The fascinating Mayan culture

The Mayan culture has already occupied some of our articles of Mysterious as The secrets of «Xibalba»: the Mayan underworld.Now we want to continue talking about this culture as mysterious as fascinating.

Mayan culture: some information you should know

Impressive cities and monuments and the most advanced practices in Astronomy and linguistics throughout America have turned the Mayan culture into study at the same level that the Egyptian culture enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth century, a culture that spread across the south of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize , a territory that in total was about 350,000 km2.

Here is a list with some interesting facts about the Mayan culture:

• The discovery of the tomb of King Pacal in the pyramid known as «Temple of the Inscriptions» by the Mexican archeologist Alber Ruz Luiller changed the idea of ​​pyramids as places with temple functions exclusively.
• The mystery of Mayan decline at the end of the preclassic period still remains.
• The dialects they gave rise to 44 modern Mayan languages ​​.
• They developed the concept of 0, it seems that centuries before it was known in the Old World.
• Thank you to the literature maya we know the daily life of its inhabitants.
• The women had great consideration and some even came to power.
• Diagrams of the movements of the moon and the planet s are as accurate as those of others civilizations.
• They had a polytheistic and pantheistic religion .

Scene of sacrifice in a v Mayan asija

• The elements of the sacrifices were: self-sacrifices, sacrifices, dances, songs and prayers, sexual abstinence and fasting.

Mayan writing

One of the most fascinating topics with the astronomy of this culture is its writing.It is a writing logosilabica , that is, it combines phonetic symbols and logograms (complete words), unlike language idiograms such as Nahuatl, this made deciphering Mayan writing even more difficult.

Rabinal Achi is a literary work declared a Masterpiece of the oral heritage heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005.

Maya code

The decipher of the Mayan writing was a hard and laborious work, as the Spanish priests ordered the burning of all l I codices, with which the work was made from the inscriptions made in stone. Yuri Knorozov played an important role.His article "The writing of the Mayan Indians" in 1963, is his most relevant work and helped greatly to decipher a large number of texts belonging to this culture during the decade of 70.In 1990 Galina Yershova developed a dictionary of Mayan-Spanish glyphs with more than 30,000 entries.

If you want to know more about the Mayan culture do not miss Calendars that marked history, where of course you will find the calendars mayas.

Image: Stefano Ravalli, Travis, Mary Harrsch