How did scholars finally learn to read Maya glyphs?

Scholars cracked the Maya script by realising it was a mix of word signs and sound signs, and the first big clue came from a book written by the very bishop who had burned Maya books. Knowledge of the writing system was lost, probably by the end of the 16th century, and renewed interest came from 19th-century accounts of ruined sites. The script was logosyllabic: a glyph could stand for a word part or a syllable, and the same glyph could often be used for both.

The first key was Landa's "alphabet". Diego de Landa had asked a Maya scribe to write the letters of the Spanish alphabet, but the system was not alphabetic. When Landa asked for "ha" as "hache–a", the scribe wrote a-che-a, which Landa recorded as "H". The glossary was long dismissed as nonsense, but eventually became a key resource. In 1952 the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorozov argued that the symbols were syllabic. He had gone to Moscow State University at 17 and initially specialised in Egyptology. Knorozov was severely criticised, and the leading Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson, who had done much to explain the Maya calendar and astronomy but rejected phonetic readings, led the attack.

The second key was the story the glyphs told. In 1959 Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed that dates on monuments at Piedras Negras represented events in the lifespan of an individual, not astronomy or prophecy. In one afternoon in December 1973, at the first Mesa Redonda de Palenque conference, a working group of Linda Schele, Floyd Lounsbury and Peter Mathews reconstructed most of the dynastic list of Palenque and read the life histories of six kings. Today over 90 percent of the Maya texts can be read with reasonable accuracy, and the "peaceful stargazers" have become people with histories.