Archaeologists found hieroglyphs (/hieroeglifs/) carved into Maya buildings and monuments. The Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairway stands in Copán. A climb up this staircase is a journey back in time. Each of the sixty-three steps has a story to tell. Carved symbols called glyphs name all of the rulers of Copán. The glyphs also explain their military victories. The American explorers who visited this site in 1839 marveled over these carvings. They could not, however, figure out what the symbols meant. For a long time, neither could any other experts.
Hieroglyphs are like a code. You must crack the code to read the messages. Mayan hieroglyphs are complicated and include more than eight hundred symbols. It wasn’t until the 1960s that archaeologists began to crack the code with early computers. Since then, we have learned a great deal about the ancient Maya.
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