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00:00A powerful civilization ruled Central America for thousands of years.
00:07Then, mysteriously vanished.
00:12We've never known for sure what triggered this apocalypse.
00:17But now, one man has stumbled upon dramatic new evidence.
00:23Can we finally reveal who killed the Maya?
00:36The Maya are famous for their pyramids.
00:39But they're even more famous for the fact that their magnificent cities fell to ruin
00:44and their people perished in just a few generations.
00:48They were scared, and just to counter that, they built these defensive walls.
00:54Maya society was under threat.
00:59Historian Nikolai Gruber wants to know why.
01:02He's helped crack the code of their ancient hieroglyphs,
01:05carved in stone and preserved in just four books.
01:12In Maya research, we have reached a level of understanding
01:15that may correspond to what Egyptologists knew about 100 years ago.
01:21His quest to push the boundaries of what we know
01:24about how these people lived and died,
01:27leads to the story of a powerful woman.
01:35New biographical evidence paints a bloody picture of genocide.
01:40dark warlords.
01:46And a self-styled warrior princess known as Lady Six-Sky.
01:51She was a woman formidable enough to lead armies
01:54and fight wars in a male-dominated society.
02:00And she would threaten the very foundations of a world
02:03that spread from southern Mexico through Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.
02:11Lady Six-Sky was born into this progressive jungle civilization.
02:19This was a diverse coalition of regional kingdoms,
02:23united by their bold architecture,
02:26evident in hundreds of incredible limestone pyramids,
02:30temples and palaces.
02:31The Maya thrived on art, astronomy, mathematics and a sophisticated written language,
02:46while Europe was still firmly immersed in the Dark Ages.
02:49But everything they achieved was lost within just 200 years.
03:02By the 9th century AD, there was virtually nothing and no one left.
03:08What went so wrong?
03:09Their seemingly strong society proved to be inherently weak.
03:26So much so, that even the actions of a young woman would be the catalyst for an apocalypse.
03:40On the trail of Lady Six-Sky's story,
03:45Nicolai Gruber is finding tantalizing new clues.
03:52Sometimes these clues are in the most unexpected places,
03:59like this ceremonial stone, or Stella, that turned up recently in a Guatemalan village.
04:04Nicolai was part of a remarkable breakthrough.
04:11By matching sounds from the Maya language still spoken today,
04:15with ancient writing,
04:17he helped crack the code of Maya hieroglyphs.
04:19It was a daunting task.
04:23They had only a few reliable Maya texts to go on.
04:32When the Spanish arrived in Central America in the early 1500s,
04:37they found thousands of Maya books.
04:42To their Christian eyes,
04:45the mysterious symbols were the work of the devil
04:47and had to be destroyed.
04:52A thousand years of history and culture went up in smoke.
05:05Deciphering the four remaining books and stone inscriptions
05:09now makes incredible reading for Nicolai and other scholars.
05:12They show that the Maya tracked the orbit of planets with astonishing accuracy,
05:21almost a thousand years before Galileo emerged in Europe.
05:25They even recorded a precise date for their own creation,
05:31the 13th of August in the year 3,114 BC.
05:35But these documents had given rise to a misguided impression of the Maya.
05:44They were thought to be entirely concerned with mathematics and the Maya calendar.
05:49Archaeologists backed up the idea of an extremely quiet and contemplative people.
06:03It's a totally wrong image that has been created in the 1950s, 1960s.
06:07The Maya are people like ourselves.
06:11They are engaged in politics and warfare and betrayal and everything that makes up history.
06:17This new image is based on hard evidence.
06:22Fragments of writing collected from across the Maya region,
06:26revealing a very different picture of their society and its rulers.
06:29They tell of a precarious balance of power just before their civilization began to disintegrate.
06:40Two superpowers dominated the Maya landscape, Calakmul and Tikal.
06:47They were influential city-states and controlled wealth and politics.
06:59As long as these two superpowers maintained an equilibrium, my society was stable.
07:07But the stone stelae and their secrets are fast fading away in the treacherous jungle climate.
07:12Deciphering them is a race against time.
07:20New stelae are like a window to the past
07:23and a valuable addition to the puzzle that Nikolai is piecing together.
07:27In 2002, a storm exposed a fresh set of hieroglyphs in Dos Pilas.
07:33This is the kingdom where the Maya princess Lady Sixkai was born.
07:37And it's where the story of the Maya's downfall really begins.
07:43Incredibly, the storm exposed an old stone staircase containing one of the longest written records ever found.
07:52Federico Farsan, a Guatemalan archaeologist, takes Nikolai to the spot,
07:57and a step closer to the Maya apocalypse.
08:00The first section is this central section.
08:05The topmost step has the birth of the ruler.
08:11I see the birth cliff over there.
08:13It's the birth of the ruler, and his name is Balach Can-Kawil.
08:18Oh yeah, and he is the one who will later become the father of Lady Sixkai.
08:22Yes, that is very true.
08:30So, born princess of Dos Pilas.
08:34What kind of person did that make her?
08:38And what was to be her role?
08:40I think that Lady Sixkai must have been a very strong woman, a very powerful individual, even when she left here,
08:59because she knew what her role was to be.
09:02She was to set up a new dynasty.
09:06And that takes a lot of power, a lot of energy, dealing with all of the aspects of a royal court,
09:16which must have been full of intrigue.
09:18And she survived for how many years?
09:21Yeah.
09:22Forty or fifty years.
09:23She even survived her own son.
09:26It would have been extremely unusual for a woman to outlive her children.
09:30Lady Sixkai was no doubt physically, as well as mentally strong.
09:38She was born in the late 7th century into a culture that had already been flourishing across Central America for 700 years.
09:49Her first taste of success came when she was sent to the town of Naranjo to become its new royal leader and replace its fallen rulers.
10:01Following in her footsteps, Nikolai also travels to Naranjo to pick up her trail.
10:10Lady Sixkai came here to establish a new dynasty.
10:14She wasted no time in making her mark and erected monuments announcing her presence.
10:18What's remarkable is that she was only a teenager, but already had a clear political strategy.
10:28It seems that nothing would stop her from fulfilling her personal ambitions.
10:36Like other royal Maya leaders, she left a record of her actions.
10:40This passage on this heavily eroded stela describes the arrival of Lady Sixkai at Naranjo in the year 682 AD.
10:51And with her arrival, she manages to establish an entirely new dynasty at this place.
10:56When she first came to Naranjo on the 27th of August 682, the town lay in ruins.
11:07Its ruling dynasty had been destroyed by her father's allies from the superpower kingdom of Kalakmul.
11:12But under her skillful leadership, it soon began to thrive.
11:21Lady Sixkai certainly benefited from the support of Dos Pilas and Kalakmul, who allowed her to hold the power at Naranjo.
11:28A most unusual situation for any Maya woman.
11:36But this was not enough.
11:38Lady Sixkai launched a political campaign that was to have far-reaching consequences.
11:45The apocalyptic violence that followed would not even spare her native Dos Pilas.
11:50In 761, the invaders came in, obviously from different sides, probably captured the king then, and he disappears from the record of history around here.
12:11And so does Dos Pilas.
12:13After that, there are no more kings in this area.
12:15This was a self-styled warrior queen.
12:21Although she was never crowned as the true divine leader,
12:25this didn't stop her from launching campaigns to regain control over the provinces that had once been affiliated with Naranjo.
12:34And she planned to go further, much further.
12:38Her aim was to take on one of the most powerful Maya cities of all, Tikal.
12:46Centuries on, Tikal is one of the most intact post-apocalyptic Maya centers.
12:55And it's home to a stone that is perhaps the most famous of them all.
12:59Because it's a record that proves the two superpowers of the day were at loggerheads.
13:04It shows King Jasor Chan-Kawil, who defeated Tikal's age-old rival, Kalakmul, in 695 AD.
13:13Nikolai and his research colleagues are interested in this stone because it also mentions a mystery city called Masul.
13:27These two heads seem to be the name of the king, and I think he's the 19th king of Tikal in the line of successors, followed by what must be a title and distance number.
13:45But the critical phrase is here. This is a Jakah verb. It was cut or decapitated, followed by the Masul toponym or emblem glyph.
13:54So a place called Masul had ties with Tikal, but where Masul is remains a mystery.
14:09From Tikal's highest pyramid, nothing but thick jungle can be seen, where once the Maya world spread out.
14:16But around 60 kilometres from here, the ruins of another city were discovered in the 1920s by the American Silvanus Morley.
14:27Almost a century later, it still remains concealed and unexplored.
14:34It was given the name Nashtun, meaning Far Stone.
14:39Built directly between the two superpowers, Kalakmul and Tikal, it could have held a position of huge political significance.
14:56Nikolai launches an expedition to retrace the early explorers' steps into the jungle to find Nashtun.
15:02He hopes it will reveal further clues to Lady Sixky and the Maya's ruin.
15:14It's hard going. The jungle is extremely dense and progress is difficult.
15:19An added pressure is time. They only have funding and supplies for five days.
15:24This expedition is a real challenge.
15:34Nashtun is so far away from everything. It's so remote that very few people have ever come to this place.
15:41There's hardly anything we know about Nashtun.
15:43And the stones are in such a bad shape that unlocking the secrets of Nashtun will be a real challenge.
15:49What I would like to find out about this place is who ruled it and maybe even its ancient name.
15:58At sun up, they push further into the forest.
16:02The thick undergrowth forces them to switch from vehicles to mules.
16:11There's no guarantee they'll find anything.
16:14It's hard to imagine that this was once the site of a bustling city, surrounded by fertile fields and very little forest, which the Maya had cleared almost completely.
16:30But a few clues remain, if you know what you're looking for.
16:49Nikolai has found an unusual stone, and its weathered carvings confirm his calculations.
16:54They must have reached the outskirts of a Maya settlement.
17:11It's a lucky break, but there's no time to lose.
17:14Nikolai and his colleagues get to work searching for evidence of this city's centre.
17:19It's a great moment, arriving at the city, after two days of walk.
17:25It really feels like being one of the early explorers.
17:30It's totally untouched.
17:34It's a city full of questions.
17:35Nikolai searches for the ruins of temples and royal dwellings.
17:49It needs a trained eye.
17:51An unusually steep slope could be man-made, concealing a royal pyramid under centuries of mud and vegetation.
17:58The Maya's architecture was certainly second to none, and the steep pyramids are still as imposing today as they must have been in their heyday, dominating a bustling Maya settlement.
18:12Many have 365 steps, testament to the Maya's sophisticated understanding of astronomy and their calendar.
18:25The pyramids were ceremonial centres, boasting a temple at their peak, where rituals could be conducted in full view of the population.
18:39But the steep steps didn't just lead to a benign holy place. Instead, they featured heavily in gruesome sacrificial ceremonies.
18:54In 1946, murals were discovered in Yaxishlan in Mexico.
19:07They dated back to the year 790, and show life in the royal courts in great detail, including human sacrifice,
19:16and the practice of hurling prisoners down the treacherous steps.
19:24Not so much stairway to heaven has a shortcut to certain death.
19:37Human sacrifice and torture clearly formed a central part of the Maya's complex belief system.
19:45It's insights like these that shatter our previously held image of the peaceful Maya.
19:51The violence was part of everyday life.
20:00Could this have contributed to their downfall?
20:07At Nashtun, Nikolai searches the forest meticulously for clues that could help unravel this mystery.
20:12Below a tangle of roots, he discovers the base of a stone structure that probably dates from the 8th century.
20:24A remnant of red stucco identifies it as a building of great importance, probably an observatory.
20:41Monitoring the stars was incredibly important to the Maya, but one planet in particular was followed closely.
20:56Venus.
20:57Venus.
21:02To them, this was the harbinger of war.
21:05The divine kings would only launch battles when the stars were correctly aligned, suggesting a highly ritualised warfare.
21:14But Lady Sixsky was an outsider in this male-dominated society.
21:22She didn't care to play by the laws of kings.
21:26She had a game plan all of her own, and was prepared to break the traditional rules of warfare.
21:32As a woman, she had only limited powers, but then she fulfilled her purpose as the mother of a new dynasty.
21:51She had a son.
21:52He became her passport to serious authority.
22:09Nikolai's efforts to track down Lady Sixsky's legacy in the heart of the Petan jungle are making slow progress, impeded by the forces of nature.
22:18Well, unfortunately, most of the stele here are quite worn.
22:35It's difficult to read them.
22:38At the same time, the jungle is extremely thick here, and it's easy to get lost.
22:43But I'm sure somehow we can get the information and we can find the orientation here.
23:02A break in the weather then brings fresh hope.
23:04Following Silvanus Morley's original 1922 maps, Nikolai tracks down more fallen stones.
23:13They're covered in faint inscriptions, almost erased by time and weather.
23:22They're in such a bad state, it's questionable whether he'll be able to read them at all.
23:27The expedition may come to nothing.
23:37If Nikolai can find a hieroglyph that reveals Nashtun's ancient name, maybe he can work out this city's position in the balance of power, and whether it was a target in Lady Sixsky's quest for supremacy.
23:53Centuries of neglect have covered the stella and its carved glyphs in dirt and vegetation.
24:12But Nikolai strikes gold.
24:14It seems that we indeed have an emblem glyph here.
24:19There is a Ahau superfix, which means king, and a sign for Uhul divine.
24:25So it reads divine king.
24:28I just cannot see the main sign.
24:31It does look different to the Masul glyph we know from Tikal altar 5.
24:35It should be the same if this would be Masul, the city Masul.
24:41Well, it's hard to see.
24:44I really think I have to come back in the night.
24:49If this city wasn't called Masul, what was it?
24:52They have to wait for darkness to shed more light on this mystery.
25:05By torchlight, the deep shadows cast by the relief of the warm glyphs makes it easier to read them.
25:12The first glyph here is Iud, and then it comes to pass.
25:24And there, this is the date.
25:26This is Tu Ahau.
25:28This is followed by the month.
25:30Well, together this has to be the date 751 A.D.
25:34It seems that the next glyph then says it has erected the stela, and this is the king's name.
25:43Well, and then what should follow should be the emblem glyph.
25:47But it really does not look like the Masul emblem glyph.
25:51Well, in that case, it means that Nagstern is a different city.
25:54It's an entirely new city.
25:58The hieroglyph is clear enough.
26:00But it's not an emblem Nikolai has ever come across before.
26:06It's a significant discovery.
26:09If Nagstern wasn't called Masul,
26:12these ruins must belong to an ancient Maya centre as yet unknown to the modern world.
26:22This is the last day of Nikolai's expedition.
26:25Time is running out.
26:30After several more back-breaking hours hacking through the dense jungle, Nikolai makes an incredible find.
26:40This is really exciting.
26:50I think this is the emblem glyph.
26:52According to the position, this must be the emblem glyph here.
26:55It does have a cool prefix, which means divine,
26:58and then the hau-superfix, which means king, divine king.
27:01And then the main sign, the principal sign, is that of a bat head.
27:06This is a different emblem glyph.
27:08It could be that of Nagstern.
27:10And then there is a name of a king in front of it.
27:13This must be the local king.
27:14This must be the king of Nagstern.
27:16He has found the all-important royal seal to identify the ruling dynasty.
27:24The Maya's divine kings took great pains in leaving accounts of their deeds,
27:30complete with names and dates.
27:33It may allow Nikolai to answer some of the questions hanging over this lost city.
27:39This is a great discovery.
27:45I really think we could have the Nagstern emblem glyph here.
27:49That's exactly what I've been looking for.
27:54This glyph is like a gateway to the past
27:57and opens up new possibilities in Nikolai's quest to find out why the mighty Maya fell.
28:02What does this emblem glyph, a sacred symbol of a bat, tell us about the divine ruler of Nagstern?
28:12What powers did he have in the eyes of his people?
28:18The Maya believed that bats could attack men during their descent into the underworld Zubalba.
28:26It would have been a powerful symbol for Nagstern's leader
28:29and an indication that his city was probably once a major centre of political power.
28:39Nikolai strongly suspects that Nagstern's ancient name was something like Bath City.
28:48But what could have caused thousands of people to simply disappear,
28:53only leaving the remnants of ruined cities as powerful reminders of a lost civilization?
28:59There are many theories about the Maya apocalypse.
29:04At their forefront is an attempt to blame a series of disastrous droughts.
29:09By the time Lady Sixkai was born, the Maya had reached their heyday,
29:15and this area of the Peten jungle was densely populated.
29:19Perhaps as many as 10 million people lived here.
29:22The failure of their crops due to drought would have been catastrophic.
29:32But it seems too simplistic.
29:35The Maya Empire stretched across incredibly diverse landscapes,
29:39with widely differing ecology and geology.
29:41There might have been a terrible drought in one place,
29:49but significant rainfall in another at the same time.
29:52Even when taking into account the Maya's own impact on the land through deforestation and growing population pressure,
30:01it doesn't quite stand up.
30:03There's evidence that even during the most severe periods of drought,
30:11many Maya cities continued to flourish.
30:18So is there another possibility?
30:21Could the very structure of Maya society be at fault?
30:25We have to figure out what happened in the political landscape and the political system
30:33that made it necessary for the Maya to defend themselves.
30:36It's a big question.
30:38The fibre of their society was held together by the belief in the Divine King.
30:45He was all-important and provided the link between the people and their gods.
30:50The spirits of the underworld were thought to rise up into the night sky as stars and communicate with the Divine Ruler.
31:07And guided by the cosmos, they would engage in one powerful ritual in particular.
31:13Warfare.
31:14Many experts believe that the common people rarely got caught up in the violence.
31:24It's more likely that war was reserved for the nobility.
31:28And capturing high-ranking prisoners was more important than destroying the enemy.
31:36War was designed for posture, not destruction.
31:39And ritual kidnapping was the sport of kings.
31:44A dangerous game played by the divine rules of the superpowers Tikal and Kallakmul for centuries.
31:57But Lady Sixkai did not belong to this gentleman's club.
32:01Its rules, the ancient traditions of warfare, probably meant nothing to her.
32:06In the year 693, her lust for power received a fresh boost when her young son, Skyburner, was officially crowned the 38th Divine King of Naranjo.
32:24It's a very difficult time.
32:25It's a very difficult time.
32:26It's a very difficult time.
32:27It's a very difficult time.
32:33Nikolai believes she probably spent years setting the scene for this moment.
32:37Lady Sixkai converted Naranjo to a large capital and placed it on the political map of the Maya lowlands.
32:54During the first 23 years of her reign, she led 12 wars against her neighbors.
32:59Her son's coronation gave the green light to Lady Sixkai's ambitions.
33:08Just 20 days later, she launched a meticulously planned campaign of violence in the young king's name.
33:14Nikolai believes there was a single driving force behind the downfall of the Maya civilization.
33:34His research in Nashtun points the finger firmly at politics.
33:42The ancient stones at the Bat City show clear political alliances through a noblewoman from Tikal.
33:49It's exciting new biographical information like this, which is revolutionizing the field of Maya research.
33:57It seems that we have the Tikal emblem glyph here.
34:04And it's followed by a female head.
34:06It is not totally unusual to find women depicted on stele,
34:11but only in a few occasions can we actually read the places where they come from.
34:16And the fact that this woman here is addressed as a woman from Tikal
34:20allows us now to reconstruct some of the political alliances that were taking place between Nashtun and Tikal.
34:29The Bat City Nashtun seems to have enjoyed the friendship of the superpower Tikal.
34:36And Tikal's friends were automatically enemies of its rival Kalakmul.
34:40Lady Sixkai's own father, the king of Dos Pilas, had formed an alliance with Kalakmul.
34:51A move that was to have far-reaching consequences.
34:59What we can see here is a figure of an individual with a large jade necklace.
35:05And it's standing on a bound captive.
35:09That's very little we can actually see regarding the inscription.
35:13But he's clearly identified as a captive from Ushtetun, a captive from Kalakmul.
35:22There's indication here that political affiliations are implied.
35:26Kalakmul is a bitter enemy of Tikal.
35:28And through its connections with Dos Pilas, Kalakmul had one of the most bloodthirsty allies of all.
35:38Lady Sixkai.
35:44She now had her sights set on the biggest prize she could aim for.
35:48Tikal.
35:49In 695, she attacked, ordering her warriors to capture a nobleman.
36:00And then, in a bold move, she had him tortured.
36:09Tikal was bound to react.
36:13Although Lady Sixkai does not make a big issue out of the 695 attack against Tikal on her own monuments,
36:28Tikal must have felt extremely humiliated to be attacked by a woman.
36:33It was probably not a major attack, but it was a provocation for Tikal.
36:38And Tikal felt it necessary to come back and to take revenge.
36:44And instead of attacking Naranjo, what they did is they went against Kalakmul.
36:50By attacking Tikal, Lady Sixkai triggered a disastrous war between the superpowers.
36:56She had certainly achieved her dream.
37:08Naranjo now controlled much of the surrounding political landscape.
37:19Naranjo was the capital of one of the largest kingdoms in the eastern sphere of the Maya Lowlands.
37:25Probably one of the five most influential ancient Maya capitals.
37:30Naranjo controlled an area that may have reached to the edge of the Caribbean Sea.
37:37Estimates would be several thousand people, probably 10,000, 20,000 or even more.
37:45But the long-term consequences proved catastrophic.
37:48Within a century, mass war left no part of the Maya world untouched.
37:58Ruins in the south still bear the vivid scars of this genocide.
38:02The kingdom of Aguateca.
38:04This city fell around the end of the 8th century.
38:10Not long after Lady Sixkai's ancestral home Dos Pilas.
38:13Markus Erbel of the Aguateca archaeology project is painstakingly piecing together a picture of the town's last terrifying days.
38:25What we discovered here is that the inhabitants of Aguateca had to leave the city immediately and they left everything, all of their belongings in their houses.
38:35So we come back as archaeologists and we can discover how these ancient inhabitants of Aguateca lived.
38:41It's like a city frozen in time, abandoned as its citizens fled in panic.
39:01What's more, they appear to have been expecting an attack.
39:04The town was partly protected by a 30 metre deep chasm.
39:15But this natural bluff wasn't enough.
39:18It still left them vulnerable.
39:21Whatever or whoever killed them was clearly the biggest threat they'd ever encountered.
39:27They surrounded themselves with thick stone walls that ran more than five kilometres around the city.
39:47I think the people of Aguateca really knew that there was an attack coming.
39:51So they were scared and just to counter that they built these defensive walls.
39:55I mean, they put in a massive effort to defend themselves.
39:58So this is important.
39:59I think they knew what was happening and they were preparing themselves against that.
40:05By now, Lady Sixsky was dead.
40:08But her actions had triggered a domino effect that was bringing the Maya to their knees.
40:16Once the fragile control of divine kings had been annihilated,
40:19the ancient civilisation began to implode, giving rise to a new power-hungry leader.
40:28The warlord.
40:32War tore across the empire, sucking in royals, nobles and peasants alike.
40:37Even Lady Sixsky's mighty Naranjo disappears from the records of this time, wiped out by Tikal soon after her death.
40:49City after city fell to ruin.
40:53These were terrifying times.
40:54They had to face the very real prospect that their children would all be wiped out.
41:08By the 8th and 9th century, the superpowers had disappeared and had broken down.
41:26And we have a situation very much similar to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.
41:32Small local states tried to become independent and warfare escalates everywhere.
41:43In the scramble for power, the Maya began to wipe themselves off the face of the earth.
41:48The fall of the divine rulers and their control of the political landscape gave rise to a new, aggressive and power-hungry sort of leader.
42:05As violence began to tear the civilisation apart, villagers poured their energy into fending off these warlords.
42:18This led to a new, devastating enemy.
42:22Hunger.
42:24Their neglected crops failed and trade links collapsed.
42:35As their sophisticated irrigation and crop rotation systems fell to ruin, survival in the jungle became extremely difficult.
42:55The people began to starve.
43:05But in their long history, the Maya had survived many crises.
43:11What set this one apart?
43:18Well, in the 8th and 9th centuries, the Maya had to cope with many different disasters.
43:22With droughts, over-exploitation of land, an increase of the population, deforestation, etc.
43:28But in the past, the Maya had been able to live with this disaster and to continue.
43:35However, the infrastructure was destroyed.
43:39The management systems that allowed them to live in the jungle,
43:43the irrigation systems, the redistribution of maize and foodstuffs,
43:47all disappeared with a collapse of the central authority and the central powers.
43:51Living in fear and terror, the people had no choice but to flee the great towns and villages.
44:06Life in the jungle would have been harsh.
44:09It became about survival, not art, architecture, the stars and spiritual beliefs.
44:15Lady Sixsky died in the year 741, over a century before the Empire came crashing to an end.
44:36But there's no doubt about the impact she had during her lifetime.
44:40She must have been recognised as one of the greatest leaders of her time.
44:54I think there cannot be any doubt that she was an extraordinary woman,
44:58because she managed to survive in a male-dominated society.
45:03Not only to survive, but she actually held the power for a very long time.
45:07She was a warrior queen and at the same time a very intelligent politician.
45:13Lady Sixsky revolutionised the old order and was a catalyst for the mutual destruction of the superpowers.
45:22She may have gained the power she craved,
45:27but a hundred years later, her actions spawned warlords whose greed decimated their own people.
45:33The system of divine kings collapsed, taking with it the foundations on which Maya society was built.
45:43And it's all there, recorded in their own words, set in stone.
45:48We are only just scratching the surface of understanding these written accounts.
46:03There may yet be other secrets to unravel.
46:06Today, there are around three million Maya in Central America,
46:13the descendants of the handful of kingdoms that escaped death over a thousand years ago.
46:23These survivors are like a living link to their legendary ancestors.
46:27Their language changed very little, providing the key for Nikolai to unravel the mystery of the Maya script.
46:37Many of the original traditions and rituals are still practised,
46:41and they worship the same gods that the divine kings once communed with.
46:45In the end, just 200 years of war wiped out a civilisation that had survived for over two millennia.
47:06This suggests that it was simply a matter of time before the Maya imploded.
47:10If Lady Sixky hadn't been the catalyst, something else, no doubt, would have taken her place.
47:27It has taken centuries to unlock the meaning of the old Maya hieroglyphs.
47:30And every new fragment of writing found sheds a little more light on this incredible civilisation and its long-forgotten secrets.
47:47The modern Maya are survivors of a terrifying apocalypse.
47:50They can trace their own bloodlines back to a time of divine kings and powerful, bustling kingdoms.
48:07It is their strong links with the past that have led Nikolai to decode their script,
48:12and open a window to their mysterious ancestors.
48:25The painstaking efforts of scholars like Nikolai Gruber have gone a long way to establish the lost history of the Maya.
48:32His determination to tell the true story of this powerful people's fall has led him to uncover some astonishing facts.
48:49He's at the forefront of a new and alternative theory about the demise of the Maya kings.
48:54A theory that puts one young woman with an ambition to be queen into the spotlight.
49:06Her actions had catastrophic long-term consequences, probably way beyond her own imagination, ending in genocide and ruin.
49:16But research about the Maya is still in an age of discovery.
49:25What new secrets lie hidden in the jungles of Central America?
49:29The Shadow of Central America
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