Mayas

Since ancient times, Mayan peoples have inhabited a region that included the easternmost states of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala together with the western portions of El Salvador and Honduras. There are only a few parts of the world today where language and culture so closely coincide that a line drawn around the Maya-speaking peoples contains all of the archaeological sites and hieroglyphic texts assigned to ancient Mayan civilization.

Linguists have divided the 31 Mayan languages spoken today into three major subgroups: Huastecan, Yucatecan (Yucatec, Lacondón,Itzá, and Mopan), and Southern Mayan (Greater Quichean, Mamean,Kanjobalan, and Tzeltalan-Cholan). Each of these languages shares a common ProtōMayan ancestor that was spoken in about 2000 BC in the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas. It is through research with present-day speakers of Mayan languages that many of the new decipherments in hieroglyphic writing have been made possible.

While the Maya existed as a people for over 2 millennia, they developed a remarkably complex civilization over the span of 6-½ centuries (CE 250 to 900), in the rain forest of southern Yucatán and northern Guatemala. They built magnificent cities of stone pyramids, temples, and palaces, produced sculpture and paintings of remarkable aesthetic quality, and screen-fold books on paper. Reaching intellectual and artistic heights, which no other peoples in the New World could match at the time, they carved hieroglyphic inscriptions on monuments and used a writing system that has now been largely deciphered. They created a mathematical notation system more sophisticated than any of their European contemporaries, incorporating place notation and the concept of zero. They counted the passage of time in hundreds of thousands of years and developed a number of calendrical systems. At the center was a sacred calendar of 260 days composed of cycles of 13 numbered days and 20 named days. In addition, they had the haab, which was 360 days long plus 5 concluding, unlucky days. Another calendar was the katun,which was a cycle of 20 tuns, each consisting of360 days. They also used a Venus calendar (584 days), a half-year lunar calendar, and other cycles. These calendars made the Mayas the most accurate reckoners of time before the modern period. All the days of these calendars were recorded in astronomical almanacs that dictated religious ceremony.

These intellectual accomplishments were what made the “Mayan Classic period” into a kind of golden age during which the Maya, living in over 90 cities, were the only people in the Americas who used a phonetic writing system. Furthermore, they were the only civilization in the New World with chronological records going back to the third century AD. Many advances have been made in hieroglyphic decipherment, which has changed the view of the intellectual culture of the ancient Maya and modified our understanding of Classic Maya political systems. It has recently become clear that not all Mayan polities were equal. The kings of some lesser states were said to be “owned” by the rulers of more powerful states. While city-states such as Palenque and Copan exercised political control over some nearby areas, there were two superpowers, Tikal and Calakmul, that dominated the entire Yucatán peninsula during the Classic period.

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