Catholic Priest Destroyed the Entire Mayan Written Language

The Maya writing system was used in what is now Mexico and Central America for almost two thousand years, until after the arrival of Cortés. It was written in bark paper books, carved on public monuments and inscribed on personal objects of pottery, bone and jade. The invading Spanish outlawed the script and burned thousands of books, systematically wiping out literacy in the Maya script and severing the Maya people from the written record of their own extraordinary past.

n the nineteenth century the texts began to re-emerge, as buried cities and fantastic inscriptions were discovered in the jungles and rare Maya books plundered by the Spanish were re-discovered in the libraries of Europe.  Early scholars decoded the complex Maya calendar and identified glyphs for gods, planets, animals, colors and directions. But prejudice and misconceptions about the nature of the Maya people and their script kept the meaning of the…