纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 051玛雅宫廷放血仪式浮雕（3）（在线收听）

The great Maya civilisation collapsed not long after this stone slab was carved, and their great cities, left deserted, bewildered the first Spanish visitors when they arrived in the sixteenth century. For hundreds of years afterwards, explorers travelling in southern Mexico and Guatemala came across huge abandoned cities hidden in dense jungle. One of the first modern visitors, the American John Lloyd Stephens, tried to describe his wonderment in 1839:

"Of the moral effect of the monuments themselves, standing as they do in the depths of the tropical forest, silent and solemn, different from the works of any other people, their uses and purposes and whole history so entirely unknown, with hieroglyphs explaining all but perfectly unintelligible, I shall not pretend to convey any idea."

Thanks to the relatively recent decipherment of Maya script, we can now read the images and the writing on their monuments as the names and histories of actual rulers. In the course of the twentieth century, the Maya ceased to be a mythologized lost race and became a historical people.

Maya territory covered modern Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico. The first Maya cities have their beginnings around 500 BC - so just a little before the Parthenon was being built in Athens - and the Maya civilisation continued for well over a thousand years. The greatest Maya cities had tens of thousands of inhabitants, and at their centre were pyramids, public monuments and palaces.