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The Maya meticulously recorded their history and culture in thousands of books. The Spanish burned all of them (archive.ph)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Only 4 Texts Remain from the Maya Civilization After Thousands Were Destroyed

Despite the fact that we are not very far removed from their heyday, we know very little about Maya civilization.

And it’s not because the Maya weren’t into recording their history.

The Maya were prolific writers and actually evolved from using scrolls to a form of folded paper called the codex right around the same time as the Romans, though each appears to be independent of the other.

[...]

Maya glyphs and the records of the Spanish conquistadors themselves attest to thousands of these codices existing by the time the two cultures met in the 16th century.

But, due to their being destroyed by priests, conquistadors, ship raiders, and even time and mold, only about 22 codices, of which only four have Maya origin, exist today.

None of them are complete, and none have their original covers.

[...]

And you might have noticed that the oldest one only goes back to 200-300 years before the Spanish conquest.

We know that the codices went back at least 800 years prior to that, so we’re essentially looking at the tip of a fingernail and trying to guess what the hand looked like.

And that’s how the soul of a culture gets erased from history…

The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. (Wikipedia)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Researchers have long thought that Maya cities were largely isolated and self-sustaining. But the LiDAR scans indicate that the Maya civilization was in fact interconnected and sophisticated, not unlike the ancient civilizations of Greece and China. For example, the team discovered a network of wide, elevated causeways that linked Maya cities and may have been used to facilitate trade between different regions.

The scans also suggest that the Maya civilization was much larger than previously believed; estimates had placed the population at around 5 million during the Maya classical period, which spanned from about 250-900 A.D. But the new data suggests that the population may have been as large as 10 to 15 million people

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Researchers have long thought that Maya cities were largely isolated and self-sustaining

I wonder how anyone really thought that's possible. There's no case that I know of, in any civilization ever, of cities being sustainable by themselves without vast rural areas providing the necessary agricultural produce. Don't archaeologists simply run the numbers of "ok, these many people lived here, that would require X hectares of agricultural produce comparing to similar agricultural development in these past civilisations"?