Secrets of the Maya ... unlocked!

This was exciting news for Maya experts. Up until then, "you had dates, but you couldn't tell what happened on that date," Graham explains.

Earlier scholars had decoded Maya calendars, astronomical information, and a numbering system that were all quite extraordinary in their accuracy. (One Maya calendar had 18 months of 20 days each - 360 days - followed by five "unlucky" days.) They believed the Maya were a peaceful people who spent most of their time star-gazing.

But newly deciphered texts began to tell of wars and human sacrifice. Rulers emerged as real people with names like "Fire-Eating Serpent," "Jaguar Mirror," and "Smoke Monkey." In the 1980s, Maya epigrapher Linda Schele popularized inscriptions that described bloodletting ceremonies. In these rituals, rulers shed their own blood onto paper made of bark. They burned the paper as an offering to ancestors and gods. They claimed to see visions in the smoke.

"Once people started to understand the verbs," says Barbara Fash, a research associate at the Peabody Museum, "the illustrations appeared more graphic."

Researchers learned that when the Maya went to war, "it was not a battle of bloodshed on the battleground," says Ms. Fash. "Instead, they took captives, brought them back, and had a ceremony in which they were killed." It was a way to proclaim victory in an age of no TV, radio, or photographs to verify events.

Today, with computers and books to help share information, and more and more glyphs decoded, our understanding of the Maya is changing again. "It's too bad all people know is that they went to battle, captured, and sacrificed," says Fash, "because that's only what rulers did - like [on] our war monuments. That's not the whole story." Modern researchers are looking at objects like pots, jewelry, even old garbage piles, to learn about everyday life. Fash is working on musical instruments, hoping the symbols painted or inscribed on them may contain instructions on how to play them or even fragments of songs.

Marc Zender, a lecturer at Harvard, started decoding Mayan glyphs when he was 8. "That's the time you're interested in codes and writing secret messages to your friends," he says. "That's when I was bitten by the bug." Mr. Zender's mom brought him often to the Royal Ontario Museum, and he loved the ancient writings. He went from Egyptian to Aztec, and finally to Maya because "there was more left to do."

Stephen Houston, a professor at Brown University, agrees: "In Maya writing, new information is pouring in," he says. "There are 10,000 Maya inscriptions or texts. That number will grow. What's fun ... is that new texts always have the capacity to surprise you."

What does it take to be an epigrapher - someone who studies ancient writing? A knowledge of languages, math, anthropology, and history is useful. Interested students often train themselves by attending workshops and conferences, reading books, and working at archaeological sites.

Professor Houston says good epigraphers also have a natural ability. That may explain why many are so young (Houston was an "ancient" 19 when he began studying glyphs). "As a professor, I can teach people to read it [Maya text], but to be good at it is innate," he says. A photographic memory helps. So does an ability to see patterns. He loves the challenge of reading ancient text, he says. He loves solving the puzzle.

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