briefly tried twice before, but stopped each time). The story of the breaking of the glyphs also serves to show how interdisciplinarity is sometimes a necessity, not just a luxury: the ultimate unraveling required contributions from school teachers, amateur archaeologists, artists, art teachers, linguists, photographers, and mathematicians. In addition, one sees how cultural forces shape and distort readings of the glyphs and interpretations of the Maya culture. Simply fascinating!

A Detective Story Spanning 500 Years - And Then Solved
If you asked most persons to identify the greatest intellectual achievements of the 20th century, you would probably hear :space exploration and genetic decoding: among the likely answers. After watching this film, I would add cracking the Mayan Code belongs in the top 5. There are literally thousands of Maya ruins with strange pictorial glyphs - but unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphs, scholars had no Rosetta Stone to help translate them. How then to decipher the ancient language?

This film is not a study of the Maya but a study of the personalities and thinkers who tried to interpret the Mayan picture glyphs. The story embraces a 500 year period. We begin with Bishop de Landa - a 15th century Spanish priest who asked the Mayan scribes to translate the Mayan sounds into western letters...a librarian in Germany who came across one of the few books still preserved of Mayan writing lost in the stacks...an artist with no special academic training who copied and studied the glyphs in Palenque...a Russian soldier who made the intellectual breakthrough that some of the Mayan writing was not like Chinese (pictures of ideas) but syllabic symbols...a photographer who photographed Mayan pottery for 30 years...and a 12 year old American genius who started publishing detailed scholarly papers on the language of the ancient Mayas. The string of personalities is endlessly fascinating. This is a beautifully photographed tribute to a group of
unknown thinkers who followed their obsession and step by step deciphered the most difficult code possible.