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360-1190 - Maya

The ancient Maya civilization was one of the most advanced to arise in Mesoamerica, marked by sophisticated mathematics and engineering that allowed it to spread throughout present-day Central America and southern Mexico. The earliest Maya settlements were constructed around 1000 BC, and most major Maya cities collapsed by 900 AD. The cause of the collapse remains the focus of intense academic debate.

Thousands of previously unknown ancient Maya structures, pyramids, palaces and causeways have been revealed in Guatemala following an investigation by a team of international archaeologists using ground-penetrating laser technology. The find allowed the researchers to map the outlines of what they describe as dozens of newly discovered Maya cities hidden under thick jungle foliage centuries after they were abandoned by their original inhabitants, according to a statement issued 01 February 2018 by Guatemala's PACUNAM foundation. The survey revealed more than 60,000 previously unknown Mayan structures like palaces, fortifications, farms, irrigation systems, and raised highways connecting nearly all ancient cities across 800 square miles in northern Guatemala.

The findings may also revise estimates of how many ancient Maya once lived in the region upward by "multiple factors," said Tom Garrison, an archaeologist who specializes in the Maya culture. Far more ancient Maya lived on the landscape than there are people in the region today, archaeologist Thomas Garrison told Live Science, and they did it without the destructive slash-and-burn agriculture that is crippling the jungle in modern times.

The new data show a civilization twice the size of medieval England at its peak 1,200 years ago. And though population estimates previously hovered around 5 million, expansive irrigation and terracing systems and wide highways indicate there might've been "10 to 15 million people there — including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable," researcher Francisco Estrada-Belli said. Walls, fortresses, and ramparts also suggest war was "large-scale and systematic" and "endured over many years" not just "toward the end of the civilization," said Garrison.

Mayan city states flourished before the better-known Aztecs, beginning in and around the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, near the Guatamala border, about the time Rome was falling apart. The Old Empire flourished during the first six centuries of the Christian Era in what are now the states of Chiapas and Tabasco in Mexico, the departments of Peten and Izabal in Guatemala, and the adjoining western part of Honduras. Their capital city was Palenque. Palenque collapsed. The remaining Maya migrated north to the Yucatan established a new empire, in some ways more spectacular than the old one, centered around Chitchen Itza.

The New Empire, which literally grew out of the Old, lasted from the fifth century AD, to the Spanish conquest in 1541. Its provenance was the peninsula of Yucatan, whither the Maya migrated during the fifth to seventh centuries, the closing period of the Old Empire being contemporaneous with the opening period of the New Empire. All through the "New Empire" the most powerful cities were: Chichen Itzá, Uxmal and Mayapán. Then this New Empire imploded too. There were few cities left when the Spanish came.

The sources for the history of the Old Empire are exclusively archeological, consisting chiefly of the hieroglyphic inscriptions and the art and architecture of the different southern cities. For the New Empire, however, the sources are in part, at least, documentary, that is the native chronicles, which give chronological synopses of the principal events from the colonization of Yucatan to the Spanish conquest.

At the beginning of the Christian era, while Rome was consolidating her empire and Christianity had begun to spread through the Mediterranean world, Mexico witnessed the emergence of what can also be called true empires. The foundations of the earliest sacred cities of the Mayas - Tikal, Uaxactun, Copan and Palenque - were constructed in the jungles of Central America.

It was generally accepted that Mayans were among the first Mesoamerican societies to use writing. Hieroglyphic scripts and an associated "sacred 260-day calendar" developed among the people of the Mayan, Isthmian and Oaxacan regions in the Late Formative period (400 B.C. to A.D. 200). These peoples came from areas around the Gulf Coast region across wide areas of eastern and southern Mexico surrounding the gulf.

Between about 200 to 900 CE, the Maya region of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Beliz had more than fifty independent city-states. Some of the largest cities, for example, Tikal in Guatemala and Calakmul in Mexico, may have had populations of up to 500,000. Enjoying rich maize agriculture and a complex trade network, Maya societies produced monumental architecture, astronomy observatories, a pictographic writing system that yielded libraries of thousands of books, and a sophisticated calendar system based on a fifty-two-year cycle. Mayan mathematics utilized positional notation, the concept of zero, and a base-20 numerical system. The monarchs and aristocratic families who ruled these city-states kept order and defended their lands in wars with other city-states. They also performed elaborate religious rituals to conciliate the gods who, Mayans believed, commanded the rain and sun. Farmers, artisans, and hunters paid taxes and supplied labor for construction of public temples, palaces, and ceremonial ball courts.

During the fourth and fifth centuries AD inscriptions based on a partly ideographic, partly phonetic mode of writing became extremely abundant, especially among the Mayas. They testify to the fact that these cultures possessed a profound sense of time and history. The Mayan calendar is further proof, for it was slightly closer to the astronomical year than the present-day calendar, and much closer than that being used in Europe at the same period.

Their chief gods were Itzamna, the god of the east or of the rising sun; and Kukulkan, the god of order-the patron of arts and crafts. Their dominant form of religion was a species of sun worship. The sun was often represented in their decorations by a feathered snake named Quetzal. To the Mayans the world was an arena of conflict between two opposing forces:-the sun, which was the source of light and life, and the night, which was emblematic of darkness and death.

No god was more important to the Maya than the maize god, the god of corn. Always handsome and young, he danced when the breeze rustled his long leaves. Corn's cycle of planting, growth, harvesting, and replanting is the cycle of life itself-birth, death, rebirth. Maya men and women - and gods - have a certain "look". Their ideal of beauty was modeled on the corn god - youthful and fresh, strong. Long heads and flowing hair mimic the corn plant. Parents gave their children's heads this long tapering shape by pressing the skull between boards for a few days just after birth. It only took a short while because babies' bones are soft, but the effect lasted for life. It didn't affect intelligence. The perfect Maya nose was large and sloped to the forehead; people used inserts to get the right profile. Crossed eyes were also desirable. Maya parents probably trained their kids' eyes to cross by hanging something in front of their noses! Teeth were filed down to points or even T-shapes and sometimes decorated with small inlays of colored stones.

The custom of human sacrifice is a characteristic feature in Nahua worship ; at the bottom of it was the religious belief that the offering to the god was sanctified by its sacrifice, and that to some extent tran-substantiation into the divine essence took place. Consequently the sacrifice - often before death - became an object of veneration. Thus, too, it was that the corpse was eaten, in order that everybody who tasted of it should assimilate a portion of the divine substance ; and for this reason again the skin of the victim served as a sacred covering for the image of the god himself, or for his earthly representatives, the priests. These ideas are entirely Nahuatlac, and were altogether wanting among the Maya of ancient times who had not been influenced by the Nahua. Although ordinarily the offerings to their gods consisted of fruits of the land, yet occasionally slaves or children were sacrificed. A most striking pictorial decoration of the Mayans represents a man being sacrificed to Kukulkan. Yet they do not seem to have made that horrible combination of war and human sacrifice which was an essential feature of the Aztec cult.

Human sacrifices were common in Maya culture. The reasoning behind this ritual was the belief that it was offering of nourishment to the gods. The sacrifice of a living creature was a powerful offering and a human sacrifice was the ultimate one. Usually, only high status prisoners of war were sacrificed while other captives were used as the labor force. There were several different ways these sacrifices occurred. The most common ways were decapitation and heart removal. Dedication to a new building or new ruler required a human sacrifice. Many of these were depicted in Maya artwork and sometimes took place after the victim was tortured (beaten, scalped, burned, etc.). These rituals provided hope and security to the Maya culture and demonstrated their own outlooks on death.

A detailed first-person account of the Mayan human sacrifice spectacle was made by the 16th Century Spanish Catholic priest Diego de Landa, " ... they threw the dead body rolling down the steps, where it was taken by the attendants, was stripped completely of the skin save only on the hands and feet; then the priest, stripped, clothed himself with this skin and danced with the rest. This was a ceremony with them of great solemnity. "

human sacrifice in Mayan culture remained relatively unknown and received little scholarly attention until the late 20th century. Mayan human sacrifice only became widely studied after the 1970s, when archaeologists began to uncover large amount of new textual and archaeological evidence that shed light on Mayan sacrificial rituals. Whereas the practice of ritual human sacrifice in pre-Colombian Mesoamerica was previously thought to be limited to the Aztec culture, whose imperial reign over the Valley of Mexico lasted from c.1400 AD to 1521 AD, it is now evident that such practice has been prevalent in Mayan culture centuries prior to that of Aztecs. Current findings indicate that ritual human sacrifice has been continuously present in Mayan city-states throughout Yucatán regions from the Classic period (c.200AD – c.900AD) up till the arrival of Spanish colonial forces in the 16th century.

Although human sacrifice was of great political and religious importance in pre-Columbian Mayan societies, they were exceptional spectacles rather than everyday religious rituals. Most Mayan religious sacrificial practices only involved offerings such as animals. Ritual mass killings of human beings were reserved in only in two types of situations – the killing of enemy captives in victory celebrations, and the mass slaughtering of slaves in those rare “occasions of great tribulation” (such as severe drought or flood).

Ancient Maya society was organized into city-states ruled by kings. Cities traded with one another and competed for precious goods like jade and the brilliant feathers of the quetzal bird. They made treaties - or war. Fortunes rose and fell, but no city ever controlled the whole Maya world. The largest cities had sixty thousand people or more and hundreds of buildings. Temples and palaces were painted red and decorated with sculpture. Temple-pyramids rose thirty stories high.

The Maya ruler was at the center of the city's political, economic, and religious life. His role on earth mirrored the role of the gods. He styled his appearance to match the corn god and wore ornaments made of jade and quetzal feathers. Green like the leaves of corn, they symbolized fertility and wealth. When he donned ceremonial costumes and the masks of gods, the king not only looked like those gods - he became like them.

Maya kings reigned over a cosmological domain comprising three vertical levels--the celestial upperworld, the earthly middle world, and the watery underworld. Linking the levels was a great world tree, represented by a ceiba tree or maize plant, or sometimes the form of the king. A granite monument dated 200-50 BCE from Guatemala shows one of the earliest Maya rulers in divine disguise as the pillar of the cosmos and the bridge to the supernatural. Maya kings used architecture to replicate the topography of the universe--a pyramid as a sacred mountain and flanking plazas as symbolic bodies of water -- with a rich repertoire of small objects conveying cosmic principles through iconography.

As in all societies where lineage serves political purposes, the Maya kept dynastic lists in varied forms, including architectural elements, sarcophagi and ceramic objects. One such ceramic vase (Guatemalan lowlands, A.D. 700-900), with its calligraphic hieroglyphs and restricted palette of red and brown-black on cream, is part of a tradition called "codex style" that is thought to mimic the appearance of Mayan books.

Ballcourts are found in the center of nearly every Maya city. As in soccer, players had to keep the ball in the air without using their hands. The ball was solid rubber and weighed eight pounds or more (that's at least eight times a soccer ball). In parts of Mexico and Central America a version of the ancient game is still played. But for the ancient Maya the stakes were especially high. Although it was played for sport, the game was also a mythic struggle. It reenacted contests of life and death, war, and sacrifice.

War was a part of Maya life too, and military leadership a responsibility of the king and court. Maya cities fought to obtain valuable resources and to win control over smaller, weaker neighbors. Warriors were armed with flint-tipped weapons and protected by leather vests and padding. They carried shields and wore helmets decorated with jaguars and other fierce creatures to share these animals' power. Battle was a noisy affair, accompanied by drums and loud horns. Captives were marched to the victorious city and forced to kneel before the king and his officers. They were stripped of their finery and tied with ropes. Torn cloth replaced their large jade earrings. Some prisoners were forced to play a deadly ritual ball game they had no hope of winning - or surviving.

The close of the Old Empire was contemporaneous with the beginning of the New Empire, around 600 AD, as suggested in "The Inscriptions at Copan," since the date on the Temple of the Initial Series at Chichen Itza, in northern Yucatan (New Empire), is just 10 years earlier than the date of Stela 10 at Xultun (Old Empire); in a word, the monumental series of the Old and New Empires overlapped by at least 10 years.

After about 750 CE, conflict intensified among city-states, monumental construction diminished, and cities were gradually abandoned. Historians have offered various theories to explain Maya decline, including ecological degradation such as deforestation and erosion. The great ritual centers at Teotihuacan and in the Mayan area began to decline in the eighth and ninth centuries and were eventually abandoned. The causes are for the most part unknown. Some authors have attributed their downfall to the arrival of new tribes from the north; at least it is certain that the northern barbarians - like the Germanic tribes inthe Roman world - were a constant threat to estab-lished cultures. In Europe the ninth century saw the consolidation of feudalism; a little later new kingdoms were founded within a cultural milieu composed of Greco-Roman and barbarian elements.

The growth of Maya civilization and increases in population and levels of sophistication actually correlate with a very wet interval that spans several hundred years and the decline of the Maya actually appeared to correlate with a downturn generally in climate and climate drying. Abundant rainfall led to bumper crops and a population boom, but a climate reversal and drought triggered famine, political competition, increased warfare and eventually, the society's collapse.

The Maya had reached the peak of their civilization (~900 AD) long before Columbus discovered America. By about 1000, the greatness of Maya civilization had passed. An era of unlversal peace and plenty was abruptiy terminated in 1190 AD by an event which shook the body politic to its foundations and which disrupted the triple alliance under whose beneficient rule the country had grown Bo prosperous. Although the causes leading to this event are obscure, it 1s evident that the ruler of Chichen Itza, one Chac Xib Chac, plotted 1n some way against Hunnac Ceel, his colleague of Mayapan, and in the war which followed, the latter, by the aid of Toltec allies from Mexico, utteriy routed the Mayan ruler and drove him from his capital.

A readjustment of power became necessary. The victors in the recent war assumed the chief direction of affairs, the ruling family of Mayapan, the Cocom, ciaiming the overlordship of the entire country. In recognition of their timely assistance, or possibly as their share of the spoiis, the Toltec allies seem to have been given Chichen Itza, at least the city appears to have fallen under strong Toltec infiuence during the latter part of its occupation. The Itza, however, did not accept this arrangement without further struggle, and the thirteenth century was filled with their ineffectual attempts to regain freedom.

Thus far Uxmal appears to have kept itself aloof from the war between the other two members of the triple alliance, which had resulted so disastrously for Chichen Itza. Doubtiess under the wise policies of its ruling house, the Tutul Xiu, whose princes, all agree, were famed for their wisdom and justice, the city had been kept from entangling alliances with either side. At all events it was the ruler of Uxmal to whom the Maya nobility turned for heip when the tyranny of the Cocoms became no longer endurable. Some time between 1440 and 1450 a coalition under the leadership of the Lord of Uxmal was formed against the Cocoms and their foreign allies, Mayapan was attacked, captured, nnd sacked, and all of its ruling family, except one son absent in Mexico, were slain. Shortiy thereafter, all the largest cities, inciuding Chichen Itza and Uxmal, as well as Mayapan, were finally abandoned.

The Spaniards arrived to find the second, less powerful Mayan empire already in decay. They destroyed many of the cities and all but four of the thousands of bookswritten by the Maya, called Codices, because they considered them to be the work of the devil. More than half the population died of new diseases brought by Spanish conquerors. But the Maya people survived. Today some six million Maya live in Mexico and Central America - and probably a million more have settled in the United States. Maya culture is diverse and alive, rich with traditions from the past.

Chiapas and Tabasco are states in southern Mexico that enjoy tropical climates, dramatic scenery, and rich history and culture. There is much to see and do in both states. Major attractions in Chiapas include the ancient Maya ruins of Palenque, Bonampak, and Yaxchilan, the waterfalls of Agua Azul, Sumidero Canyon, the lakes of Montebello, and the colonial city San Cristobal de Las Casas. Chiapas is the southernmost state of Mexico, located in the southeast of the country.

From the perspective of many Maya field archaeologists, the intensifying focus on art and writing, quite apart from ethical issues, represents a renewal of the traditional elite emphasis of Maya studies. To some degree this trend runs counter to the recent shift in interest from the traditional preoccupation with the affairs and monuments of Maya aristocrats to a more general approach to the organization of Maya societies. The latter strategy requires much closer attention to non-elite remains, especially domestic architecture and associated artifacts, and has been accompanied by an increasing focus on regional variability and recognition of the importance of detailed empirical documentation.

PERIODS OF MAYA HISTORY