The Ancient Maya Essay -- essays research papers

The Maya of Mesoamerica, along with the Aztecs ofMexico and the Incas of Peru, do up the highcivilizations of the American Indians at the time of theSpanish conquest. Both the Aztecs and the Incas were latecivilizations, between 1300-1533 AD, but the Maya of theYucatan and Guatemala exhibited a cultural continuityspanning more than 2,000 years, 1000 BC-AD 1542.Many aspects of this culture h overage yet today. TheAncient Maya in their time had actually refined writing.They had an ample written language, which was bothphonetic as well as ideographic. bingle of completely fiveindependently created writing systems in human history.Maya nomenclature were in hieroglyphs, each picture with its ownmeaning. Unlike other quaint Central Americancivilizations, the Maya could write in words, sentences, andeven stories. Arranging several(prenominal) pictures together in a logicalform would create a story. The Maya covered their citiesand buildings with hieroglyphs carved into the stone. Mo stof the Maya could read some hieroglyphs, but the priestsand nobles were the only people who actually hadknowledge of the entire language. The Maya would alsouse quills made of turkey feathers to write in books madeof soft bark interpreted from a type of fig tree. Religion was thecenter of the Mayan life. Mayans believed that there were cardinal levels of the world. The first level was the physicalworld and the second was the spiritual world, whichconsisted of the old dead ancestors, ...