[历史频道谁毁灭了玛雅].History.Channel.Who.Killed.The.Maya.PDTV.XviD.MP3.GORE.avi

Thanks for the info, I'm amazed by the efforts.

An excellent documentary!

I will recap the findings and theories in the program and also try to produce a large part of the English script for you guys who are still looking for Chinese subtitles, but as long as you understand English by reading, this script should help you enjoy the documentary better than impeded listening comprehension. Although I had to conduct a little research to grasp archeological terms such as "stela" or "stelae", the name of the city "Masuul" and so forth, the script is largely being reproduced by me memorizing the narration then jotting it down quickly within a relatively short time duration and I don't backtrack much as prove listening unless I didn't catch the words the first time around. Hence, I'd apologize in advance for any mistakes it may contain.

Main Plot:

Among a handful of decrepit Mayan pyramids and buried stone ruins, archeologist Nicolite Gruber traveled in the thick jungle to an ancient Mayan city and found the evidences of the Mayan extinction by reading the stone inscriptions.

The Script - Part 1

Narrator -

A powerful civilization ruled Central America for thousands of years, then mysteriously vanished. We’ve never known for sure what triggered this apocalypse, but now one man has stumbled upon dramatic new evidence, can we finally reveal – WHO KILLED THE MAYA?

The Maya are famous for their pyramids, but they are even more famous for the fact that their magnificent cities fell to ruin and their people perished in just a few generations.

“They were scared then, just to cope that, they built these defensive walls.”

Maya society was under threat. Historian Nicolite Gruber wants to know why. He’s helped crack the code of their ancient hieroglyphs carved in stone and preserved in just four books.

Nicolite:“In Maya research, we have reached the level of understanding that may correspond to what Egyptologists knew about hundreds years ago.”

His quest to push the boundaries of how these people lived and died, leads to the story of a powerful woman.

New biographical evidence paints a bloody picture of genocide, dark warlords and a self-styled warrior princess known as Lady Six Sky. She was a woman formidable enough to lead armies and fight warlords in a male dominated society. And she would threaten the very foundations of a world that spreads from southern Mexico through Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.

Lady Six Sky was born into this progressive, jungle civilization. This was a diverse coalition of regional kingdoms united by their bold architecture evident in hundreds incredible limestone pyramids, temples and palaces. The Maya thrived on art, astronomy, mathematics and sophisticated written language while Europe was still firmly immersed in the dark ages. But everything they'd achieved was lost within just two hundred years - by the ninth century A.D., there was virtually nothing and no one left. What went so wrong?

Their seemingly strong society prove to be inherently weak, so much so that even the action of the young woman would be the catalyst for their apocalypse. On the trail of the Lady Six Sky's story, Nicolite Gruber is finding tantalizing new clues.

Nicolite:"Look at this piece ..."

Sometimes these clues are in the most unexpected places, like this ceremonial stone or stela, that turned out recently in a Guatemalan village. Nicolite was part of a remarkable breakthrough, by matching sounds from the Maya language still spoken today with ancient writing, he helped crack the code of Maya hieroglyphs. It was a daunting task - they had near few reliable Maya texts to go on.

When the Spanish arrived in Central America in the early 1500's, they found thousands of Maya books. To their Christian eyes, the mysterious symbols were the work of the devil and had to be destroyed. A thousand years of history and culture went up in smoke.

Deciphering the four remaining books and stone inscriptions now makes incredible reading for Nicolite and other scholars. They showed the Maya tracked the orbit of the planets with astonishing accuracy - almost a thousand years before Galileo emerged in Europe. They even recorded a precise date for their own creation - the thirteenth of August in the year 3114 B.C..

But these documents had given rise to a misguided impression of the Maya - they were thought to be entirely concerned with mathematics and the Maya calendar. Archeologists backed up the idea of an extremely quiet and contemplative people.

Nicolite:"It set the totally wrong image that has been created in the 1950's and 1960's. The Maya people like ourselves - they are engaged in politics and warfare and betrayal and everything that makes up history."

This new image based on hard evidence: fragments of writing collected from across the Maya region revealing a very different picture of their society and its rulers. They tell a precarious balance of power just before their civilization began to disintegrate - two superpowers dominated the Maya landscape: Calakmul and Tikul.


They were influential city states that controlled wealth and politics.

Nicolite:"As long as these two superpowers maintained an equilibrium, the Maya society was stable." But the stone stelae and their secrets are fast fading away in the treacherous jungle climate - deciphering them is a race against time.

New stelae are like a window to the past and a valuable addition to the puzzle that nicolite is piecing together. In 2002, a storm exposed a fresh set of hieroglyphs in Dos Pilas, this is the kingdom where the Maya princess Lady Six Sky was born and it's where the story of Maya's downfall really begins.


Incredibly, the storm makes exposed an old stone staircase containing one of the longest written records ever found.


Federico Farzon, a Guatemalan archeologist takes Nicolite to the spot and a step closer to the Maya apocalypse.

Farzon:"The first section is this central section. The top most step has the birth ..."
Nicolite:"I see the birth glyph over there"
Farzon:"Ya, the ruler, it's a ... the birth of the ruler and his name is B'alaj Chan K'awiil."
Nicolite:"He is the one who will be ... later become the father of Lady Six Sky."
Farzon:"Yes, that is very true."

So born princess of Dos Pilas, Lady Six Sky, what kind of person did that make her and what was to be her role?

Farzon:"I think that Lady Six Sky must've been a very strong woman, a very powerful individual even when she left here because she knew what her role was to be. She was to set up a new dynasty and that takes a lot of power; a lot of energy dealing with all of the aspects of the royal court which must've been full of intrigue and she survived for how many years?"

Nicolite:"ya, forty or fifty years, she even survived her own son."

It would have been extremely unusual for a woman to outlive her children. Lady Six Sky was no doubt physically as well as mentally strong. She was born in the late seventh century, into a culture that had already been flourishing across Central America for seven hundred years.

Her 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.


Following in her footsteps, Nicolite also travels to Naranjo to pick up her trail.

Lady Six Sky came here to establish a new dynasty. She wasted no time in making her mark and directed monuments announcing her presence. What's remarkable is she was only a teenager, but already had a clear political strategy. It seems that nothing would stop her from fulfilling her personal ambitions. Like other royal Maya leaders, she left a record of her actions.

Nicolite:"This passage on this heavily eroded stela describes arrival of Lady Six Sky at Naranjo at the year 682 A.D. and wish arrival, she managed to establish an entirely new dynasty at this place."

When she first came to Naranjo on the 27th of August 682, the town laid in ruins. Its ruling dynasty had been destroyed by her father's allies from the superpower kingdom of Calakmul. But under her skillful leadership, it soon began to thrive. Lady Six Sky certainly benefited from support of Dos Pilas and Calakmul who allowed her to hold the power at Naranjo - the most usual situation for any Maya woman. But this was not enough. Lady Six Sky launched a political campaign that was to have far-reaching consequences. The apocalyptic violence that followed would not even spare her native Dos Pilas.

Frazon:"In 761, the invaders came in obviously from different sides, probably captured the king then and he disappears from the record of history around here and so Dos Pilas. After that, there are no more kings in this area."

This was a self-styled warrior queen. Although she was never crowned as the true divine leader, this didn't stop her from launching campaigns to regain control of the provinces that had been once affiliated with Naranjo. And she planned to go further, much further; her reign was to take on one of the most powerful Maya cities of all - Tikal.

Centuries on, Tikal is one of the most intact post apocalyptic Maya centers and it's home to a stone that is perhaps the most famous of them all, because it's a record that proves the two superpowers of the day - warrior loggerheads. It shows King Jasaw Chan K'awiil who defeated Tikal's age old rival Calakmul in 695 A.D.. Nicolite and his research colleagues are interested in the stone because it also mentions a mystery city called Masuul.


Nivolite:"These two heads seem to be the name of the king and I think he's 19th King of Chaco, the Lion of the Successors ... followed by what must be a title and (a) distance number, but (the) critical phrase is here, this is "Chakuvo", it was "cut off", "decapitated" followed by the Masuul emblem glyph."

So a place called Masuul had ties with Tikal, but where Masuul is remains a mystery.

From Tikal's highest pyramid, nothing but thick jungle can be seen where once the Maya world spread out. But around 60 kilometers from here, the ruins of another city were discovered in the 1920's by the Ameican Sylvanus Morley. Almost a century later, it still remains concealed and unexplored. it was given the name Naachtun, meaning "far stone". Built directly between the two superpowers Calakmul and Tikal, it could have held a position of huge political significance.

Nicolite launchs an expedition to retrace the early explorers' steps into the jungle to find Naachtun. He hopes it will reveal further clues to Lady Six Sky and Maya's ruin.

END OF THE SCRIPT - PART 1 (15:10)


To be continued ... (I'm adding to it irregularly)