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Deep within the
jungles of Mexico and Guatemala and extending into the limestone shelf of the Yucatan
peninsula lie the mysterious temples and pyramids of the Maya. While Europe was still in
the midst of the Dark Ages, these amazing people had mapped the heavens, evolved the only
true writing system native to the Americas and were masters of mathematics. They invented
the calendars we use today. Without metal tools, beasts of burden or even the wheel they
were able to construct vast cities across a huge jungle landscape with an amazing degree
of architectural perfection and variety. Their legacy in stone, which has survived in a
spectacular fashion at places such as Palenque, Tikal, Tulum, Chich?n Itz?, Copan and
Uxmal, lives on as do the seven million descendants of the classic Maya civilization.
The Maya are probably the best-known of the
classical civilizations of Mesoamerica. Originating in the Yucatan around 2600 B.C., they
rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern
Belize and western Honduras. Building on the inherited inventions and ideas of earlier
civilizations such as the Olmec, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems and
hieroglyphic writing. The Maya were noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated
ceremonial architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces and observatories, all built
without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical
rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizable underground reservoirs for
the storage of rainwater. The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and
cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant
peoples.
Around 300 B.C., the Maya adopted a
hierarchical system of government with rule by nobles and kings. This civilization
developed into highly structured kingdoms during the Classic period, A.D. 200-900.
Their society consisted of many
independent states, each with a rural farming community and large urban sites built around
ceremonial centers. It started to decline around A.D. 900 when – for reasons which are
still largely a mystery – the southern Maya abandoned their cities. When the northern Maya
were integrated into the Toltec society by A.D. 1200, the Maya dynasty finally came to a
close, although some peripheral centers continued to thrive until the Spanish Conquest in
the early sixteenth century. (Source)
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