World Civilisations

                             The Maya Civilisations

The Maya are the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica. According to the Mesoamerica, it was established during the Pre-Classical period of 2000BC to 250AD.Many Mayan cities reached their highest state of development during the Classical period of 250AD to 900AD and continued throughout the Post-Classic period until the arrival of the Spanish. The city reached its maximum power in the Early Classic ,when it was one f the largest capital cities in the Maya region; it was allied with Tikal at that time .By the Late Classic its power had wanted, perhaps linked to defeat by Calakmul or its allies. Maya cities were the centers of population of the Pre-columbia Maya Civilization of Mesoamerica.

The Mayan  City

 They served the specialised roles of administration, commerce, manufacturing and religion that characterised ancient cities worldwide. The Maya homeland, called Mesoamerica, spans five countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and EI Salvador. There are now indications that the people we call the Maya had migrated from North America to the highlands of Guatemala perhaps as long ago as 2600B.C, living an agricultural, village-based life.
           

             MAYA CULTURE

The height of the Maya civilization in the Classic Period produced the incredible cultural advances for which they are well known. The Maya believed deeply in the cyclical nature of life -nothing was ever 'born' and nothing 'died' - and this belief inspired their view of the gods and the cosmos .Their cosmological views, in turn, encouraged their imaginative efforts in architecture, mathematics, and
Astronomy.

The great pyramids which characterize so many Mayan cities are replicas of the great mountain of the gods known as the Wit-zob. The cyclical nature of human existence is mirrored in the famous Maya calendar .The depictions of the many gods and goddesses all toward their function in helping one through the cycles of life or hindering. Religion influenced most aspects of Maya life. The Maya believed in many gods. There were gods of corn, death, rain, and war. Gods could be good, evil, and sometimes both. Gods also were associated with the four directions and with different colours: red for east,black for west, white for north, yellow for south, and green in the center. The Maya believed that each day was a living god whose behaviour could be predicted with the help of a system of calendars.


                                                          MAYA CALENDARS

                                                
The Maya developed a 260-day religious calendar, which consisted of thirteen 20-day months. A  second 365-day solar calendar consisted of eighteen 20day-months,with a separate period of 5 days at the end. The two calendars were liked together like meshed gears so that any given day could be identified the best times to plant crops, attack enemies, and crown new rulers. The Maya based their calendar on careful observation of the planets, sun, and moon. Highly skilled Maya astronomers and mathematicians calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days. This is only .0002 of day short of the figure generally accepted today! The Maya astronomers were able to attain such great precision by using a math system for zero, dots for the numbers one to four, and a bar for five. The Maya number system was a base-20 system. They used the numerical system primarily for calendar and astronomical work.

Stone of the Sun

Archaeologists claim that the Maya began counting time as of year 3114B.C. This is called the zero year and is likened to january 1,1 AD. All the dates in the Long Count begin there so the date of the beginning of this time cyclesis written 0-0-0-0-0.13 cycles of 394 years will have passed before the next cycle begins, which is in year 2012A.D.

They used three different calendar systems known as the Tzolkin(the sacred calendar),the Haab( the civil calendar),and the Long Count system. 

                                          MAYAN HIEROGLYPHICS

The Maya script is known as Mayan Hieroglyphics. It is one of the most outstanding achievements of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas. It is one of the most sohisticated and highly developed writing system of more than a dozen systems that developed in Mesoamerica. The Maya used their writing system to record mportant historical historical events, carving their glyphs in stone or recording them in a bark-paper book known as a codex. Only three of these ancient books have surviced.Other original books of Maya history and customs do exist, however, Maya peoples wrote these down after the arriva; of the Spanish.The most famous of these books,the Popal Vuh, recounts the Highland Maya's version of the story of creation.

Maya glyphs


"Before the world was created, calm and Silence were the great kings that ruled" reads the first sentence in the book. " Nothing was created , there was nothing."

 

                                         MAYA'S  DECLINE

The cause of Maya decline remains their greatest mystery. The causes proposed by the archaeologists for the Maya's decline are numerous. Their civilization was not destroyed by an overwhelming outside force. The Maya power disintegrated from within. Proposed hypotheses for decline are: overpopulation, famine, epidemics, civil disorder, or could the common people just stopped believing in the dogma the elites were using to establish their power and justify their excesses. But one of the central causes is that the demands they placed upon their environment grew beyond the capacity of the land. At it's peak, there were about 15 million people occupying the Mayan world. Over-population of Mayan metropolises are suspected are suspected to have gone beyond levels that the Mayan political and social networks were able to support, resulting in social unrest and revolution .In the late 800s,the Maya suddenly abandoned many of their cities. Invaders from the north, the Toltec, moved into the lands occupied by the Maya. These warlike peoples from central Mexico changed the culture. The high civilization of Maya like Tikal and Copan disappeared. No one knows exactly why this happened, though experts offer several overlapping theories. By the 700s, warfare had broken out among the various Maya city sates. Increased warfare disrupted trade and over-farming may have damaged the environment, and this led to food shortages, famine, and disease. By the time the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s, the Maya were divided into small, weak city-states that gave little hint of their former glory. As the Maya civilization faded,other peoples of Mesoamerica were growing in strength and sophistication. Like the Maya, these peoples would trace some of their ancestry to the Olmec. Eventually, these people would dominate the Valley of Mexico and lands beyond it.

Today, many of their descendants living throughout Central America still speak an evolved version of the Mayan language and have managed to retain some of the ancient Mayan cultural practices.

Mayan nowadays

Refrences:
             
                1.http://www.history.com/topics/maya
                2.http://www.ancient.eu/Maya_Civilization/