At any one time, no more than around 500 glyphs were in use. In total, the script has more than a thousand different glyphs, and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. It is the only writing system of the Pre-Columbian New World which is known to represent the spoken language of its community. The Maya writing system, often called hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to the Ancient Egypt writing system. With the translation of the Maya script it was discovered that the Maya were one of the few civilizations where artists attached their name to their work. Late Pre-classic murals of great artistic and iconographic perfection have been recently discovered. The use of Maya Blue survived until the 16th century when the technique was lost. A beautiful turquoise blue color that has survived through the centuries due to its unique chemical characteristics is known as Maya Blue. We have only hints of the advanced painting of the classic Maya mostly what has survived are funerary pottery and other Maya ceramics, and a building at Bonampak holds ancient murals that survived by chance. Maya art has been considered to be the most sophisticated and beautiful of the ancient New World. For instance, some cities on the flat limestone plains of Mexico grew into great sprawling municipalities, while others built in the hills used the natural loft of its surroundings to raise their towers and temples to impressive heights. Maya architecture tended to integrate a great degree of natural features, and their cities were built somewhat haphazardly, as dictated by the topography of each independent location. Some cave sites are still used by the modern Maya in the Chiapas highlands.Īs Maya cities spread throughout the varied geography of Mesoamerica, site planning appears to have been minimal. There are also cave-origin myths among the Maya. There are also cave sites that are important to the Maya. Maya architecture spans many thousands of years yet, often the most dramatic and easily recognizable as Maya are the stepped pyramids. The Maya bodily ideal is also based on the form of this young deity, which is demonstrated in their artwork. This philosophy is demonstrated on the belief in the Maya maize god as a central religious figure. The life-cycle of maize lies at the heart of Maya belief. Good and evil traits are not permanent characteristics of Maya gods, nor is only “good” admirable. There is a massive array of supernatural characters in the Maya religious tradition, only some of which recur with regularity. Much of the Maya religious tradition is still not understood by scholars, but it is known that the Maya believed that the cosmos had three major planes, the Earth, the underworld beneath and the heavens above. This is depicted on ancient objects such as pictorial texts. In some Maya rituals people were killed by having their arms and legs held while a priest cut the person’s chest open and tore out his heart as an offering. They also had to determine if the heavens were propitious for performing certain religious ceremonies. The Maya priest had the job of interpreting these cycles and giving a prophetic outlook on the future or past based on the number relations of all their calendars. The rituals and ceremonies were very closely associated with celestial and terrestrial cycles which they observed and inscribed as separate calendars. Like the Aztec and Inca who came to power later, the Maya believed in a cyclical nature of time. The northern lowlands cover the remainder of the Yucatán Peninsula. The southern lowlands lie just north of the highlands, and incorporate the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo and northern Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador. The southern Maya highlands include all of elevated terrain in Guatemala. The Maya area is generally divided into three loosely defined zones: the southern Maya highlands, the central lowlands, and the northern lowlands. The Maya civilization extended throughout the present-day southern Mexican states, Guatemala, Belize, Northern El Salvador and western Honduras. Many outside influences are found in Maya art and architecture, which are thought to result from trade and cultural exchange rather than direct external conquest. Maya influence can be detected from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and as far as central Mexico, more than 1000 km from the core Maya area. Advances such as writing, and the calendar did not originate with the Maya however, they brought these technologies to full development. The Maya civilization shares many features with other Mesoamerican civilizations due to the high degree of interaction that characterized the region. The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems.
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