Why the Ancient Maya Remained Steeped in Mystery

While Europe slept, the Maya culture soared

Chichen Itza. Photo by Alec Azbach on Unsplash

Hola Amigos!

When Europe was immersed in the Dark Ages the Maya civilization was at its height. The year was 900 AD.

North America would remain unknown for another 600 years and not till three and half centuries later would the first explorers of the Yucatán, John Lloyd Stephens and artist Frederick Catherwood, stumble upon pyramids known to be Maya, in Copán, Honduras. It was 1839.

But why were the Maya, just a few decades ago, steeped in mystery? In 1841 when Stephens’ first book about his explorations was published, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, zero was known about the Maya civilization. On his book’s publication, the world went wild for any information on the Maya. It was so popular it had 12 printings in its first year, making John Lloyd Stephens something unheard of at the time—a best selling author.

But just as the Maya were poised for their debut on the world stage, assuring their days of anonymity would be over, the Caste War of Yucatán erupted.¹ In 1847, the uprising closed the Peninsula. For nearly a century, the Maya swore they would kill any interloper on sight who was not a person of color. After decades of abuse, the remaining descendants of the ancient Maya revolted against the Spanish landowners who had subjugated them, made indentured servants of them if not outright slaves, and stolen their land and water rights.

It wouldn’t be until 1935 that a half-hearted truce was signed. Until then, only a handful of explorers dared risk entering the Yucatán in fear of encountering a Maya with a machete.

Sylvanus Morley excavates Chichen Itza

One of those risk takers was explorer Sylvanus Morley. Morley began excavating Chichen Itza in the 1920s and dug there for 23 years, making it the most excavated site in the world. Chichen Itza now claims title to being one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

Morley and his star pupil, J. Eric Thompson, came to believe the hieroglyphics of the pyramids related strictly to astronomical calculations and the spiritual side of the Maya. But that was not what modern archeologists and iconographers discovered in the early 1970s.

Modern research proved that what Maya scribes had written on the stela placed in front of pyramids (limestone slabs roughly six feet by four feet by six inches) described historical dates and functions—accession of kings, births and deaths, and success in battles. Their purpose was more that of datebook and accolade of accomplishments, an ancient Facebook.

So who were the ancient Maya? Were they astronomers? Mathematicians? Pyramid builders? Lords of the jungle? High priests and shaman?

Like all indigenous American peoples, the Maya’s predecessors were nomadic hunters who followed large game animals across the Bering Land Bridge in migratory waves. As hunter-gatherers, they populated the Yucatán Peninsula and the southern highlands since 11,000 BCE. It’s guessed their origins lay with the Olmecs.

Their civilization is divided into three stages: Pre-classic (1500 BCE - 200 CE). Classic (200 CE to 900 CE) and Post classic (900 CE to 1200 CE). Their rise to power, around 600 CE, lasted the length of one of their baktuns, a Maya time measurement of 400 years, in which all major classic sites were built, including Copán, Tikal, Palenque, and Quiriguá. ²

In their classic era they epitomized the best of civilization. They had organized cities, a complex religion, an advanced calendar, trade routes, dynastic leadership and a writing system. They began farming 3000 years ago and the cycle of maize became a metaphor for Maya life.

The Maya had no metal yet they created artistic carvings using stone tools and obsidian. They had no animals to carry cargo so humans became their beasts of burden. They had no wheel yet they invented the concept of zero.

They had 28 calendars in all, but three were a staple of daily life: the Tzolk’in, Ha’ab and Long Count. The Tzolk’in, or sacred round, is a 260-day calendar, and the Ha’ab, is a 360-day ‘solar’ calendar to coordinate with the Earth’s rotation cycle around the sun. Five days called unlucky time were added at the end of the Ha’ab to make up a full 365-day sidereal cycle. They calculated the sun’s cycle (equatorial) as 365.242 days. Modern calculations according to the Atomic Clock are 365.2425 days.

Three main Maya calendars meshing together like cogs in a wheel. Image from The Collector

Slippage occurred but this didn’t bother the Maya. They didn’t try to play catch up as the modern world does with Leap Year. They just let time roll along.

Their Long Count calendar, one of the most important cycles of Maya time, lasts 5,125 years. This one has been most focused on, and makes up 13 four hundred year cycles called baktuns. The infamous year 2012 was a 13th baktun, an auspicious time for the Maya. ³

Time and the Maya

Time was cyclical to the Maya, whereas for us, time is something that passes. To the Maya, time was something that repeated. Their calendars constantly repeated and their pasts always returned in endless cycles and repetitive patterns so they could read their future through their past.

As naked eye astronomers, they had an observatory at each pyramid site. They kept records of the eclipses and calendars for the synchronization of the cycles of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. They followed the moon. Year after year, decade after decade, they devotedly scanned the night sky. They configured the minutiae of cosmological events and recorded thousands of them in paperbark books called codices. But in the 1500s a Spanish zealot burned all but four—the Madrid Codex, Paris Codex, Dresden Codex and the Maya Codex of Mexico. The discovery of the codices helped archeologists break the Maya code.

The Maya believed in sacrifice and bloodletting. Royals pierced ears, tongues and genitals, allowing blood to collect on paper in a sacred bowl. They burned the paper and at times created a ‘vision serpent’ to communicate sacred knowledge from their ancestors and their gods.

At their height, 800 CE, they supported millions of people. It has been recorded that they had as many as 50 independent states and encompassed more than 100,000 square miles of forest and plains. Around 830 CE they began to desert their major ceremonial centers. And the last hieroglyphs inscribed at any pyramid sites discovered to date were in 910 CE.

Known today as the collapse of the ancient Maya, the exact reason remains unknown but speculation abounds, ranging from peasant revolts, drought, epidemic, foreign invaders, resource reduction and overpopulation. The author agrees with all these possibilities, most specifically drought and its repercussions.

Collapse and disappearance

The classic Maya were long gone by the time the Spanish arrived in 1527 and not a force to be reckoned with. They disappeared almost as soon as they were ‘discovered.’

So why did the Maya civilization  remain steeped in mystery so long? Firstly, the Caste War of Yucatán hindered most explorations until the 1930s. Secondly, the Spanish’s burning thousands of their paperbark books containing advanced mathematical configurations deterred breaking the code, leaving just a small portion of what was once a treasure trove of artifacts—akin to the loss of the Library at Alexandria for another civilization. Thirdly, infighting amongst early scholars was rampant and competitive. No agreement could be made on what the Maya were trying to say in their hieroglyphs until the 1970s when scholars and students met at the famous Mesa Redonda Roundtable talks in Palenque, Chiapas, organized by artist and Maya scholar Merle Green Robertson and artist and author Linda Schele. ⁴

Making headway in deciphering hieroglyphics

From that point on, things moved swiftly towards deciphering not only the glyphs but the mind set of the ancient Maya. For decades scholars believed they were a spiritual civilization that reigned for a thousand years in peaceful conditions with neither wars nor sacrifice. But once the code was broken, archeologists realized the Maya civilization was made up of many warring tribes that commonly used sacrifice and ritual.

Today, 90 percent of the Maya hieroglyphics have been read by iconographers but many of the pyramid sites are far from fully excavated. Archeologists say that many are yet to be discovered. This ancient civilization, though a staple in the news, is still cause for mystery. Who knows what yet lies in wait for those traipsing through Central American jungles, in search of the Maya.

Uxmal, Temple of the Magician. Photo by Barbra Bishop

1. Nelson Reed. The Caste War of Yucatán. (Stanford University Press, 2000).

2. Michael D. Coe. Stephen Houston. The Maya (Ancient People, Ancient Places, 9th Edition. (Thames and Hudson, 2015).

3. Jeanine Kitchel. Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy. (Jeanine Kitchel, 2012).

4. Merle Greene Robertson. Never in Fear. (Pre-Columbian Maya Research Works, 2006).

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WHY THE MAYA—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.