Rediscovering the Maya

John Lloyd Stephens was an American lawyer and diplomat, but his passion was travel and exploration. While in London in 1836, Stephens met an artist named Frederick Catherwood, who shared his dream of exploring the uncharted land of Mesoamerica. Three years later, President Martin Van Buren appointed Stephens to go on a diplomatic journey to Central America, a mission that would soon turn into one of history’s great adventures.

While in Mesoamerica, the two men made amazing discoveries. Stephens’s writing and Catherwood’s drawings introduced many people of the nineteenth century to the Maya civilization for the first time.

Discovering Ancient Cities

The men learned of a wall of stone partially buried in the shrubs and trees of the jungle in the Yucatán Peninsula. They had encountered the remains of a temple in Copán, a city abandoned one thousand years earlier by the Maya. The Maya were an advanced civilization that flourished in Mesoamerica for over 1400 years. Hoping to protect the site from damage and study it, Stephens is said to have purchased all of Copán for fifty dollars.

Exploring Forgotten Civilizations

In the middle of the nineteenth century, most people were aware of the great civilization created further to the north by the Aztecs in central Mexico and the civilization of the Incas high in the Andes Mountains of South America. The Maya, however, were all but unknown beyond their native land. There were some fantastic legends known to the modern inhabitants, but no other indications that the poor people who lived in the jungles of Central America were part of one of the most advanced ancient civilizations in history. Stephens and Catherwood eventually explored and documented more than thirty Maya cities, including the now-famous sites of Palenque and Chichén Itzá.

Unlocking a Lost Language

Stephens and Catherwood also encountered many samples of the mysterious writing of the Maya carved in stone. We know now that the Maya were the only Mesoamericans to create a fully complex form of written language. Some Maya glyphs represented objects, like a pictographic language. Others represented sounds. In some cases, a single glyph represented both a sound and an object. Today scholars recognize roughly 800 core Maya signs (and over 1,000 including variants), but Stephens and Catherwood could not decipher the stones they discovered.

The Maya Codices

Maya codices were folding books made from the inner bark of the wild fig tree, pressed and coated to form a type of paper. All but a handful were destroyed in 1562 by the order of Diego de Landa, a Spanish bishop sent to Mesoamerica to convert the Maya people to Christianity. Realizing the Maya people would use the codices to reinforce their traditional beliefs, de Landa ordered all Maya texts to be burned. The bishop later wrote,

“We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”

Before he did this, however, de Landa recorded his observations of Maya culture and examples of their writing. His notes were lost for nearly three hundred years until they were rediscovered in 1862. The bishop’s manuscript was the first key to unlocking the puzzle of the previously unreadable Maya writing.

Clues to an Ancient World

Four Maya books—known today as the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Mexico Codices—escaped the fire. As scholars learned to decipher the language, the books provided insight into Maya mathematics and astronomy. The codices tell us very little of everyday life for the Maya, and nothing about how the common people of the region lived. There are still many mysteries to discover as archaeologists continue to probe the jungle and find more clues about the Maya people. Researchers speculate that we will know a lot more about the Maya in the years to come.