Like ourselves, the Maya wrote on paper, keeping thousands of books in which they recorded their history, genealogy, religion, and ritual; but their libraries and archives perished into dust or in the flames of their Spanish conquerors. Nevertheless, hieroglyphic texts and scenes carved or buildings, stone monuments, jade, bone, and other materials impervious to decay in the tropics remain as records of their innovative political solutions to the social crises that dominated life in ancient America. These political chronicles speak in the language of a great philosophical, scientific, and religious vision—a character for power as eternal and as flexible as the American Constitution.