The Maya did not disappear
There are around six million Maya people today, living in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras, speaking some thirty Mayan languages. The phrase mysterious vanished civilisation, which turns up in a great many documentaries, would be news to them.
What happened around AD 900 was the collapse of the southern lowland CITY states — TIKAL and its neighbours were abandoned over roughly a century, probably through a combination of severe drought, soil exhaustion and warfare between rulers competing for status. Cities further north, including CHICHEN Itza, carried on and flourished afterwards. A political system failed. The people stayed.
They had zero before Europe did
Maya NUMBER notation used three symbols — a dot for one, a bar for five, a shell for ZERO — in a place-value system counting in twenties. Having a symbol for nothing, and treating it as a number you can calculate with, is a hard conceptual step that most societies never took, and it was in use in Mesoamerica by at least the fourth century AD.
Europe took much longer. Roman numerals have no zero and no place value, which makes arithmetic painful, and the Hindu-Arabic system with its zero only reached Italy properly in the 1200s and was resisted for two centuries after that — Florence banned the new numerals in 1299 on the grounds they were too easy to forge. The Maya, independently, had got there first.
The glyphs were unreadable until the 1980s
For most of the twentieth century the leading scholar in the field insisted Maya GLYPH writing was purely symbolic — pictures of ideas, not a language — and his authority held the field back for decades. A Russian linguist, Yuri Knorozov, working from Moscow with photographs and never permitted to visit the sites, argued in 1952 that the signs recorded sounds.
He was right, and the decipherment that followed transformed the subject. The inscriptions turned out to be history: named kings, dated accessions, wars, marriages and defeats, carved on monuments by rulers who wanted the record kept. A civilisation previously described as peaceful stargazers turned out to have left its own political chronicle, and archaeologists could suddenly read it. Knorozov did much of the work with his cat sitting on the desk, and insisted on listing her as co-author.
The calendar, the ballgame and the grid
The Maya ran several CALENDAR cycles at once — a 260-day ritual round, a 365-day solar year, and a Long Count of days from a fixed start date. The Long Count completed a cycle in December 2012, which some people took to mean the world would end; it meant the odometer rolled over, and the Maya themselves carved dates far beyond it.
The BALLGAME was played across Mesoamerica on stone courts with a solid rubber ball struck using the hips, and carried religious weight — some carvings show a losing or winning captain being sacrificed, and scholars argue about which. The rest of the grid: ASTRONOMY accurate enough to predict Venus, the PRIEST who kept the records, JADE valued above gold, COCOA, MAIZE, the JAGUAR, the CODEX, the PYRAMID and TEMPLE, and the RUINS the JUNGLE grew back over.