National Geographic: Lost Kingdoms of the Maya Page #2

Year:
1993
465 Views


They knew that the universe moved

in cycles,

some very large, some very small.

They even predicted eclipses

of the sun.

They seem to have been fascinated

by the relationship between time

and the events in their own lives.

The Maya also left a record in a

medium much more permanent than paper.

And this writing contains much more

than dates and numbers.

On these stone the Maya recorded

the important events

in the lives of their rulers.

This is the Hieroglyphic Stairway

at Copan,

the longest inscribed text

in the New World.

But early archeologists reassembled

it out of order,

so today we can read it only

in segments.

Sculpture specialist Barbara Fash

is making a catalog

of the 1,200 glyphs on the stairway.

Someday, these drawings may tell

a more complete story of Copan's kings

This means "to plant with a stick

in the ground."

Other hieroglyphs are more accessible,

thanks to dramatic breakthroughs

in the past few decades.

This is the date. It's a...

Epigrapher Linda Schele has done

her share of the recent detective work

This is a little tree-tey.

And on this side,

facing the east, he's young.

But on the west side you can see...

Look at the beard.

It is a rare thing when a people

develop historical consciousness

and make recorded history

a part of what they do.

What we are participating in now

is the recovery of lost history...

...because American history does not

begin in 1492 with Columbus.

It begins in 200 B.C.

with the first Maya king

who wrote his name on a stone.

Long before the first king wrote

his name on a stone,

the Maya were living

in the fertile Copan valley.

They were corn farmers.

Their lives were ruled by the rhythms

of the natural world,

planting and harvesting,

birth and death.

But around A.D. 400,

at about the time Rome

was starting to collapse,

a change swept through the valley.

On a lazy bend in the Copan River,

buildings made from stone were rising

from the jungle floor.

Brilliantly colored buildings

surrounded a whitewashed central plaza

where thousands of people could gather

There was trade in shells

and cacao beans,

tobacco, jade, and feathers.

At the center of the city

stood the ball court.

The object of the ball game seems

to have been to keep

the heavy rubber ball in motion,

without using hands or feet.

Stone carvings at some sites show

ballplayers with severed human heads

dangling from their belts.

But no one knows if they depict

what actually happened to the losers,

or illustrate something more symbolic.

The ball was supposed to be a metaphor

for the movement of the sun

and by extension, also the moon

and the stars.

And you wanted to make sure that there

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Patrick Prentice

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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