Customer Reviews

Breaking the Maya Code

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4 star:		(1)
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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!

If you asked most persons to identify the greatest intellectual achievements of the 20th century, you would probably hear about space exploration, the cure for polio, or uncovering the structure of DNA. 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.

If you enjoy this film, the director is also responsible for the exciting movie entitled "Proteus"...another exceptional documentary about scientific discovery. Check it out.

If you've ever wondered how the scientific community really attacks a problem, watch this video. There are occasional brilliant insights, but this shows the painstaking, behind the scenes work done by an array of professional (and amateur) researchers that lead up to that one big leap. Einstein didn't work in a vacuum, many researchers spent decades amassing the work that Einstein would ultimately tie together to develop relativity. So it is in some ways with the breaking of the Maya code. The Mayans left an incredibly detailed account of their history and culture right in front of us, and for centuries we hadn't a clue as to what it meant. A mystery that started with the Spanish conquest of central America several centuries ago, and only resolved (well, mostly resolved) in the past few decades. In this DVD, you'll watch how generations of researchers slowly put together bits and pieces of the puzzle. You'll listen to accounts of young researchers as they recall the high points of key conferences and key moments, as well as the arduous months in the jungles carefully photographing and drawing the Mayan symbols on temples, stelae, and other antiquities. The symbols are also reproduced graphically so that the viewer can see how the written Mayan language all fits together. You probably won't be reading the symbols on the temple walls by the end of the DVD, but you'll be able to recognize the symbols and how they all fit together! There are so many fascinating details presented in this outstanding documentary. One of the most famous, most knowledgeable Mayan scholars was completely wrong on one key aspect of the translation, and probably held up progress for decades, but quickly and graciously relented when shown convincingly that he was wrong. One thing that puzzled linguists for years about the Mayan language was that they were unsure whether is was an alphabetic language (like English) or a purely symbolic language (like Chinese). The alphabetic languages have several dozen characters, and symbolic languages have hundreds or thousands. The Mayan language had about 80 or so. The great breakthrough came when it was realized that some of the characters had the same meaning and that there were only 30 or 40 distinct characters - the language was alphabetic. Bottom line - great documentary - a no-brainer if you're even remotely into this sort of this.

As a woman of part-Chippewa (Ojibwa) heritage, I am very interested in both the ancient peoples of the Americas and in the stories of how our cultures have fared since the European settlers "discovered" our homelands.

This documentary pulls very few punches when describing the ancient Mayans, the European newcomers, or modern Mayans.

There are stories within stories in this well-crafted documentary: the ancient Mayan story, the modern Mayan story, the European explorer/conqueror story and the personal stories of the various scholars, linguists, enthusiastic amateurs and adventurers who did something amazing, sometimes in spite of themselves: break the ancient Mayan code, a code that was almost neglected -- and actively repressed -- out of existence.

I highly recommend this documentary as a bridge between the past and the future. It pulls together the various strands of its story with nuanced wisdom and humility -- and with almost none of the romanticized sentimentality that so often turns pseudo-scholarly works on Native Americans into something embarrassingly banal.

Very well done.

This video is the story of a civilization whose enigmatic glyphs puzzled the world for centuries and the long, often frustrating efforts by priests, renaissance men, scholars and gifted amateurs to decifer the words left by them in stone.

The video does an excellent job of chronicling the people who added to our knowledge of the Maya in fits and starts over the centuries. It shows the breaking of the Maya written language, in fits and starts, beginning with the deciferment of their system of mathematics. The video shows the many arguments whether the glyphs were phonetic, syllabic or represented entire ideas or concepts.

I was surprised by the number of breakthroughs that were made not by scholars but by gifted amateurs who were able to bring a fresh perspective to the process. It was a story of individual insights and creative collaboration assisted by the Xerox machine!

Visually, the video was very well done and showed the remains of what was a sophisticated civilization. The dvd does an excellent job of visually introducing the viewer to the glyphs, showing how they are used to make sentences as well as the artistic lattitude the ancient scribes had to express thoughts. I was struck by the amazing artistic talent of those ancient Maya scribes as they recorded royal geneologies, history, diplomacy and a multitude of other things people record for posterity.

The dvd contains interviews with those who played major roles in the breaking of the code (in the case of those who are deceased, their thoughts are transmitted to us through their writings) and adds greatly to the viewer's understanding of the circumstances of their contributions as well as their work from their own words.

This is an excellent documentary that was well made, informative, entertaining and was able to convey the passion of researchers to solve the puzzle of the Maya glyphs that the story of the Maya could be known to us. I reccomend this with five stars!

"Breaking the Maya Code" is so much better than other videos out there that I have seen and this one goes so well with the book "Breaking the Maya Code" by Michael Coe. You don't have to read the book but I did ad it explains more information than this film even. Back to this film this video will open your eyes to a new "old" world. Most think that the Americas began from Span, but this will get you to wonder if this is true.

The Maya began in the BC and this demonstrates the science that proves it. This is beautifully done and a must have for your video library.

Who said scholarship has to be dry? While tracing the history of Mayan decipherment, this splendidly photographed film shows what it means to be on location - and what locations they are! The film is a monument both to the ancient Maya and to those who have dedicated themselves to sharing them with the rest of us. Beautiful!

Great documentary! You will find the list of people you need to know to study the history of discovering Mayan's culture for the last 200 years. It's a great guide to the world of unique culture. It's also an amazing collection of stories about extraordinary people who gave back living Mayans their language, history and pride.

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.

I know what you're thinking - how interesting can this possibly be? Dusty old remnants of heiroglyphic carvings statically filmed for another of those PBS-tyle documentaries for crusty old pedants smoking pipes.

But this really is fascinating. It's interesting how this written language could have been studied for so long over the centuries and still been misunderstood so many times. The language is logical, yet quirky, with colloquial styles and subtly different forms. It mixes purely graphical elements (like Chinese) with "sound adapters" like a more alphabetic language.

But again, it's the history of the discoveries and the wrong turns and breakthroughs by various people that make this so interesting. And reintroducing (!) the language to modern day Mayan descendents is a beautiful way to end the story. An entire race that did not have access to its own history for so long....