The Maya
The earliest Maya reveal Olmec origins, although scientists do not understand the process. The early Maya built ceremonial architecture beginning approximately 2500 years ago. They erected burial mounds, pyramids, monuments at large city-centers like Chichen itza, Palenque and Copán. In looking at a map of Mexico and Central America you can see how close they were to the centers of the Olmec nation. They developed city-centered small states with palaces for their rulers, a religious shrine for prayer and practice, and centers for goods and agricultural trade.
Like the Olmec the Maya staple was maize. This vital sustenance was more than a principal foodstuff; it became fundamentally spiritual nourishment supplied by their gods. The Maya diet became even more based in beans and maize than the Olmec along with the many plants, roots, fowl, insects and reptiles of their environment, which was similar to the Olmec environment. As time went by the cocoa bean became a favorite drink that seemed to be drunk by the aristocracy of the day and by their gods! It also became a standard of exchange in the marketplace.
The Maya developed hieroglyphs signs to reproduce the spoken language. Their symbols were phonetic having sounds for groupings of two or more symbols like; ca-ca-ua (which means chocolate or cacao). And they used this writing system for nearly 2,000 years. Years later, at the time of the Spanish invasion, they would write down in European letters a book known to us today as the Popol Vuh. Like the Christian Bible, this Quiche Maya book is a astonishing story of how the Maya world was created. It is still considered a remarkable piece of literature. It is astonishing that this information had survived due to events that occurred during the Spanish conquest when many sacred texts were being destroyed and burned by the Spanish soldiers and missionaries. The Popol Vuh had been hidden and protected and from it modern humanity has been able to understand much about ancient Maya belief.
The Maya believed sacred spaces existed both above and below us. They connected underground caverns with their underworld gods and the sky with their heavenly gods. The sun, moon and stars had all connections with the gods. The Maya believed in prayer and human sacrifice. They believed that pouring blood back onto the ground revitalized and fed it. The ritual of beheading, bloodletting, and human heart sacrifices were the satisfying way to make offerings to their gods and to replicate practices found in nature, whether in the harvesting (beheading) of maize or in the bleeding of tree sap from a rubber tree. Replications of nature pleased their deities.
Certain social status was admired and honorable. The job of a scribe, for instance, was a very important position held in at least some cases by lords or sons of kings. Maya civilization produced the most skilled artisans and thinkers whose work in turn has left us numerous architecture structures including palaces, pyramids, monuments, large ball courts, temples and urban design. Specialist mastered the writing system, early astronomy and developed the use of math learned from the Olmec, including the concept of zero, geometry, and the mathematics of base 20. They were very interested in the passage of time, creating calendars to be followed by everyone; when to seed crops, harvest, when to marry and conceive! One of their calendars (again probably inherited by from the Olmec) consisted of 260 days- the average length of human conception. They studied the skies to record the movement of the heavens.
Students will enjoy learning about many of the ways of the Maya not only for their sports but also for their ingenuity. The pictorial writings, decorative ceramic images and stone carvings reveal both courtly life and noble practice to them. Although naturalistic looking, the drawings of the Maya can seem almost caricature or cartoon-like in style. The Maya style seems casual and calligraphic because they had years of practice preferring the technique of using a brush. Because they used a brush to draw… the writings and ceramic images can be understood as essentially graphicand in this, artists developed a fluid, distinctive style that emphasized their idea of beauty, particularly desirable among the Maya portraying slanted sloping foreheads, almost crossed eyes and elongated noses wearing giant ear and nose plugs! Here my students will have a lot to say; we'll discuss what beauty is and why we feel the need to change our appearance. We'll be sure to talk about makeup, hair, tattooing, and piercing.
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