In the two decades following the discovery, Thomas Young, an Englishman, would go on to deduce part of the hieroglyphic alphabet and Jean-François Champollion, a Frenchman, to decipher the ...

When, in the 1960s, the hieroglyphs—the most sophisticated writing system created in the New World—were at last beginning to be deciphered, a new picture of these people emerged. Mayan art and ...