2025 for January 1970

Maya Civilization Latest News

Archaeologists recently unearthed the remains of a Maya city nearly 3,000 years old in northern Guatemala, with pyramids and monuments that point to its significance as an important ceremonial site.

About Maya Civilization

The term "Maya" refers to both a modern-day group of people who live across the globe and their ancestors who built an ancient civilization that stretched across much of Central America.
The Maya are probably the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica.
Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America, the Maya possessed one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere.
Originating in the Yucatán peninsula 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, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems, and hieroglyphic writing (a system that employs characters in the form of pictures).
- The Mayans developed a precise and sophisticated calendar that followed the movement of the sun, moon, and stars. The Mayan calendar is so precise that it even includes a leap day adjustment to keep the calendar synchronized with the solar year.
- The Mayans created a system of hieroglyphic writing that includes more than 800 different glyphs. This writing was used to record the history, astronomy, mathematics, and religion of the Maya culture.
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.
The Maya made paper from the inner bark of wild fig trees and wrote their hieroglyphs on books made from this paper. Those books are called codices.
The Maya also developed an elaborate and beautiful tradition of sculpture and relief carving.
Their society consisted of many independent states, each with a rural farming community and large urban sites built around ceremonial centers.
At its height, Mayan civilization consisted of more than 40 cities, each with a population between 5,000 and 50,000.
The peak Mayan population may have reached two million people, most of whom were settled in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala.
After 900 CE, however, the Classic Maya civilization declined precipitously, leaving the great cities and ceremonial centres vacant and overgrown with jungle vegetation.
The Maya peoples never disappeared, neither at the time of the Classic period decline nor with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and the subsequent Spanish colonization of the Americas.
The Maya remain in contemporary Mesoamerican societies, and maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs, combined with more recent practices such as the almost total adoption of Roman Catholicism.

Maya Civilization FAQs

Q1: Where was the Maya civilization located?

An:. Present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize, and western Honduras.

Q2: Is Mayan still existing today?

Ans: Maya people and many aspects of their culture very much still exist today.

Q3: Around what year did the Maya civilization begin to rise to prominence?

Ans: AD 250

Source: CNN