The Maya

The Maya were one of the most interesting cultures in the American continent.  They were great architects, artists, astronomers, mathematicians, politicians and warriors.  For 3,000 years their culture flourished and grew amidst the lush jungles of México and Central America.  Centuries after the disapparance of the civilization that created it, the archaelogical evidence of their history and achievements still amazes us.

Maya History

Historians divide the history of the Maya into three mayor periods, each with its own subdivisons:

Maya Architecture

Early construction materials were wood and adobe.  Later used mainly stone.  Pyramidal structures were built in all Maya cities, the most famous of these are perhaps the pyramids of the Mayan citiy Tikal, in Guatemala.  

Temple V in Tikal, Guatemala

During the Pre-Classic period, Maya architects devised a method for the construction of corbelled arches, which denotes a step in technical progress from the use of posts and lintels.  Corbelled arches were also used in ancient Greece.

Corbelled arch at Copan.  Photo by J. Bendeck.

It is believed that the mayority of stone structures found in the remains of Mayan cities were temples.  A typical Maya city would have the main ceremonial buildings at its center, made completely out of stone and highly decorated. Around the ceremonial center, there would be houses made of stone walls and wooden roofs, to house the upper and middle classes of society.  The lower classes would live furthest away from the center, in simple houses made out of wood.  The larger ceremonial centers would have "subcenters" llocated around them, with small settlements to support them.

Maya Art

Maya arts and crafts have wondered archaelogists for decades.  They were masters of pottery, making handsome pots, plates and vases without the use of a potter's wheel.  They layered consecutive rings of clay, one on top of another and then smoothed the surfaces by hand. Some pottery artifacts were shaped using intricate molds, some of which survive today.  Many Maya pottery pieces were painted with artistic designs in several colours and with Maya writing, depicting events in their daily lives.

Despite not having metal tools, the Maya were masters of stone sculpture. This is obvious in the many stone carvings on the facades of Maya buildings and on the stelae they used to commerate their kings. Maya art was intimately connected to religion, with most of their artwork serving a religious purpose. Below you can see what is perhaps the most elaborate piece of artwork ever found in Copan: a stone carving representing an acuatic bird, whose torso was made to represent the head of a god. The bird holds a fish in its beak and the wings were carved in two separate pieces of stone.

Stone sculpture of a bird at Copan. Photo by A. Villatoro

Maya Astronomy

Since religion was such an important part of everyday life for the Maya, they used two calendars: the 260-day religious calendar, called tzolkin and the 365-day astronomical calendar, called haab.

The haab was made up of 18 months, each month having 20 days, and final 5-day month to complete 365.  They achieved great accuracy in their calculation of the lenght of the astronomical year. The Gregorian calendar that has been used in Europe and the rest of the western world since the XVI century has a year 365.2425 days long. The Maya calculated that the year to be 365.2420 days long.  From modern astronomical observation, we know that the true year is 365.2422 days llong.   This means that the Maya calendar it was more accurate than the Gregorian year by 1/10,000th of a day.   They accomplished this without telescopes or any other precision measurement instruments.

Maya Maths and Numbering

The Maya discovered the value of the zero.  Amongst ancient civilizations, this discovery was also achieved by the Babylonians and the Hindu, but not by the Greeks nor the Romans.

Instead of a decimal (10-based) numbering system like most of us use today, the Maya used a vigesimal system (20-based).  The notation they used was also noticeably simple:  instead of a unique symbol to represent each number, they used only two symbols: a dot to represent the quantity of one and a horizontal bar to represent the quantity of five.  This is also simpler than the Roman numerical notation, which requires five letters (X, I, V, M, L, C, D) to express all quantities.

The Maya Writing System

Maya developed their very own writing system; anthropologists regard them as one of the most advanced in the American continent. The Maya writing sysem surpassed the pictorial stage into the ideographical and was not far from becoming a phonetic alphabet.

Maya writing represented a considerable challenge to historians and archeologists for years, as no one who knew how to read or write in it lived to see the times when the Maya culture began to be studied. To make matters more complex, very few Maya texts exist today - most were destroyed by the Spaniards in their effort to replace the old pre-Columbian religions with Catholicism. Thanks to decades of work by anrcheologists and anthropologists, more than 750 Maya glyphs can now be read and the history of the Maya and the secrets of their cities in the jungle can be unravelled.

Below you can see an original example of maya writing in stone, as it stands today in one of the museums at Copan.

Maya writing in stone. Photo by A. Villatoro

Maya Religion

Maya religion was present in all aspects of their life.  They had a complex polytheisctic religion, with a busy pantheon with gods ruling over all aspects of life that were of importance to them.  There were gods for corn, agriculture, rivers, war, death, and even business.  As the Maya believed that the world was supported at its four corners by four iguanas, the most important god was called "Itzán Na", which means "house of iguanas".  The table below gives a small cross-section of the Maya pantheon:

One of the few surviving Maya texts is the Popol Vuh.  This tells the Maya's own creation myth, in which the gods tried to create mankind first out of clay, then wood and last corn. The first two attmpts failed, but the third was succesfull and resulted in the birth of the Maya people. This shows how important the corn crop was to the survival of the Maya and all other Mesoamerican cultures, just as rice and wheat have been to European and Asian ones.

Artist's rendition of the dedication ceremony for Altar Q in Copán. Painting by J. Hall.

Maya Social Order

During the Classical Period of their history, the Maya cities had grew large and complex enough to require social stratification.  The Maya society was a theocracy, so priests and prophets were at the highest point in the social structure. The social classes were organised as follows: