The most fully developed writing system of the pre-Columbian Americas, and the only one known to record connected speech in full. Maya script mixes whole-word signs with phonetic syllable signs, recording the dynastic history, ritual, astronomy, and calendar of the Maya — a body of knowledge nearly erased by Spanish book-burning, then painstakingly read again in the twentieth century.
For four centuries the carved stones of the Maya could not be read. Scholars admired them, copied them, and guessed at them, but the glyphs kept their silence. The breakthrough did not come from a single key. It came from a Soviet linguist who worked far from the Maya ruins, with no field access to them, and from a museum scholar who noticed that the same signs kept appearing beside the same dates, as if the stones were recording the lives of real kings. They were.