Word: mayas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Knife & Corn. The Maya, he says, were remote cousins of the Inca, the Iroquois and the Eskimo. Squat, copper-colored, often cross-eyed (admiring crossed eyes, they hung beads of resin before the eyes of their infants to induce a squint), they were wise, brilliant, cruel...
Archaeologist Morley thinks that the Maya, rather than the Inca, were the first of the New World people to cultivate corn. Out of this skill and the sedentary rooted life it led to, they evolved their extraordinary culture. Just when the Maya flowering began he can merely guess at, but by the dawn of the Christian era there was probably already a considerable Maya civilization in what is now the Guatemala Department...
...this civilization had accomplished marvels. It had an exact chronology, a "more accurate knowledge of astronomy" than that of Egypt under the Ptolemies, an arithmetical system involving the concept of zero, a complex hieroglyphic writing (much of which is still undeciphered), highly accomplished arts & crafts. Yet the Maya were aboriginal people-without metal tools of any kind, without beasts of burden, without even a wheel...
...Flowering. During the next few hundred years, they spread north, east and south, until Maya cities & towns dotted an area of 125,000 square miles. No one knows the total number of settlements, but there were "countless" small ones, and at least 100 that were metropolitan enough to have temples, statues and hieroglyphs. Tikal, in Guatemala, may have had a population of 200,000 or more; its ruins cover several hundred acres, and include five temples, one of them over 200 feet high. Copan, in Honduras, has within its inner group of buildings a sizable stadium, sculptured stairways, terraces, pyramids...
...abandoned, one after the other, principally because of crop failures, partly because of epidemics, social disintegration, wars. The last great city founded was Mayapan, about A.D. 1000. It was sacked by local rivals some 450 years later. Within another century Cortes and his Spaniards appeared. Their conquest of the Maya lands was difficult and protracted, for the Maya were degenerate but they were stubborn...