Maya people

“ In Yucatan they had a kind of writing, the Maya writing, of the most curious and elaborate character. So far as we have been able to decipher it, it was used mainly for keeping the exact and complicated calendars upon which the priests expended their intelligence. The art of the Maya civilization came to a climax about 700 or 800 A.D. The sculptured work of these people amazes the modern observer by its great plastic power and its frequent beauty, and perplexes him by a grotesqueness and by a sort of insane conventionality and intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. ”

“ Yucatan, when discovered, was occupied by a number of tribes of Maya Indians. The Maya language spread beyond the limits of Yucatan. This region, with Chiapas, Guatemala, and a part of Honduras, contained and still contains evidence, in the ruins of ancient structures, of a higher advancement in the arts of life than any other part of North America. The present Maya Indians of Yucatan are the descendants of the people who occupied the country at the period of the Spanish conquest, and who occupied the massive stone houses now in ruins, from which they were forced by Spanish oppression. ”

“ For the earlier history of the people of Maya stock we depend almost wholly upon tradition and architectural remains. The net result of the evidence wrung from these is that the Maya civilisation was one and homogeneous, and that all the separate states must have at one period passed through a uniform condition of culture, to which they were all equally debtors, and that this is sufficient ground for the belief that all were at one time beneath the sway of one central power. ”

“ The ruins of Yucatan, those of the state of Chiapas and of the Island of Cozumel, are very splendid remains, and they are all of them situated in a region where the Maya language is still spoken, substantially as at the time of the Spanish discovery.9-*
Don Manuel Orosco y Berra, says of the Indian inhabitants, “their revengeful and tenacious character makes of the Mayas an exceptional people. In the other parts of Mexico the conquerors have imposed their language upon the conquered, and obliged them gradually to forget their native language. ”

“ At the risk of repetition it is essential to point out that civilisation, which was a newly acquired thing with the Nahua peoples, was not so with the Maya. They were indisputably an older race, possessing institutions which bore the marks of generations of use, whereas the Nahua had only too obviously just entered into their heritage of law and order. When we first catch sight of the Maya kingdoms they are in the process of disintegration. Such strong young blood as the virile folk of Anahuac possessed did not flow in the veins of the people of Yucatan and Guatemala. ”

“ Among those the Nahuatl or Aztec has been appealed to; and the Mayas have been noted as a lettered people whose hieroglyphic records, and later transcripts of written documents, are now the object of intelligent investigation both by European and American philologists. The Maya language strikingly contrasts, in its soft, vocalic forms, with the languages of nations immediately to the north of its native area. It is that which, according to Stephens, was affirmed to be still spoken by a living race in a region beyond the Great Sierra, extending to Yucatan and the Mexican Gulf. ”

“ The architecture of the Mayas is unlike that of any other people of what is called the Old World. It resembles only itself. And, notwithstanding that Mayapan, from the most remote times, was visited by travellers from Asia and Africa, by the wise and learned men who came from abroad to consult the H-Menes; notwithstanding, also, the invasion of the Nahuas and the visitation of the pilgrims, the Maya art of building remained peculiar and unchanged, and their language was adopted by their conquerors. ”

“ The peoples who divided them one from another were themselves benefited by carrying Maya culture into Anahuac, or rather it might be said that they constituted a sort of filter through which the southern civilisation reached the northern. These peoples were the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, and the Kuikatecs, by far the most important of whom were the first-mentioned. They partook of the nature and civilisation of both races, and were in effect a border people who took from and gave to both Maya and Nahua, much as the Jews absorbed and disseminated the cultures of Egypt and Assyria. ”

“ The greater number of these exhibit a carved serpent (which in Maya is kan) in their centres and this fact affords a clue to the possible origin of the Maya name for a neck ornament given in the Motul dictionary. It is undeniable that all evidence unites in proving that the ancient peoples of the Mississippi valley were in traffic, if not more intimately connected, with a Maya-speaking people and came under the influence of the ideas and symbolism current in Yucatan. ”

“ The history of this people can only be read on the monuments they have left, which have given rise to so many divergent hypotheses. Yet documents were not wanting, and had the religious zeal of the men of that time been less ill-judged, they would have found in the various and multiform manuscripts, in the charts or maps, in the idols, in the pottery and living traditions, ample and reliable materials from which to write an exhaustive history of the Maya civilisation. But the Spaniards were more careful to demolish than to preserve. ”

“ But all this is very far from showing that at any time a race speaking the Aztec tongue ruled the Peninsula. There are very strong grounds to deny this. The traditions which point to a migration from the west or southwest may well have referred to the depopulation of Palenque, a city which undoubtedly was a product of Maya architects. The language of Yucatan is too absolutely dissimilar from the Nahuatl for it ever to have been moulded by leaders of that race. The details of Maya civilization are markedly its own, and show an evolution peculiar to the people and their surroundings. ”

“ I will directly speak more at length of vestiges of the Mayas in Babylon, when explaining by means of the American Maya, the meaning and probable etymology of the names of the Chaldaic divinities. At present I am trying to follow the footprints of the Mayas.
On the coast of Asia Minor we find a people of a roving and piratical disposition, whose name was, from the remotest antiquity and for many centuries, the terror of the populations dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean ”

“ The Maya had many customs and beliefs in common with the Nahua, but their art and racial characteristics mark them out as fundamentally a different people. At the present time their descendants are represented by the agricultural class in Yucatan and Guatemala. In many parts of Mexico, Indian life in its tribal aspect still exists ”

“ No white man has ever penetrated their zealously guarded stronghold that lays between Guatemala, Tabasco, Chiapas and Yucatan, the river Uzumasinta watering part of their territory.
The Maya language seems to be one of the oldest tongues spoken by man, since it contains words and expressions of all, or nearly all, the known polished languages on earth. The name Maya, with the same signification everywhere it is met, is to be found scattered over the different countries of what we term the Old World, as in Central America. ”

“ Famine and pestilence, civil strife, and the attacks of warlike neighbours have all been suggested as the causes, and all may have contributed to the result, but there is some reason for giving preference to the last. Mr. Mercer and other investigators have shown us that in Northern Yucatan the Mayas were the original inhabitants of the country and that they brought their culture with them from elsewhere, and there seems little reason to doubt that they brought it from the southern part of the Maya area. ”

“ Even today, in many places in Yucatan the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have forgotten the native tongue of their sires, and only speak Maya, the idiom of the vanquished. Traditions, religious rites, superstitious practices, dances, were handed down from generation to generation. But, as the sciences were of old the privilege of the few, the colleges and temples of learning having been destroyed at the downfall of Chichen, the knowledge was imparted by the fathers to their sons, under the seal of the utmost secrecy. ”

“ The geographical features of this area have probably had a very considerable influence on the evolution of Maya civilization, for when once the Mayas were settled on the high land to the north of the great volcanic range which follows the trend of the Pacific coast, and on the peninsula of which this range forms the base, they were in an exceptionally strong position for defence and may have existed there for many centuries, slowly developing their civilization undisturbed by later migrating tribes from Mexico, which would have passed along the natural roadway of the Pacific slope. ”

“ Between this western branch and the great Mayan centre of Yucatan the coast was occupied by intrusive Nahuatlan tribes, landward from whom lay the territories of the Zoquean and Zapotecan stocks, the western neighbours of the Mayan peoples.
The culture of the Maya is distinctly related, either as parent or as branch, to the civilizations of Mexico. [72] Affinities of Haustec and Maya works of art indicate that the ancestors of the two branches were not separated previous to a considerable progress in civilization ”

“ In the southern regions, where the Maya culture flourished, or what may be considered geographically as Central America, we have seen that the chronologic record is much less extensive and perfect even than in the north, taking us back in an oft-broken line only a few centuries beyond the Conquest. Yet we have caught traditional glimpses far back in the misty past of a mighty aboriginal empire in these tropical lands, of the earlier and grander stages of Maya culture, of Votan, of Xibalba, of even the early periods of Nahua civilization and power. ”

“ Evidences of Nahua influence also are not wanting, a fact which is eloquent of the later period of contact which is known to have occurred between the peoples, and which alone is almost sufficient to fix the date of the settlement of the Maya in Yucatan. It must not be thought that the Maya in Yucatan formed one homogeneous state recognising a central authority. On the contrary, as is often the case with colonists, the several Maya bands of immigrants formed themselves into different states or kingdoms, each having its own separate traditions. ”

“ In this poem are represented as nearly as possible, the religious ideas of the Mayas, their belief in KU, the Supreme Intelligence; in the immortality of the soul, and in successive lives on earth before returning to the great Source whence all emanate; also their rites and ceremonies as gathered from traditions of the natives of Yucatan, the fresco paintings found at Chicħen, and the books of ancient Maya authors. ”

“ All we know for a certainty is that many of the names of their villages and tribes are pure American-Maya words: that their types are very similar to the features of the bearded [76] men carved on the pillars of the castle, and on the walls of other edifices at Chichen-Itza: while their warlike habits recall those of the Mayas, who fought so bravely and tenaciously the Spanish invaders. ”

“ The chief objection to this theory of the origin and development of the Maya culture, as far as I can see, is that in Guatemala and Honduras no certain traces of a proto-Maya culture have as yet been discovered, but that the civilization springs, as it were, full-blown from the earth. The answer would be that the finest ruins have focussed all attention up to the present, and that earlier manifestations of the culture have not been sought, while the difficulties afforded by environment and climate place serious obstacles in the way of systematic excavation. ”

“ The prehistoric civilization which was developed to the south of Mexico is generally known as "Mayan," although the Mayas were undoubtedly akin to the Aztecs or early Mexicans. The Maya tribes in Yucatan and Honduras, from abundant evidence, must have risen to a refinement in prehistoric times, which, in several respects, was superior to that of the Aztecs. ”

“ Without attaching very great importance to the last argument, I am inclined to believe that the most plausible conjecture respecting the origin of the Mound-Builders, is that which makes them a colony of the ancient Mayas, who settled in the north during the continuance of the great Maya empire of Xibalba in Central America, several centuries before Christ. We have seen that the ancient Mayas, under the name of Quinames, probably occupied eastern Mexico at that epoch, and in later times we find the Huastecs in southern Tamaulipas speaking a Maya dialect. ”

“ The occupation and colonization of Yucatan marked the dawn of a new era for the Maya although their Renaissance did not take place at once. Under pressure of the new environment, at best a parched and waterless land, the Maya civilization doubtless underwent important modification. ”

“ Another and more important result is the proof it furnishes of an intimate relation of the Maya with the Nahua nations. That all the Central American nations had calendars substantially the same in principle as the Mexican, is well known. This of itself would indicate a common origin not so very remote; but when we see two contiguous or neighboring peoples making use of the same conventional signs of a complicated nature, down even to the most minute details, and those of a character not comprehensible by the commonalty, we have proof at least of a very intimate relation. ”