The Classic Maya Florescence
The Classic Maya period ran from about 250 to 900 and produced the only fully developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is defined by the long count. Maya cities from the third century onward carved dated monuments recording accessions, wars, marriages and rituals against a calendar counting days from a fixed point in 3114 BC, which is why the political history of dozens of kingdoms can be reconstructed year by year. The script is logosyllabic, with several hundred signs standing for words and syllables, and it was read as calendrical and mythological until the 1950s — the decipherment, driven by Yuri Knorozov working in Leningrad from published photographs and by Tatiana Proskouriakoff's demonstration that the inscriptions record human lifetimes, changed the subject entirely. What emerged is not a peaceful theocracy of astronomers but dozens of competing dynastic kingdoms with divine kings, patron gods, client relationships and constant war, dominated for centuries by the rivalry of Tikal and Calakmul. The achievements are nonetheless real: a positional numeral system with a zero, a solar year calculated to within seconds, tables predicting Venus and eclipses, corbelled architecture, and painting at Bonampak and San Bartolo. The population of the central lowlands may have reached several million, supported by raised fields, terraces and reservoirs. The southern cities stopped raising monuments between 800 and 900, and the northern ones continued. Four books survive out of a literature the Spanish burned. The decipherment also had a political dimension worth noting. The leading American scholar of the mid-century, Eric Thompson, held that the glyphs were not historical and blocked the alternative reading for decades, and the man who broke it worked in the Soviet Union from photographs and never visited a Maya site until he was seventy-six.
- Year: 250 CE
- Category: Cultural
