The Popol Vuh, a K'iche' Maya narrative first set down in the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century and translated in full by Dennis Tedlock and by Allen Christenson, is the fullest surviving account of Maya cosmology: it tells of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who defeat the lords of the underworld Xibalba and avenge their father Hun Hunahpu, and of a creation reaching its final, successful attempt with humanity shaped from maize. Deities named across Maya tradition more broadly include Itzamna, a creator and sky god, Kukulkan, the feathered serpent later closely associated with the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, and Chaac, god of rain and lightning, still invoked in agricultural ceremony in some communities today.
The Maya kept three interlocking calendars: the two hundred sixty day Tzolkin, combining thirteen numbers with twenty named days for divination and ritual timing; the three hundred sixty five day Haab, an approximate solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus five unlucky days; and the Long Count, a linear day count from a mythological starting point that let Classic period inscriptions date events precisely across centuries, whose completion of its thirteenth baktun in December 2012 was popularly, and wrongly, read outside Maya communities as a prophesied apocalypse. Maya hieroglyphic writing, a mixed logographic and syllabic script, resisted full decipherment far longer than Egyptian or cuneiform; J. Eric S. Thompson's influential mid-twentieth-century work mistook much of it for purely calendrical and astronomical notation, and it was epigraphers working from the 1960s onward who showed that most surviving texts instead record royal history, in the words of the kings themselves.