The 200-year quest to decipher the ancient Maya hieroglyphs has unlocked the secrets of a great civilization and re-connected modern Maya with their extraordinary past.

The complex and beautiful Maya hieroglyphic script was until recently the world’s last major un-deciphered writing system. BREAKING THE MAYA CODE is the story of the 200 year struggle, often hampered by misconceptions and rivalries, that has ultimately unlocked the secrets of one of mankind’s great civilizations and re-connected modern Maya with their extraordinary past. It’s an epic tale that leads from the jungles of Guatemala to the snows of Russia, from ancient Maya temples to the dusty libraries of Dresden and Madrid. The film is based on the book of the same title by Michael Coe,
called by the NY Times “one of the great stories of twentieth century scientific discovery.”

Review:
It’s somewhat humbling while watching Breaking the Maya Code to see this supposedly technologically primitive people were predicting eclipses and cataloguing the orbit of Venus with astounding accuracy nearly a millenium ago. It’s also humbling to see the completely oafish several centuries of idiotic behaviors which kept the Mayan language from being understood until very, very recently. We Westerners often think we’re the repositories of all knowledge, and that hubris has often led us down dead end paths where we’re still insisting we’re not lost and know the way. That blindness is on pretty pathetic display throughout this revelatory documentary which has just jumped to the head of the class of recent “true life” stories I’ve seen.

The Maya culture has left us a fascinating, if largely misunderstood, reliquary of temples and other artifacts that are a unique blend of art and language, a language that as recently as 50 or so years ago was more or less incomprehensible. When the Spanish conquerors found these “barbarian” peoples centuries ago, their first activities of course were to convert them to Christianity, teach them “cultured” languages, and, most importantly, eradicate any vestiges of supposedly “Satanic” elements like the native Mayan language. And thus we see a reenactment of literally thousands of Mayan codices being burnt, with the absolutely gut-wrenching result that only four such books are known to be extant in our current time.

Trust me on this one – even if you don’t have a particular interest in Maya culture or even less the history of languages and translations, you are going to be spellbound by Breaking the Maya Code. Highly recommended. Reviewed by Jeffrey Kaufman