The Mayans

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The characteristics of an empire

• Large army
• Absolute ruler
• Citizens pay tribute and receive protection
• Territory separated into lots
• Farms
• Strict laws
• Wealth concentrated on only the upper class.
• Social classes
• Conquering people

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The Mayan Empire

• Was centered in the Yucatan Peninsula which is
  now a part of Mexico. Parts of the Mayan Empire
  were also in the modern day countries of
  Guatemala, Belize and Honduras.

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Peace loving?

• Historians used to believe that the Mayans were
  quiet, peace-loving scholars. Now we know that
  they were anything but peaceful. They were
  raiders and traders.

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Trading

• They traded widely throughout Central America and
  along the Caribbean coast. They traded items
  such as jade, salt, wax, cacao, honey, feathers,
  cotton and pottery.

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Mayan Alphabet

• The Mayans developed a written pictograph
  language that used pictures or symbols is a
  glyph. Over 800 of these have been identified so
  far. Each glyph represents not a letter, but an
  idea such as birth, capture or burial

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Codex (codecies)

• Only the upper classes used the Mayan written
  languages and wrote books called codex. When the
  Spanish arrived in Central America, they found
  these books and burned them because they believed
  them to be pagan.

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Codex continued

• Only 2 complete Mayan
• books remain. We still cannot
• fully translate the language today.

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Astronomy

• Mayan priests charted the movements of the
  planets and stars. They were able to predict
  eclipses because of their precision.

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Mayan Time

• It has been said that the Mayan genius was in the
  area of astronomy but there real obsession was in
  the area of time. They developed an accurate
  calendar with 365 days in a year and a leap year
  every 4 years years before Europeans came up
  with a similar idea. We now have a calendar that
  has a year of 365.2422 days.

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The beginning of time?

• For Mayans, the date of the beginning of time was
  Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. They divided time into many
  different units like our days, weeks, month etc.
  A day was a kin and a bactun was a period of
  144,000 days. We have no idea why they needed a
  unit like this.

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The Mayans Love Math!!

• To do all these calculations, the Mayans created
  a system of mathematics that included the concept
  of zero. They did this 500 years before anyone
  else in the world thought of it.

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Mayan Social Classes

• Mayan society was divided into rigid social
  classes. The priests and rulers and their
  families were at the top. These people possessed
  all the knowledge and learning. They were the
  only ones who could read and write the language
  and use the mathematics.

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Social Classes continued

• The upper class lived like kings in huge stone
  palaces and were carried everywhere they went in
  litters. There were at least two important Mayan
  rulers that were women.

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Social Classes

• The Mayans buried their high-ranking dead in
  secret tombs under stone-temple pyramids.

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Burial

• The Mayans did not mummify their dead but they
  did have similarities to the Egyptian pharaoh
  burials. Also, like the pharaohs, many of the
  upper classes intermarried, probably brothers and
  sisters.

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FOOD!!!

• The most important food was corn along with the
  other crops they grew. They also hunted, fished
  and trapped. They raised an ugly, fat little
  breed of hairless dog that they ate and uses as
  sacrificial offerings to the gods.

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This Mayan pottery may show the next victim
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Mayan Government

• They were like ancient Greece in that they were
  organized into city-states. Each city seemed to
  have a different importance.

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Tikal Cultural Capital
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Palenque Political Capital
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Chichen Itza Religious Capital
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Cities or centers?

• These places may not have been cities at all.
  They may have been ceremonial centers. They were
  not lived in year-round. Only priests, the
  rulers, and a few of the merchants lived there
  all the time. The ordinary people lived in small
  villages outside of the city but came in for
  the religious ceremonies.

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Religion

• Religion controlled every aspect of Mayan life.
  The Mayans were polytheistic, meaning that they
  worshipped many gods. Every moment of the day
  was governed by a different god. You even had a
  special god of your birth that you were supposed
  to pay special attention to.

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Other Mayan gods

• god of Rain and god of Corn.

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Worship Ceremonies

• The ceremonies often involved small offerings
  such as food or flowers. Sometimes they
  sacrificed small dogs. It doesnt appear that
  they performed many human sacrifices however,
  they may have done blood-letting. The Sacred
  Well of the Mayans in Chichen Itza may have been
  an exception.

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• In this picture, a woman is performing the
  bloodletting ceremony by pulling a thorn-rope
  through her tongue.

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Its actually an underground lake!
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                         The Mayans built Chichen
Itza between two sacred wells. I think one they
used for drinking water and the other was used to
throw stuff in, err... make sacrifices. Here are
a couple pictures of the Sacred Cenote, which is
the well they found a bunch of skeletons in (i.e.
not the drinking one). I don't know about you,
but this is not what I think of when I think of a
well. The thing is huge. And deep. But you can
understand why ancient people would regard it as
sacred.
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Dont you wish we had a sacred ball game?

• This was much more than a game it was a
  religious ceremony. The two opposing teams may
  have represented good and evil. The game, in the
  Mayan language was pok-ta-pok. Today, it is
  known by its Spanish name, pelota.

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Pok-ta-pok

• The game was played, only by men, on a paved
  court shaped like a giant capital I. Each
  Mayan city had at least one ballcourt. Chichen
  Itza had 7.

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Pok-ta-pok The Facts

• The ball was about the size of a melon. It was
  made of solid rubber and had the density and
  weight of a bowling ball. The game was dangerous
  and violent. Many men were usually hurt or
  killed in the game, even though they wore
  protective rubber padding and wooden helmets.

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How would you do this?

• There was a vertically mounted hoop about 15 foot
  off of the floor. The object of the game was to
  keep the ball moving and put the ball through the
  hoop without using your hands and your feet. The
  games sometimes went on for days before either
  team could score.

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And the winner is

• After really important games, the winners would
  chase the losers and humiliate them by stealing
  their clothing, their jewelry and cutting off
  their long hair. Later, losers may have been
  killed. Temple murals show ballplayers with
  human heads hanging from their belts.

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What do you consider beautiful?

• Upper classes of society (men more than women)
  wore a lot of jewelry including pendants, breast
  plates, bracelets, decorated head bands and arm
  bands.

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Beautiful or not?

• Pierced nose, lips and ears?
• Incised teeth with jade and coral?
• Filed, sharp-pointed teeth?
• Tattoos on the back of their hands using hollow
  fish bones to inject colored dyes into designs.
  They painted their ears, noses, lips, knees,
  necks, wrists and ankles in bright colors.

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Beautiful or not?

• Men and women wore their long hair in two or four
  braids that were elaborately arranged on their
  heads.

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Short is in!

• The Mayans were short, stocky people. They
  considered long, narrow, almost pointed heads
  quite beautiful. Using cradleboards, they shaped
  their babies heads shortly after they were born.

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Look at that nose!

• Long, hooked noses were also thought to be
  beautiful. They may have intentionally broken
  their noses to achieve their shape.

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Crossed Eyes

• Crossed eyes were also thought to be beautiful to
  the Mayans. They were able to do this by hanging
  a colored bead from a babys cradleboard of from
  a lock of hair. The babys eyes focused inward,
  on the bead, and eventually stayed that way.

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Where did they go?

• By about 1,000 AD the Mayans had abandoned their
  cities and no one really knows why. The theory
  is that Mayan society became increasingly violent
  and destroyed itself. Temple murals give
  evidence to this.

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The steps to ruin

1. City-state compete against each other.
2. Prisoners of war go from slavery to death.
3. They were first tortured and then sacrificed to
   the gods.
4. Would you stay? Its not hard to imagine why the
   ordinary Mayans began to hide in the jungle and
   slip quietly away instead of killing each other
   off as the upper classes did.