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When these lost cities throughout southern Mexico and portions of Central America were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, "no one knew what to make of this distinguished civilization that had been engulfed by the jungle," says Fash. "This was a great mystery, and nothing excites the human imagination like a mystery."
Any number of wild speculations arose about the origins of the Maya. The most helpful account came in the form of a book published by a priest (later a bishop) of YucatÁn, Fray Diego de Landa. "He was sitting in jail waiting to meet the Inquisition, and prepared this very long treatise on Maya culture as a means of trying to defend his occasionally overzealous attempts at conversion," says Fash. "Ironically, the Inquisition is the reason we have Landa's fabulous text about Maya civilization."
Landa had a Maya scribe write down the names of the numbers, days, and months of the Maya calendar, which, Fash says, became "a great primer for Maya scholars who wanted to decipher the stone inscriptions." Landa also had the scribe write down phonetic signs for Spanish sounds using Maya symbols. "No one could make heads or tails of that," says Fash, "but what everyone could agree on was how the calendar worked.
"A number of sophisticated mathematicians and engineers applied what Landa had recorded to the surviving books and stone monuments. This cracked the codes of the dates on the Maya monuments, the lunar reckonings, and the Venus tables, and recognized other time counts related to astronomy."
The focus on time and the movement of the stars and planets sent scholarship spiraling off in the wrong direction for about 50 years, he says. "Since that was what we could decipher, everyone obsessed on the Maya's understanding of the cycles of time, their fascination with the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the obsession to record this in vivid detail in their books and inscriptions. Taken to a logical extreme, people concluded that the Maya must have been a theocracy governed by astronomer priests whose only concern was the passage of the heavenly bodies through the heavens."
Many years later, scholars disproved this fantasy by means of basic archaeology and deciphering the hieroglyphs. "The archaeologists found defensive ditches dug around cities and other evidence for invasions of cities, and abundant evidence for the mass production of projectile points and other weaponry," he says. "Most stunningly, in 1949 they discovered the ruins of Bonampak, Mexico, where the murals portrayed a pitched battle between two Maya kingdoms." Implements of war and murals with images of human sacrifice contradicted the notion that this was a band of peaceful astronomer priests.
Fash highlights the "brilliant work of deduction" of architect, artist, and epigrapher Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Decades ago she concluded that the repeated dates at the Maya city of Piedras Negras were tied to history more than to astronomy. "The dates recorded events in the life spans of named individuals, and the monuments existed to pay homage to these rulers and important events of their lifetimes," Fash explains. In other words, record-keeping related to the heavenly bodies was background information for historical events, perhaps to explain why a date was chosen for the accession of a ruler or for a particular war against a neighboring kingdom. "The monuments were erected by the Maya not to record the move- ment of heavenly bodies, but to record Maya history," he says.
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