Ancient Mayan Cities-Tikal and Copan

This is sunrise over the jungle in Tikal. The sounds of the jungle waking up and coming alive were more exciting than the views.I'm glad we knew the roaring was from howler monkeys, not lions, tigers and bears (omy!).

 I am leaving the photos in Web Albums because they won't transfer with the captions intact. Copy and paste the link, press slide show, and there you are! If that doesn't work, let me know and I will send another link.

https://picasaweb.google.com/cdobervich/TikalAndCopan#
For folks who would like to read my musing to myself about the ancient Mayans that inhabited the ruins at Copan and Tikal, which we saw on this trip, read on. Warning: it's long. But you can quit. :-)




So, you get to the ruins. You walk around and it all has the look of some other world. Who WERE these Mayans and why did they cover all their buildings with strange stone art?

There must have been a huge population--these abandoned cities are way bigger than I expected.

If the city centers were that big, and the buildings that tall, than probably they had a class of thinkers who had a command of math and science, and they must have had a prodigious source of labor producing the necessary food and muscle power.

So went my  thinking, and it mirrors just about exactly the diaries of the Spanish conquerors who invaded the Americas with Cortez and Alvarado around 1525.  They were awestruck and well aware that they were not dealing with primitive hunter-gatherer societies. Who WERE these people?

Carolyn is ever curious about societies that can create peace and social justice (defined by me to mean life experience not too different whether one is born in the elite or the laboring classes). For awhile in the mid-20th century, a leading archeologist who wanted the aforementioned to be the case published research speculating (on not much evidence) that the Mayans were probably that peaceful, egalatarian society.

Research ever since then proved him wrong. Mayan societies warred on each other, practiced human sacrifice, and had a highly stratified social system in which the elites lived in luxury compared to the laboring classes. The Mayans developed city-states with alliances that changed over time as well as extensive trading networks and business relationships. Noble familes formed marriage alliances.  Strong leaders  developed empires with sattelite cities; the empires thrived for a few hundred years then faded from history.
ln short, they developed a lot like the European cultures of the conquerors as well as the other civilizations that historical researchers have been able to explain up to date. It must have been disconcerting to the European invaders because they explained to the world back home that surely peoples from the civilized world must have arrived generations ago and planted seeds of Western European knowledge which then took root. The contemporary view among historians discounts that theory as superfluous.

The Mayans developed a sophisticated understanding of math (including the first use of placeholder zero) with a base 20 counting system. They had a complicated set of interrelating calendars based on astronomical observations (using only eye measurement) that are as accurate as current calendars. The calendars projected time from yearly units to celestial events they could predict thousands of years into the future.

Mayans' lives appeared to be influence primarily by two calendar cycles. A 260-day sacred almanac was not based on celestial events but might reflect the period of human gestation. The almanac prophacied the destiny of each person's life based on the patron saints of birth dates.  Typical Mayans also used a yearly solar calendar like our 365-day one but broken into 20-day units plus a five-day "correction." By combining it with the Almanac it was projected into 52-year cycles. Supposedly, nobles and shamans protected the knowledge of math and astroonomy that allowed them to control the power of prophecy in the calendars. Mayan daily life revolved around necessary religious rituals based on these calendars, historians think.

As I noted in an earlier blog, Mayans thought everything was imbued with sacred spirit. They thought that other universes had existed in the past and would in the future. They thought that sacrifice and ritual were critical to maintaining balance in this life. Nobles sacrified their own blood, humans were sacrified, and in the goriest of events a human's heart was taken from a living body (same as the Aztecs--it is worth remembering that at the same time in history Christians were burning people alive).

All of this is recorded in their glyphs, a complicated writing system. At the sites, the only surviving monuments with glyphs are the carved stone ones that usually establish dynasties and military victories. Although Mayan history was written in many other ways, not much survives (in part because of the climate and in part because some Spanish conquerors burned them). Three known books (called Codexes) are in museums; I only know of one copy, we saw it in Guatamala City.

At the sites, my poor, untutored eye couldn't pick out much meaning without help. In Tikal, there is almost no accompanying text in the form of posted information. You can hire a guide, or wander around with a map that offers a sentence or two of description for the most important ruins. In Copan, you can hire a guide, or rely on the posted descriptions, which are more extensive.

Copan ruins are neatly contained in a relatively small space--the valuable objects have been removed from the exterior ruins and situated in a museum on the site. Tikal's ruins spill untidily over 2.3 square miles--a metropolis connected originally by causeways but now mostly part of the jungle. At its peak, from about AD250 to the ninth century, its population was probably around 100,000 people--possibly 80 million over its life span, the guidebooks say. Copan ruins seem neater and tidier, but as a local pointed out to us, the part we pay to see doesn't include everything. The non-ruins area around the excavated site was also inhabited, and undoubtedly the current town is sitting atop the suburbs where workers and farmers lived. Our B&B's proprietor has a collection of Mayan artifacts he has run across, and on the day we arrived had just found a pot, nearly intact, while digging a cistern next door.

So here is my stab at placing Mayans in time and space. Their culture is measured from about 400 BC to the arrival of the Spanish. I'm a little foggy on exact times and dates but the empire extended from near Mexico City down the Yucatan Peninsula including Belize, the western edge of Honduras, part of  El Salvador, and Guatemala. Mayans inherited much of their culture from their predecessors, dating back to around 10,000 BC, and their own culture still exists although they no longer rule empires. 

Over that period of time, great cities were apparently abandoned as well as conquered. Cities that were powerful at the time of the Spanish invasion were already fracturing under stress from more powerful cities in Mexico. What happened to them? Environmental degradation played a big part. The land could no longer support the population. The natural resources use for trade and for building monuments ran out. And people left.

When the Europeans arrived, they brought disease as well as superior weapons. They also brought a take-no-prisoners approach to warfare that included knocking down the enemies' cities and slaughtering whole populations. Apparently, at least some historians' reading of Mayan warfare is that it placed honor on taking prisoners, especially the elite classes who would be sacrificed. Buildings weren't knocked down, they were retained and new layers of building added over the old layers (very handy for future archeologists).

Now, the photos: