The Maya took great pride in their customs and traditions. Every occasion was feted in a grand way, and people with special powers known as shamans conducted rituals for the gods. The shamans took stimulating drugs to induce trance-like states during these rituals in order to make contact with the spiritual world.
These substances affected the body in such a way that pain was not felt, and energy was increased. A number of these substances have subsequently been used as pain relief in modern medicine. In the Maya Empire, laws were standardized across every state and were applicable to all levels of society. If someone broke the law, they would go to court where punishments were meted out according to the crime. Victims of theft were personally involved in the process of justice.
Murder was uncommon because the punishment was so extreme. The Maya had an extremely accurate numerical system. It had only three symbols: 0 shell shape , 1 a dab and 5 a bar. They used these three symbols to express numbers from 0 to 19; numbers after 19 were composed vertically in groups of 20, using place markers. The Maya, therefore, used a base 20 or vigesimal numbering system. The use of place markers and 0 made this system much the same as the one we use today.
With the base system, the second position was worth 20 times more than the numeral, the third position had or times the value, etc. The Maya likewise used shorthand to express extensive numbers like 2. Similarly fascinating is that the Maya had built the concept of 0 into their numbering system by 36 BC. While not primarily known for their advances in science, they did have a working knowledge of it, and a large number of their dates and estimations are shockingly accurate. While not an innovation in itself, Mayan art is widely applauded around the world.
Maya art was very modern in flavor. The Maya created artwork from a variety of materials including wood, jade, obsidian, and earthenware, and decorated stone landmarks, stucco, and walls. Woodcuts were common but only a few examples still survive. Stone sculptures are much more common today, the most celebrated among them, from Copan and Quirigua, are remarkable for their complexity of detail. The cities of Palenque and Yaxchilan are well known for their beautifully decorated lintels including the famous Yaxchilan Lintel Maya steps were decorated with a variety of scenes such as the one found at Tonina.
Zoomorphs are large rocks sculpted in the shapes of animals such as those found Quirigua. The Maya had a long tradition of wall painting, dating back to around or BC. Among the best-preserved Maya wall paintings is a large-scale example at Bonampak. The Maya were also famous for their flint sculptures which were incredibly difficult to make. Ancient Mayans also enjoyed art and architecture. However, the Maya is best known for their calendar. If you recall in the History of the Calendar post, it was the Mayan Calendar that people based their predictions from.
Hollywood even released a movie called , helmed by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich that played into these fears. In reality, December 21, , was merely the end of a cycle in the calendar.
That may sound confusing. The Mayan Calendar is a hieroglyph-heavy calendar. Unlike solar-based calendars, such as the Gregorian, it counts days as opposed to the length of a solar year. The calendar also comprised three interlocking calendars. After they went through the first 13 numbers, they began again, and the day names continued.
When they used all the day names, they repeated. And, the numbers continued up to While the calendar contains days, it also had 18 months and that included 20 days. The unlucky days represent a day in the Haab calendar by a number in the month — then the name of the month. There were month names, plus Wayeb for the dreaded five-day month, making month of names.
Other calendars have addressed this issue by including leap years. The Long Count Calendar was the third and final calendar. Its creation was to keep track of more extended periods. The extended periods were usually for any historical or mythical events that extended over 52 years.
The most important unit of this calendar is the tun — which is a year of days. This calendar expresses dates in it — in the following five digits:. The Mayan Calendar system included five cycles similar to the Gregorian Calendar because it counts days, months, years, centuries, and even millennia.
Like Maya mathematics, the Long Count Calendar system counts by 20s. There is an exception, however. You guessed it — the last cycle concluded during the Winter Solstice in The year period of time was called a "bundle" and meant the same to the Maya as our century does to us.
The Sacred Round of days is composed of two smaller cycles: the numbers 1 through 13, coupled with 20 different day names. Each of the day names is represented by a god who carries time across the sky, thus marking the passage of night and day. Some of these are animal gods, such as Chuen the dog , and Ahau the eagle , and archaeologists have pointed out that the Maya sequence of animals can be matched in similar sequence to the lunar zodiacs of many East and Southeast Asian civilizations.
Glyphs for two of the eighteen months of the Vague Year: Pop left and Zotz. In the day tzolkin , time does not run along a line, but moves in a repeating circle similar to a spiral. The two cycles of 13 and 20 intermesh and are repeated without interruption. Thus, the calendar would begin with 1 Imix, 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, and so on to 13 Ben, after which the cycle continues with 1 Ix, 2 Men, etc. This time the day Imix would be numbered 8 Imix, and the last day in this day cycle would be 13 Ahau.
No one is certain how such an unusual calendar came into being. The day cycle may tie several celestial events together, including the configuration of Mars, appearances of Venus, or eclipse seasons.
It may even represent the interval between conception and birth of a human baby. The day calendar was used to determine important activities related to the gods and humans. It was used to name individuals, predict the future, decide on auspicious dates for battles, marriages, and so on. Examples of this include Seibal and Tikal.
For defense, warriors carried shields and elites and veterans wore thick, cotton armor treated with rock salt that could withstand obsidian. Helmets were unknown and warriors wore elaborate headdresses instead. Warriors also used body paint and animal skins to show their status. The Popul Voh, the book of the Kiche Maya, tells of hornets and wasps used as defensive weapons. When attackers came, defending warriors had gourds filled with hornets that they threw into the midst of the attackers.
Hornets erupted out of the gourds and angrily attacked, killing many warriors. The defenders won the battle. The Mayans did this to be pleasing to the gods, for social status and for personal beauty.
The noble class performed as many body modifications as they could, as Mayans believed the more extreme a modification, the higher the status of the individual. However, even Mayan commoners filed their teeth and tattooed their skin. Both Mayan men and women got tattoos, although men put off tattoos until they were married.
Mayan women preferred delicate tattoos on their upper bodies although not on their breasts. Men got tattoos on their arms, legs, backs, hands and face. Getting a tattoo was painful. The tattooist would first paint the design on the body, then cut the design into the skin. The resulting scar and paint created the tattoo.
The process often led to illness and infection. Mayans who got tattoos were honored for their bravery during the process, as it meant they had the fortitude to deal with the pain and suffering.
Mayan tattoos depicted symbols of the gods, power animals and spiritual symbols to express harmony and balance or the power of night or day. Powerful animals such as serpents, eagles or jaguars were favorites of nobles and warriors.
Feathered serpents, a symbol of the powerful god Kukulkan, represented spirituality and wisdom. Eagles symbolized foresight and flight. Jaguars embodied bravery, stealth and power.
These are still popular Mayan tattoos today. Mayans honored their gods by depicting their myths in tattoos. Cortez found a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked living among the Mayans. Cortez asked the man, Gonzalo Guerrero, if he wanted to return to Spain. Mayans were an intensely spiritual people; to them, tattooing held deep meaning. First, tattoos designated their social status, specialized skills and religious power.
Tattooing was also a sacrifice to the gods, to give the gods their suffering and blood. The symbols they chose as their tattoos represented their totem animal or the gods, who would then imbue their lives with a measure of power. As a difficult and dangerous process, tattooing was the charge of the Mayan god Acat. While all Mayans were encouraged to get tattooed, many did not. The painful process of getting a tattoo turned many away. Getting a tattoo required time, as tattooists worked carefully one step at a time to create a tattoo.
People often got sick during the process and would have to take time to recover. Overall, the Mayans loved body modifications and considered the pain a part of the process in order to honor the gods. What we call the Mayan calendar is actually a set of three interlocking calendars, the sacred calendar of days called the Tzolkin, the solar calendar of days known as the Haab, and a Long Count calendar of much longer time periods.
When the Mayans inscribed a date on a temple wall or a stone monument, they wrote the date using all three calendar notations. Every 52 years, the Tzolkin and the Haab come back in sync with each other. This was called a Calendar Round. The Tzolkin or sacred calendar consisted of 20 periods each with 13 days for a day count. Each day had a number and a name, the numbers from 1 to 13 and 20 day names. When the 13 numbers were gone through, they began again, and the 20 day names continued.
When the day names were gone through, they repeated, and the numbers continued up to The cycles of 13 and 20 repeated until they came back to the first number, first name again in days. The priests who kept the calendars used the Tzolkin to determine days for sowing and harvest, military triumphs, religious ceremonies and divination.
The solar calendar or Haab has days made up of 18 months of 20 days each, which adds up to days. The remaining five days at the end of the year is an unlucky, dangerous time known as the Wayeb. Mayans stayed home and neglected all activities during this time to avoid disaster.
In the Haab calendar, a day is represented by a number in the month, then the name of the month. There were 19 month names, plus Wayeb for the dreaded five-day month, making 20 month names. In order to keep track of longer periods of time, the Mayans used the Long Count calendar. The Long Count counts all the days since the beginning, which the Mayans marked as August 11, B.
The Long Count calendar is cyclical as each period of time will begin again, but it is also linear. Because it is linear, it can take into account dates far in the future or in the past. The basic unit of this calendar is the tun, a year of days, the basic Haab year without the five-day Wayeb. Long Count dates are expressed in five digits. The five digits represent a kin day , uinal month , tun year , katun 20 years and baktun 20 katuns.
Most Mayan dates note both the day of the Tolzkin and the Haab calendar. The next day would be 3 Kimi 6 Pop. When the Mayans inscribed a date on a stela, however, they also included the five digits of the Long Count calendar. Thus January 1, would be written When we think of the Mayans and their culture, what comes to mind? The first thing that would occur to a reader would be the astonishing Mayan cities in the jungles of Central America.
Other readers would mention the fascinating Mayan calendar and the predicted end of the world in Scholars would discuss the complex math and writing systems of the Mayans and their vast knowledge of astronomy. Temples and towers soar above the rainforest. Great city centers include extensive plazas lined with stepped pyramids, graceful palaces, elite homes and ceremonial platforms.
Many buildings in the city center were astronomically aligned to the solstice or equinox. Stone stelae tell of the great deeds and lineages of kings. Elaborate carvings of gods, masks and myths cover the surfaces of buildings and grand stairways.
Carved stone court makers dot the royal ball courts where ceremonial games were played to the death. Stone causeways known as sacbeobs linked Mayan cities, the longest one being kilometers. Most amazing is that the Mayans built their distinctive cities, roads and aqueducts without draft animals, wheeled vehicles or metal tools.
At first, Mayan scholars thought the Mayans had a simple social and political structure consisting of an aristocracy and a peasantry. More recent archeological finds have revealed a complex society with a large middle class that was more powerful and successful than previously believed. The Mayan middle class consisted of merchants, warriors, engineers, architects, physicians, artists, craftsmen, government officials and administrators.
Nobles often were artists and warriors, and talented, skilled peasants could rise into the middle class, revealing a certain amount of social mobility. Socially stratified societies allow a culture to grow and develop, although it can also lead to structural inequalities. The Mayan writing system, its mathematics in service of astronomy and the complex three interlocking calendars in one were a major cultural achievement. The Mayans were one of the few cultures to come up with the concept of zero.
They could calculate sums in the hundreds of millions, all with a base 20 math system and simple number symbols. The Mayan writing system fully represented their spoken languages, the only Mesoamerican writing system to do so. Hundreds of glyphs and pictograms represent things, ideas, concepts or syllables and words. While only the noble class was fully literate, many Mayans could no doubt read or recognize the public writings on walls and monuments.
The Mayans produced many technological innovations and inventions. They knew how to make rubber from gum trees. They created a full rainbow of paint colors, including the famous Maya Blue. Most Mayan paints were mineral based, using mica, copper or other minerals.
Tough, durable Maya Blue has resisted the humid Mesoamerican climate for centuries. The Mayans developed intensive and extensive agricultural techniques in order to feed their thriving society, including terracing, raised bed farming and irrigation.
One Mayan cultural achievement is universally recognized: chocolate. Thanks to Mesoamericans, Mayans among them, people around the world enjoy this delicious food. With between and named gods, the Mayans had a complex and changeable pantheon. They had gods to oversee every human action and aspect of life: gods for birth and death, for the ball game and gambling, for travel and traders, for pregnant women and infants, for youth, age, health and suicide, for wild nature and for agriculture, a god of maize and of thunder, creator gods and gods of destruction, death gods and gods of heaven.
All of these gods were changeable as well. They could be one sex or both, young and old, good but sometimes evil, depending on the time and circumstance. Because of the complexity, it is unlikely that modern minds could fully grasp the Mayan religion and pantheon. However, scholars have deciphered enough of the Mayan codices and hieroglyphics to cite the major Mayan gods.
These gods are listed below, but the list is not comprehensive by any means. Itzamna is a creator god, one of the gods involved in creating human beings and father of the Bacabs, who upheld the corners of the world.
Itzamna taught humans the crafts of writing and medicine. Itzamna is sometimes identified with the high god Hunab Ku and the sun god Kinich Ahau. A nature god, Yum Kaax is the god of wild plants and animals, the god of the woods. He is the god venerated by hunters and by farmers, who hunt wild animals or carve their fields out of his forest.
The Mayans had both a female and a male maize god and both a simple vegetative god and a more powerful, tonsured male maize god. The tonsured maize god personifies maize, cacao beans and jade. He is a patron god of the scribal arts, dancing and feasting. Mayan kings often dressed as the maize god during rituals of his life, death and regeneration.
Hunab Ku is a pre-Columbian god whose name translates as the only God or the one God. Scholars are still debating whether Hunab Ku is an indigenous god or a creation of the Spanish.
0コメント