The Ancient Maya

The Maya of Mesoamerica, along with the Aztecs of

Mexico and the Incas of Peru, made up the high

civilizations of the American Indians at the time of the

Spanish conquest. Both the Aztecs and the Incas were late

civilizations, between 1300-1533 AD, but the Maya of the

Yucatan and Guatemala exhibited a cultural continuity

spanning more than 2,000 years, 1000 BC-AD 1542.

Many aspects of this culture continue yet today. The

Ancient Maya in their time had actually refined writing.

They had an extensive written language, which was both

phonetic as well as ideographic. One of only five

independently created writing systems in human history.

Maya words were in hieroglyphs, each picture with its own

meaning. Unlike other ancient Central American

civilizations, the Maya could write in words, sentences, and

even stories. Arranging several pictures together in a logical

form would create a story. The Maya covered their cities

and buildings with hieroglyphs carved into the stone. Most

of the Maya could read some hieroglyphs, but the priests

and nobles were the only people who actually had

knowledge of the entire language. The Maya would also

use quills made of turkey feathers to write in books made

of soft bark taken from a type of fig tree. Religion was the

center of the Mayan life. Mayans believed that there were

two levels of the world. The first level was the physical

world and the second was the spiritual world, which

consisted of the old dead ancestors, ...