Maya Civilization

The only fully developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, and a civilisation that was never a single state. The Maya occupied the Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize and adjacent highlands from around 2000 BCE, and their classic period from roughly 250 to 900 CE produced dozens of independent city-states - Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque, Copan - that fought, allied and intermarried much as Greek cities did. Their hieroglyphic script was logosyllabic and recorded dynastic history, and its decipherment, largely achieved in the second half of the twentieth century, converted the Maya from a supposed civilisation of peaceful astronomer-priests into a documented political history of named kings and specific wars. Their astronomy tracked Venus precisely, and the Long Count calendar operated on cycles that reached a widely misreported end date in 2012. The southern cities were abandoned over about a century and a half from around 800, probably from a combination of prolonged drought, warfare and soil exhaustion - a collapse of states rather than of a people. Northern cities such as Chichen Itza continued. Spanish conquest took nearly two centuries because there was no capital to capture; the last independent Maya kingdom at Nojpeten fell in 1697. Diego de Landa burned almost all the books. Six million people speak Mayan languages today. Tikal's tallest temple rises over sixty metres above the forest floor. The Popol Vuh, written down in the sixteenth century, preserves the creation narrative. Maya mathematics used a positional system with a symbol for zero, independently invented. Cenotes provided the Yucatan's only reliable water. Four bark-paper codices survived Landa's burning.

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