Ancient Mayan City

About Ancient Maya city:

• It is located in the Balamku ecological reserve on the country’s Yucatan Peninsula.
• This city has been named Ocomtun – meaning “stone column” in the Yucatec Maya language.
• This would have been an important centre for the peninsula’s central lowland region between 250 and 1000 AD.
• The city includes large pyramid-like buildings, stone columns, three plazas with “imposing buildings” and other structures arranged in almost-concentric circles.
• It has a core area located on high ground surrounded by extensive wetlands.

Key Facts about Mayan Civilization

• The Maya are probably the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica.
• 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.
• 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 rainforest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater.

Where is Yucatan Peninsula?

• It is a Northeastern projection of Central America which is lying between the Gulf of Mexico to the west and north and the Caribbean Sea to the east. 
• The peninsula is almost wholly composed of beds of coralline and porous limestone rocks.

Q1) What is hieroglyphics?

It is composed of pictorial symbols or signs known as hieroglyphs, which represent both objects and ideas. The term “hieroglyphics” is derived from the Greek words “hieros” meaning “sacred” and “glyphein” meaning “to carve.”

Source: Ancient Maya city discovered in a Mexican jungle

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