Nearly 30 years ago, Mike and I found ourselves in Tikal, an ancient Mayan city in the Guatemalan highlands.

The country was immersed in civil war, we spoke little Spanish, and we were in waaay over our heads. Talk about “accidental tourists”!

Howler monkeys, giant insects, oppressive jungle … what an adventure!

While visiting the “Maya” exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, we got to relive memories of our first real travel adventure.

In the exhibit, an interactive kiosk invites you to choose 2 words for your name, then spits out 2 Mayan glyphs.

 

I selected my Maya name: FIRE JAGUAR

The word sign version: K’ahk’ Bahlam            The sound sign version: K’a-K'(a) Ba-la-m(a)

 

Highlights from NOVA’s “Cracking the Maya Code”:

1958: Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a Russian-born American and architect by trade, took work drawing reconstructions of the ruins at Piedras Negras, a Classic Maya site on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. Later, while examining photographs of the stelae, or commemorative stone slabs, she convincingly proved the markings on the stelae depicted a king’s life from birth to death … the glyphs told the stories of the Maya.

1981: It had been thought that the Maya wrote in rebus, in which symbols are used for whole words. (For example, “I can see” would be an eye, a tin can, and the sea.) Astonishingly, 15-year-old David Stuart discovered that individual Maya words could be written in multiple ways, using different symbols for the same sounds, as in “faze” and “phase.” His revelation enabled scholars to read many glyphs once considered indecipherable.

Learn more at the NOVA web page, “Cracking the Maya Code.”