Word: mayas
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...widespread civilization as well as a high one, for it left the carved facades of its urban centres over what is now British Honduras, Southeastern Mexico, two-thirds of Guatemala and part of "Spanish Honduras." To this oldest American civilization archaeologists have agreed to give the name Maya(pronounce the first three letters like the pronoun my). This is a name of uncertain origin, connected with a late Yucatan capital called Mayapan. It has been extended to cover a great nation which once numbered many millions...
...Maya proficiency in painting Dr. Spinden says, "In foreshortening they greatly excelled the Egyptians and Assyrians...
...foremost authorities on Maya history, including Dr. S. G. Morley of the Carnegle Institute. Dr. Spinden of Harvard, and the British archaeologists Maudslay and Joyce, are agreed that Maya culture suffered eclipse before the coming of the Spaniards. There was an early collapse in the seventh century A. D., and a later one in the fifteenth century. The most likely causes of these collapses are civil war, exhaustion of the soil, climatic change and the appearance of disease...
...present information has been gained since Stephens's time, that is, within the last ninety years. And most of our knowledge of the glyphs has been hammered out within the past thirty years by arduous study of the inscriptions on monuments and of the texts of three Maya books, or "codiees," as the experts call them, which fortunately escaped the Spanish zeal for destroying what were considered "writings of the devil...
Very little intensive archaeological work has yet been done in the Maya area. If the riddle is to be solved it will be done by energetic labor in the field and not by armchair theorizing and fireside dreaming. It is not beyond the limits of possibility that more codices more ancient books, will some day be found in sealed chests or chambers...