If you have 50 minutes, what the heck, you might find this interesting.
I used to be really interested in this. I went to Cancún Yucatan with a group of ten people, an outstanding experience for a lot of reasons, a lot of utterly unique memories cherished from that; the coconut that fell and sprouted a spear unfolding into a frond so perfectly I wanted to take it, snorkeling around the rock jetty immediately outside the rented house, the best Cuba Libre I've ever tasted and to this day still cannot duplicate, deep sea fishing, monkeys, the market, top restaurants, but most of all a side trip that I organized, that I insisted on, and pushed, and lobbied, and made a major pain in the butt out of myself to get us all to Chichén Itzá. My group was not interested. I tore up one of my books for its pictures and pasted them onto a poster of a map showing what is there to be seen and how close we'd be to it. I pushed and pushed and pushed. I was the youngest person in my group and the rest were simply not interested.
The Mexican government built a road that cuts a straight line right through the jungle. This road become a major path for Mexican people to walk very long distances between settlements. We passed an assembly of people walking along the highway carrying a coffin who all glared at us as we passed. Apparently we broke some kind of rule that we didn't know about.
I climbed over every structure in the whole place from one end the other. I saw everything there is to see, everything in the photographs and more. I was not ready for all the carved stone laying around like junk to be picked up. Portraits of people in block stone that as you walk by it you go, "that would make an excellent coffee table base with a glass top." And, "I could use this for art." Literally thousands of such instances. And still, my friends were not that interested.
There is a famous wall there with a design of skulls that's Halloween as anything gets. The Temple of Warriors I climbed up, (but not we climbed up) with its adorable stone seated figure is actually an altar for human sacrifices.
You don't know this until you climb up and through it, their planetarium is actually not all that, with passageways and rooms fit for children.
This was fulfillment of a childhood dream. I was actually doing it; climbing on Maya pyramid built in their terminal period, the other buildings in various styles. "At the Mouth of the Well at Itza" is a cenotaph with gross slime-green water and whatever else the Maya threw into it, human corpses and such.
Later I learned of their blood-thirst, their constant warring, an economic plan based on conquer and pillage. I learned of unbelievably huge sacrifices in other places like Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) (Aztec, not Mayan) when the entire city had to be abandoned for the stench of decaying bodies sacrificed in a single incident estimated at 50,000.
And that put me off permanently, boom, just like that, no longer interested, dropped like a nuked potato.
I think this lead frame looks like the Nikko monkeys, see, hear, speak no evil, but spill water out your mouth. I did not notice this structure in the video.
Did you watch?
Did you watch carefully?
Because I noticed a few things that are weird. Go ahead and correct me. I promise I will not argue with you.
"Decimated the Maya civilization." Loose use of the term. It means 90% Mayan remained.
* They burned all the books except four
* in the Yucatan
* Yucatan is just a portion of the Maya civilization
* Scribes were forced to learn Spanish
* And the stone carvings survived.
* Extended from Central Mexico to much of Central America.
Yet the ability to read the glyphs evaporated
Even though Maya still exist, then and now.
* Guatemalan still make offerings to gods.
* planting/harvesting, business/travel, courtship/ marriage
They kept their gods, their practices, their language, their culture, but lost their ability to read their language.
* They’ve been cut off from the written word of their ancestors.
Yet there they are, the carvings and codex for westerners to translate and return to them.
That means the civilization was not literate as described
Rather, it was limited to scribes and educated elite.
So quit blowing smoke up my skirt about how advanced this culture was.
"As Europe entered the Dark ages these city states reached the height of their glory."
I cannot even count the number of times I’ve heard and read that. Let’s get one thing straight; American native tribes were good at cutting, carving and stacking large stones and that’s it. With short narrow tunnels and tiny rooms that modern man can not even fit into without crunching down low and nearly crawling the whole way, then bend over in a cramped space. That's all that they did. It's no big thing to aline these efforts with cardinal points or to stars, or match holes to equinox sunrises. At the same time when Europe was at its lowest Europeans were building incredible cathedrals with thin walls and mind-blowing grand open interiors. And with very large windows that flooded the space with light and with art all around in all forms possible that common people could read an impressive religious history.
So don’t give me this shit about how great Mayans were at their height compared to Europe following the fall of Rome. Just BITE ME me Mr. Erudite Historian Person.
"Some cities supporting hundreds of thousands of people." Wrong. The outlying surrounding farmers and especially the warriors supported the cities (through pillaging other cultures), not the other way around. The cities didn’t support anything except artists, scribes, priests, and aristocracy. Not hundreds of thousands of people. And when that feeble structure collapsed the knowledge of reading glyphs collapsed with it because regular people could not read them even then.
"The only nearly fully literate society in the New World." Bullshit. Or else the ability to read the glyphs would have stayed with the people along with everything else. They’re right there chiseled in stone. They didn’t have libraries, the bark codexes were not available to common people. Those books were held by the elite. That’s what the stones carvings were for, to record the history of elite families and it didn’t matter if common people could read them or not.
The culture cannot be nearly fully literate and then lose ability to read glyphs in a snap, even though they are written in stone, available to read, as the Mayan people persist to worship their gods for crops, business and marriages. The population never could read in the first place.
"The cities were swallowed and forgotten." How presumptuous. They’re assuming Maya who still live in the jungle still right there forgot where their ancestor's cities are, when they’re living right there in the jungle around the abandoned cities.
Mathematically, Mayans didn’t have “0”.
Westerners do a lot of stumbling. They stumble into Palenque and they stumble onto the Dresden codex in a museum.
"And even pursued astronomy." So what. There’s nothing else to do at night. And the stars are bright even in cities that have no electricity. Of course they study astronomy and if they didn’t then they’d be incredibly dull.
logographic = signs for words
25:23 "Our own system uses various numerals and logograms."
Wrong.
Our system uses various numeral and phonograms. Our writing symbols stand for sounds in our language, not things and concepts.
GAWL!
"The single most important myth that we have from the entire New World probably the most important piece of literature ever produced in the Western Hemisphere."
bring bring. Hello, Shakespeare? Okay, Bill, I’ll tell him.
bring bring. Hello, Hemingway? Okay, Ernest, I’ll tell him
bring bring. Hello, Mr. Frost? Fine, Bob, I’ll tell him.
bring bring. ¿Diga? ¿García Lorca? Sí, Fred, se lo diré.
bring bring. Allô Monsieur Hugo? Oui, Victor, je vais lui dire
bring bring. Hello, Mr. Fitzgerald? Sure, Scott, I'll tell him.
one ringy-dingy two ringy-dingies three ringy-dingies four ringy-dingies. Hello, Mr. Coe? Um, yeah. A bunch of writers just called and told me to tell you to go fuck yourself.
"The Maya had guided explorers and rebuilt monuments."
There. You say this yourself. So you know yourself that the cities were not engulfed in the jungle and forgotten. They were not lost to the Maya people. They were there to be read all along but the population was not generally literate in the first place, far less fully literate, so they couldn't pass down something they didn't have. That's why the ability to read glyphs was lost. Too few people knew how to read them in the first place. So don't give us your crap about the population being near fully literate. Logical deduction says otherwise.
"Now, they wanted to reap the benefits of the decipherment" BY WESTERNERS!
"The glyphs present the one and only window into the Pre-Columbian past."
Except for the temples, ball courts, plazas, ceramics, textiles, weapons, tools, boats, jewelry, art, tombs, seeds, and language.
3 comments:
I loved the little hotel there. Straight out of Indiana Jones. And the path to the ruins when the Great Pyramid suddenly looms right up out of the jungle.
PS The pool was where the winner of the ball game jumped in, along with a girl suitable for sacrifice.
Must be your ruins, they are not Mayan.
I didn't watch the video, but thoroughly enjoyed the commentary by ChipA below the fold.
I was there in 1982. I bought an art print portraying some of the carvings, but never got around to framing it when I returned home and ended up throwing it out. For what reason? It didn't call, speak or invite, in fact something about it repulsed, and I didn't have any insight into what that might be about, until I read this post. I only knew I didn't like it or want it on my wall.
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