Maya writing: Did you mean...?

Juan de Grijalva (aka Grijalba, 1489-1527) was a Spanish conquistador who explored the eastern coast of Mexico in 1518. His notable achievements included a demonstration that the Yucatán Peninsula was just that and not, as previously thought...

Teotihuacan, located in the Basin of Central Mexico, was the largest, most influential, and most revered city in the history of the New World. It flourished in Mesoamerica's Golden Age, the Classic Period of the first millennium CE. Dominated...

From Egyptian hieroglyphs to your alphabet, watch these miners turn fancy symbols into simple scratches that were all about the sounds. First marvel at hieroglyphic inscriptions in the shadow of the great pyramids. Once you grasp how those...

Your vowels were invented in Greece, giving birth to the first "true" alphabet. Watch as your new toga-clad friend turns your consonant abjad into a consonant-vowel alphabet. It's such a useful mapping of letters to sounds that neighbor...

Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic evolved a unique way to write vowels... with consonants! See how in this episode of Thoth's Pill: an Animated History of Writing. You're back in the ancient Middle East, where seemingly everyone's...

Not a syllabary. Not quite an alphabet. Totally Indian. Watch Ashoka discuss his land's exotic script and tell you his plans for this unique alphasyllabary. This episode traces the invention of the Indic alphasyllabary, the parent of so...

This sacred Maya cenote or ceremonial sinkhole is located at the ruins of San Gervasio, which is located on the island of Cozumel in Mexico.

A Maya diving figure from a lid of a ceramic vessel. Mexico, c. 1000-1100 CE. (St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri)

The Maya glyph for Tikal. From a stela in the Archaeological Museum of Tikal.

Colonnaded halls were very popular among the Maya along Mexico's eastern coast in Pre-Columbian times. At San Gervasio, located on the Mexican island of Cozumel, one can see this Maya "palace" structure in full-view. This structure has benches...