Lost Civilization Maya 1 of 6

[Music]

We are entering a world shrouded in

mystery where nothing is as it first

might seem.

It is a sacred world where a game is

being

played. The year is 750 AD.

We do not know the rules or how many

played, but this is no ordinary

contest. They played this

game for their lives.

More than a thousand years ago, the men

who played and the crowds who watched

would all

vanish, leaving the arena and all their

magnificent cities

empty. Today, only mysteries remain.

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

They were called the classic Maya.

They built the greatest civilization of

the

Americas. When Europe was still in the

dark ages, they produced artists and

scientists whose achievements still

astound. When London was just a town of

wood shacks and dirt streets, the Maya

were building mighty cities of stone in

the heart of the Central American

rainforest.

This is the greatest of them all,

Takab. A thriving metropolis of 40,000

people. It reached its peak around 750

AD and covered an area the size of

Manhattan. Less than a century later, it

stood empty.

It's a mystery that touches

everyone because we're all existing in

civilizations and we feel the fragility

of civilization. When we see something

like the Maya ruins, when you see how

high a civilization can develop and

achieve and how dramatically it can

disintegrate,

uh, it touches each of us.

Unlike so many other civilizations, the

Maya did not fall to famine, invading

armies, or terrible

disease. Maya cities were deserted more

than

destroyed. The Maya who once inhabited

these streets just walked away into the

forest, never to return.

Today, descendants of the Maya still

live in the land of their

ancestors. Yet, their empire is no

more. But

why? Why did the ancients leave their

magnificent cities?

It is a question that has haunted

historians and archaeologists for ages.

Only by exploring the deepest beliefs of

a people who died a thousand years ago

can we attempt to understand who they

were and why they left deserted all

they'd created.

[Music]

The trail is cold, but clues can still

be

[Music]

found. Clues hidden in massive pyramids

of

[Music]

stone. Clues written in a hieroglyphic

code whose secrets were almost lost

forever.

Clues contained in ancient tales of

mighty kings and dangerous gods in a

world founded in ritual and sustained by

bloody

sacrifice. Tales still told by old men

to children, descendants of an empire

that vanished long ago.

The origins of the Maya lie in the

forgotten histories of the first

immigrants, the Asiatic people who

walked across the Bearing Sea from

Siberia during the last ice age and

settled the Americas more than 15,000

years

ago. Thousands of years would pass

before the primeval Maya established

themselves in the sweltering jungles of

Central America.

Then in a period lasting from 250 to 900

AD, the sophisticated civilization we

call the classic Maya would

flourish. Hundreds of cities were built.

The vast territory that is now southern

Mexico, Bise, Guatemala, and Honduras

became the Empire of the

Maya. They thrived for more than six

centuries.

Then it was over. All across the empire,

the Maya simply walked

[Music]

away. For almost 1,000 years, their

ruins lay lost and forgotten.

It wasn't until the 19th century that

the world would rediscover the classic

Maha. In

1839, travel writer John Lloyd Stevens

and illustrator Frederick Catherwood

explored the jungles of

Guatemala.

Their work captured the romance and

mystery of the Maya world while

providing the first serious clues to the

origins of this lost

civilization. Explorers before them had

theorized the Maya were descendants of

the Greeks, a lost tribe of Egypt, or

even fugitives from the mythic land of

Atlantis. But these men believed

otherwise.

Unless I am wrong, we have a conclusion

far more wonderful than that of

connecting the builders of these cities

with the Egyptians or any other

people. It is the spectacle of a people

possessing cultivation and

refinement. John Lloyd Stevens, 1840.