MAYA OR MAYAN - Mayan always refers to the language group of the Maya people. The term should be used for Mayan languages. The word "Maya" should be used for the name of the people and their culture. Maya is both plural and singular. While there exists some debate over the usage of these words we have chosen to use this definition.

THE ANCIENT MAYA - Originated sometime between 2600 and 1000 B.C. among nomadic tribes in north central Petén, Guatemala, where there are evidences of a once-flourishing agricultural people.  They probably migrated into the region from North America. Asiatic peoples pushed their way into North America using the Bering Straits when Siberia and Alaska were connected via a land bridge. 

Wherever they came from they settled and lived in small family bands in Western Honduras, Guatemala, the entire Yucatan Peninsula and vast areas of Chiapas. After settling in these areas they started cultivating maize and abandoned a nomadic way of life to settle in villages surrounded by cornfields. 

They lived in thatched-roof houses, usually one-room huts with walls of wooden poles laced together using vines (behúko). Their homes were used primarily for sleeping and daily chores such as cooking took place outdoors over open pit fires. The battle of the sexes did not exist to the Maya. 

The men performed construction and farming and the women prepared food, made clothing, and tended to the family's domestic needs. These family traditions continue to be followed in many rural communities today.

TIME AS A SCIENCE - The Maya were obsessed with the idea of time. Of all the world's ancient calendar systems, theirs are the most complex, intricate and accurate. This obsession lead them to create seventeen calendars, three of which are mentioned here. The tzolkin is the exact astronomical calendar. The haab is the solar calendar and the "long count" measures the march of time through thousands of years.

TZOLKIN - Since they knew that the earth year was a little more than 365 days, they developed the tzolkin which is extremely accurate. The calculations of Maya priests were so precise that its correction is slightly more exact than the standard calendar the world uses today. The tzolkin has 13 months of 20-days each making a year 260 days long. This year is not a solar year, it is an astronomical year. 

This time period was called a Sacred Round. The Sacred Round of 260 days moves through time sort of in a repeating spiral that meets the haab calendar at the end of 52 solar years. The exact reasons why such an unusual calendar came into being is still a mystery. The 260-day cycle may tie several celestial events together, including the configuration of Mars, appearances of Venus, or eclipse seasons. It does represent the interval between conception and birth of a human baby. And there are those who insist that it is based on the cycles of the Pleiades constellation. 

The solar cycle of the Pleiades takes 26,000 years, which the Maya divided by 1,000 to make up years lasting 260 days. From the first time I heard that theory I wondered just how did the Maya know that a year in the Pleiades constellation was 26,000 years here on earth. Now that's a mystery. But, since 13 and 20 are both sacred numbers, and when you multiply them together you get 260, well who knows? Could be, but while we can't be certain why they used 260 days, we know they did. The use of a 20 day month is probably based on the fact that the Maya use a base-20 numbering system rather than the 10 based system of the western world.

HAAB - The Vague Year or haab of 365 days is similar to our modern calendar, except that it uses 18 months of 20 days each, with an unlucky five-day period at the end of the year which was known as 'Vayeb'. The haab is a solar calendar while clearly the tzolkin was used to measure things beyond our solar system. The Maya solar new year is thought to have begun sometime in July. The linking of the tzolkin and the haab occurs every 52 solar years. The end of this 52-year cycle was feared, because it was believed to be a time when the world might end. This 52-year period of time was called a "bundle" and meant the same to the Maya as our century does to us.

THE LONG COUNT - The 52-year cycle was inadequate, however, to measure the continual passage of time through the ages. So, another calendar was created. This one is called the Long Count. The Long Count starts at either 3114 B.C. or 3113 B.C. and runs to the present age and from there into the future. 

Similar to our use of the birth of Christ as a starting point for modern historical dates. That is why long count dates found at Maya ruins are so important. They precisely pinpoint an exact date. The long count was not only used to fix dates accurately in time, however, but to correlate the actions of Maya rulers to historic and mythological events. It was also used to mark the time of past and future happenings. 

Some Maya monuments, for example, record the dates of events 90 million years ago, while others predict events that will take place in the future. Indeed, the Maya were obsessed with time.

ASTRONOMY

- The Maya look to the heavens for guidance. The ancient Maya used observatories, shadow-casting devices, and observations of the horizon to trace the complex motions of the sun, the stars and planets. From these observations, the Maya developed calendars to keep track of celestial movements and the passage of time. Using a forked stick and the naked eye Maya astronomers would take observations and calculate the path of Venus and other celestial bodies. They could calculate with precision events such as solar eclipses and the alignment of Venus and other important planets.

Even the novice Maya investigator knows that the ancient cities were aligned with the heavens. Who hasn't heard about the pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichén Itzá where during the spring equinox (March 21st) the sun illuminates the stairs, and as the sun rises creating shadows, the image of a snake slithers down the sacred mountain to Earth. The exact opposite happens in the fall. 

Other alignments might relate to the exteriors of temples and palaces and were not limited to solar activity. Some of the buildings are aligned with constellations. Why did the Maya go to such lengths to align their ceremonial plazas and temples with the heavens? In part, it was to venerate the gods. Pacal's tomb in the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, for example, is aligned with the Sun. 

At winter solstice, the Sun sets behind the high ridge beyond the temple, in line with the center of the temple roof. As the Sun crosses the sky, it creates areas of sun and shadows. The sunlight enters the door of the temple which illuminates the back wall. Then as the sun starts to set the light appears to go down the stairs into the tomb. Another example is the group of three at Uaxactún, which marks the Sun's rising position at summer solstice, the two equinoxes and winter solstice. 

The Caracol at Chichén Itzá is aligned with the appearance of celestial bodies such as the Pleiades and Venus. Another temple at Uxmal contains hundreds of Venus symbols.

Celestial events were foretold far in advance and became part of the spiritual platform from which rituals and major events were scheduled. Transfers of royal power, for example, seem to have been timed by the summer solstice at certain centers. Rituals were timed to coincide with different alignments of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the Moon. 

The Maya also went to war by the sky, again triggered by the planet Venus. Venus war regalia is seen on stelae and other carvings, and raids and captures were timed by appearances of Venus. Warfare related to the movements of Venus was, in fact, well established throughout Mesoamerica. The appearance of Venus was also used to predict the future.

To understand the Maya approach to astronomy you have to understand that to the Maya the Gods moved the planets, even the sun and moon were controlled by the Gods. The Maya believed that the Sun and Moon would journey through the underworld at night. The Maya believed that the heavenly bodies needed human help to make it through the underworld and return the next day. 

Help was provided through sacred rituals such as mutilation, torture, and human sacrifice. The Maya maintain, even today, a basic belief in the influence of the cosmos on human lives. They felt it necessity to pay homage to the gods through rituals. Offering this help was simply the price to be paid for the survival of the universe. Death from such rituals conferred immortality on those who died.

Maya mythology, astronomy and astrology intertwine to form one belief system. The Maya observed the sky and kept calendars to predict solar and lunar eclipses, the cycles of the planet Venus, and the movements of constellations. The observatory, at night looking deep into the heavens, that was the church of the Maya.

MATHEMATICS

- Hun and Hun is Ka (one and one is two) - Maya mathematics is one of the most sophisticated, and yet easy to use, mathematical system ever developed in the Americas. The Maya counting system required only three symbols: a dot = one, a bar = five, and a shell = zero. These three symbols were used in various combinations so that uneducated people could do simple arithmetic. 

The Maya understood the value of zero long before most of the world's civilizations and it was an incredible advantage to the Maya, for use in very advanced calculations. The Maya numbering system is based on 20 rather than 10. This means that instead of the 1, 10, 100, and 10,000 of our mathematical system, the Maya used 1, 20, 400, 8,000 and 160,000. 

Maya numbers are written from bottom to top. For example, 19 is three bars which counts 15 with four dots on top. Numbers larger than 19 were represented by the same kind of sequence, but a dot was placed above the entire number for each group of 20. Twenty was represented by a shell with a dot over it. For example, 31 would be written, 11 (two bars and one dot) with a dot on top of the whole thing representing an additional group of 20. The Maya set of numbers is easy to use and allowed uneducated people to add and subtract. For example, to add 9 and 6 you would have a bar and four dots on one side (9) and a bar with one dot (6) on the other. The two merge to make three bars representing 15.

The Maya considered some numbers sacred. One of these special numbers was nine for the levels of the underworld. Thirteen was sacred for the number of original Maya gods. 20 represented the number of fingers and toes a human being could count on. Another sacred number was 52, representing the number of years in a "bundle". Another number, 400, had sacred meaning as the number of Maya gods of the night.

Mathematics was very important to the Maya and representations of it have been found in Maya art such as wall paintings, where mathematicians can be recognized by number scrolls which trail from under their arms. The first mathematician identified as such on a glyph was a female figure.

THE WRITTEN WORD

- The Maya still use many of the calendars from the past. And astronomy is still performed by the Maya people. In villages all over mesoamerica the Mayan language and numbering system is still used. But, the elaborate writing system of the ancient Maya is gone. It is considered by archaeologists to be the most sophisticated writing system ever developed in the Americas, yet it only exists in the ruins of the great civilization. 

Archaeologists have been studying the writing of the Maya for many years, but it wasn't until 1962, that the Maya hieroglyphs were first catalogued. Since then a great deal of progress has been made in understanding glyphs found at ruins and excavation sites. The ongoing work of decoding the glyphs holds promise that many of the mysteries surrounding the Maya may one day be solved.

They wrote using hundreds of individual signs or glyphs that represented words or syllables that could be combined. These combinations then would form a word in the Mayan language, including numbers, time periods, seasons, animals, names, titles, events, the names of gods, scribes, sculptors, objects, places, and food. Hieroglyphic inscriptions were either carved in stone and wood, monuments and architecture, or painted on paper, plaster walls and pottery.

The unit of the Maya writing system is the glyph, which is equivalent to the words and sentences of a modern language. There is no Maya alphabet. The Maya considered writing to be a sacred gift from the gods. Most ancient Maya could not read. Reading and writing was limited to a small part of the nobles and was jealously guarded. It was thought that reading and writing was a form of communication with the gods, and only the elite of the ruling class was allowed.

This writing is very difficult to interpret for a number of reasons. The glyphs can represent both sounds or ideas. The glyphs must be combined with the context to know how each glyph actually reads. This is because many Maya concepts can be written in more than one way. Numbers, for example, can be written with symbols or with the picture of a god associated with that number or a combination of the two. 

Get Flash !