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Anonymous
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Immediately in the first sentence of the reading there is a mention of Mayan record keeping, specifically astronomical records to help their people commune and appease the gods. The Mayans were known to be expert astronomers capable of extremely accurate predictions, using rudimentary elements to produce complex astronomical tools. One date in particular, which is still historic and very iconic now, is December 21, 2012, or what the Mayans have deemed to be "Doomsday". The nature of this statement could be taken many different ways, it could simply mean a spiritual occurrence happens on that day. It could mean that the Earth reverses its pattern of revolution. During the year 2012, according to Wikipedia (which has a list of things which are to happen during this year) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012, the sun will reverse its magnetic poles. Could that be what the Mayans meant?
The reading mentioned the Mayan record keeping of time. When I went to Mexico the place I went to described Mayans as "obsessed with time". I also remember the date 12/21/12 as some monumental change in the world. I could not recall what exactly it was.
I looked on Wikipedia and found out that the Winter Solstice (shortest day of the year) falls on this date. However on the Winter Solstice page I looked at the history (and projected dates) for winter solstices. Every winter solstice occurs on either the 20th or the 21st, so I don't think this is what the Mayans were talking about.
Another thought that had occured was the sun reversing its magnetic poles (as Joe mentioned above). However I figured out that this occurs every 11 years.
I did find out that on 12/21/12 the Mayan Calender will complete its 13th cycle, for the first time in approximately 5125 years. However some researches do believe that the date should be 12/23/12 instead.
The past couple of readings have mentioned "mound agriculture". I didn't know what that was so I looked it up. I found that this was where plants (usually potatoes) would be planted over large mounds of grass and dirt that had been used as burial grounds. The bodies were thought to be good fertilizer. One of these mounds still exists in Tennessee (here is the Wikipedia article but its location is restricted and it is not available for tourists. Here is a picture of a mound like the ones used in mound agriculture.
Also, I found some pictures (Pic1Pic2) of Tula, a big city that was called in the reading "the successor to Teotihuacan".
In the reading, it mentioned that the "Maya civilization largely abandoned the lowlands in the ninth and tenth centuries. [After this] new building in ceremonial centers ended. Inscriptions ceased. The royal cult disappeared. Evidence vanished of rich elites and professions specialized in learning and the arts." I was wondering, what did these "lowlands" look like and what happened afterwards. Why did the Mayans decide to "largely abandon" them? I found out that they were located on the Yucatan Peninsula and they have an average elevation of less than 500 feet above sea level. There are many tropical rainforests here. I found a great site which gives some evidence of why the Mayans decided to leave the lowlands. It is believed that the Lowlands could not sustain high populations. Another reason that they abandoned them was because the lowlands provided thin soils, seasonal drought, and an absence of permanent natural water sources. However, at the same time, these elements made the Mayans a great civilization. I found a book cover which pretty much, the title sums up what the lowlands did to the Mayan civilization. It was a time of "Collapse, Transition, and Transformation."
I was interested in learning more about Mayan dress. I was trying to picture the Mayans while the reading was describing them, and I wondered what they wore, and if/how that reflected the culture and interests of the Mayans, like keeping time and the spill of royal blood. This website has some helpful information on this. It says that the pattern of a diamond was common on Mayan clothing, and that the diamond represented the universe. They give an example by saying that a diamond is found many times on clothing at Yaxchilán, a site of Mayan ruins. I also learned from that site that huipíles are garments not only worn by women, but are used to adorn statues of saints. Here is a picture of huipíles. It was traditional for mothers to teach their daughters how to weave huipíles. That website also mentioned that most of the designs and patterns on Mayan clothing have meaning to them. They represent weather cycles, gods, saints and ancestors.
Maize cultivation provided many pro's for the Mayan civilization. However, I found some of the Maize diseases. Maize Dwarf Mosaic Virus, corn smut, and Stewart's wilt are the most common. Maize Dwarf Mosaic Virus is a pathogenic virus of the family Potyvirus. Symptoms include chlorotic spots on the leaves. Later, the plants may get red streaks through it. When all three of these diseases are established, it results in major crop loss which could potentially hurt the civilization. See this site for more information on the Maize Dwarf Mosaic Virus.
I was interested in looking more into the Mayan astronomy. The Mayans were pretty advanced in the field of astronomy, but I was curious how they knew so much since they didn't have high-powered telescopes or other instruments of the sort. When I went here, it had a good description of the whole idea behind the Venus thing. The Mayans were enthralled by Venus and believed it to be more important than the sun itself. It says that it would take 2922 days for Venus, the sun, the earth, and stars to all align, and the site has a good picture of that. I started looking for a picture of what a "zenial passage" would look like, however, I came across the Mayan calendar. The calendar is a large circle with many different turning parts.
The term "zenial passage" still hadn't really made itself clear to me, and I wasn't really sure what it was since it was mentioned in all the sites. On the Wikitionary, yes the Wikitionary, the definition was "The passing of the sun directly overhead such that no shadows are cast by a pole sticking straight up from the ground. These conditions only occur in locations between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn." So, this just means the sun is right overhead so there's no shadows, but this only happens where the Mayans were. While it came from crystalinks, I think its still an accurate definition. I was able to find, however, on this Wikipedia article on the Mayan calendar about Venus. It said that they were very skilled, and were able to predict the cycle of Venus. Much of this was found in the Dresden Codex. It even said that they could've tracked other planets such as Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter
I was first confused about Tula and what and where it was. This is a map of where Tula is in Mexico. The ruins there are sacred and it is predicted that there were about 60,000 people living there in that five square radius at their time of power (900-1100 AD). Here is a picture and a short description about the ruins at Tula. A question I had about Tula was specifically, what kind of experiments and advances in urbanization did Tula cause? Another question I had in general was, what part of the Americas is the book talking about when they said that they buried the dead extravagantly and about the large trade networks? Relating to my topic of Moche construction, it mentioned in the reading about adobe. I was wondering what this was exactly and adobe is a type of brick are made from natural building material such as sand, clay, water, and some type of fibrous material. It is then shaped and put in the sun to dry. Something else that caught my interest was the royal blood letting and I was wondering what the special ceremonies were like. This is a very information paper that I found which talks about royal blood letting in general and answers part of my question about the blood letting ceremonies.
i got really interested in tula. I did some research on it and found out today they are located 50 kilometers northwest of Mexico city. Also i learned about Tollan, it was the capital of the Toltec Empire. They founded about AD 750 right before the Teotihuacan empire crumbled or as it was crumbling.
I was wondering about an island that the reading mentioned on the Last page -> Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon, so I found a map of where it is. www.visionofbrazil.com/Destination/images/DestinationMapImage.aspx?id=18 ">Map of Marajo Here is what it looks like(pictures) --> www.condorjourneys-adventures.com/images/brazil_marajo2.jpg ">Picture1 www.condorjourneys-adventures.com/images/brazil_amazon2.jpg ">Picture2
I was trying to find out more about the urns, but couldn't really find anything. But then when I was looking around about Marajo Island, I found a New York Times article, which shows pictures and descriptions of the island. And it also has a picture of what they call a funerary urn. "Funerary urns (also called cinerary urns) were used by many civilizations. After death, a body would be cremated and the ashes were typically collected in an urn" --> Wikipedia
In the section of the reading about Maize, it mentions that burial mounds appeared between the "Dakotas" and the Red River. I did not know where either of these were, so I looked into this. To be honest, I suspected that the Dakotas were where we know North Dakota and South Dakota to be, but I wasn't sure. According to Wikipedia , "Dakotas" is what I thought it was. I also found a picture of the Red River.
The reading talked about how Mayan art, specifically how it featured sacrifice in it. I found this interesting because I had noticed this a little but when looking into my last post, but thought it was cool that it was now mentioned. This Picture shows that there was a lot of sacrifice in this art. I had not realized just what a big part of mayan culture the sacrifice was until looking into this and and seeing this part of the reading.
I wanted to learn about Mayan math, since it is one of the main things that the Mayans are known for. They used a 20 digit system, called a vigesimal system. There are three symbols used that represent all the numbers: a dot means one, a bar means five and a shell means zero. The numbers are written horizontally, so the symbols are stacked on top of each other to make a number. Using their math, the Mayans could calculate things like the length of a year very accurately. Something that I found interesting was that the Mayans had a concept of zero, because most civilizations had no concept of zero at this time. Here and here are two good sites that explain Mayan math.
Sorry i was a little bit late but i was working on my lit epic and kinda got carried away.
While reading I got sort of interested in what the sacrifices were like in Mayan culture. One idea that the Mayans had come up with were that the gods had, in the beginning, sacrificed their own bodies so that man could have life. Another idea of the Maya was that they owed the gods life and blood so they would sacrifice people and people's blood to give back to the gods. Another type of sacrifice practiced by the Maya was that of Autosacrifice. This was the act of bloodletting. Bloodletting was giving blood from yourself to the gods by piercing body parts or cutting yourself.
One example of Autosacrifice in the Maya culture was that of the finding of a queens tomb in Waka. In her genital area was a ceremonial stingray spike which can be seen as she was autosacrificing using the blood from her genitals.
Here is the link...I couldn't get the correct format to work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_in_Maya_culture
In the reading, one of the places that was mentioned was Tula, a metropolis to the northwest of Teotihuacan. This is a website that contains a great deal of information on Tula, and also has many pictures of the ruins. There are still parts of step pyramids and pillars left standing in the ruins. There are also many carvings on the still-standing structures.
I was interested in learning about the Mayan writing as a whole. I found that their writing was acctually quite complex and was not read in the way one would think. Rather than being read across or up and down, the Mayan writing was acctually read in a paired column form. This meant that the first glyph would be in the top left corner, the next glyph to the right of the first. The third glyph however would be located underneath the first. The fourth is located under the second and the reader continues in a zig-zagging pattern before returning to the top of the next column and continuing on. The calender is similar to that of the eastern cultures, but instead of starting on 1, the first day of the month is refered to as 0. Their language was phonetic, with different syllabes represented, rather than letters. This site has a good chart of the Mayan symbols, used to represent sounds. The Mayan language also has what is called a glottal stop, where there is a constriction of the larynx before the vowel, giving it an explosive sound. The Mayans would then combine these smaller symbols, to form larger "words". In addition to these symbols, there were also larger glyphs that could represent commonly used words in the Mayan language, such as shield and snake. These words could be written many ways, and so different scribes would write the same word different ways.
I was looking up Mayan wars and found this website about a Mayan civil war. It was recently discovered because of hieroglyphs, unearthed by a hurricane last summer that blew away part of the dense rain forest covering a Mayan pyramid at a site known as Dos Pilas, in what is now Guatemala. The hieroglyphs say that Dos Pilas was then an outpost of the city Tikal, which was 75 miles away, and that the ruler of Dos Pilas was the brother of the ruler of Tikal. Then, people from the city-state Calakmul, which was 60 miles away, in what is now Mexico, invaded Dos Pilas and took the king prisoner, eventually restoring him to the throne but making him a pawn of Calakmul. The Dos Pilas puppet-king eventually turned on his own brother and invaded Tikal itself, killing his brother in the process. Tikal came back a few years later and overthew Calakmul.
In the reading it mentioned how important corn was but, I don't think that it stressed enough how important corn was. Some cultures(Zuni tribe and others) worshiped corn (golden corn from Wednesday here). The Mayan also had a lot of corn so much in fact that it was used in pretty much every dish from chocolate to cold drinks (Scott Kenny made some for our 6th grade History project, it was rather good).
I was also wondering where the idea for the Mayans not cut themselves in peculiar places came from. And I'm honestly kind of nervous about looking it up.
18 comments:
Immediately in the first sentence of the reading there is a mention of Mayan record keeping, specifically astronomical records to help their people commune and appease the gods. The Mayans were known to be expert astronomers capable of extremely accurate predictions, using rudimentary elements to produce complex astronomical tools. One date in particular, which is still historic and very iconic now, is December 21, 2012, or what the Mayans have deemed to be "Doomsday". The nature of this statement could be taken many different ways, it could simply mean a spiritual occurrence happens on that day. It could mean that the Earth reverses its pattern of revolution. During the year 2012, according to Wikipedia (which has a list of things which are to happen during this year) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012, the sun will reverse its magnetic poles. Could that be what the Mayans meant?
The reading mentioned the Mayan record keeping of time. When I went to Mexico the place I went to described Mayans as "obsessed with time". I also remember the date 12/21/12 as some monumental change in the world. I could not recall what exactly it was.
I looked on Wikipedia and found out that the Winter Solstice (shortest day of the year) falls on this date. However on the Winter Solstice page I looked at the history (and projected dates) for winter solstices. Every winter solstice occurs on either the 20th or the 21st, so I don't think this is what the Mayans were talking about.
Another thought that had occured was the sun reversing its magnetic poles (as Joe mentioned above). However I figured out that this occurs every 11 years.
I did find out that on 12/21/12 the Mayan Calender will complete its 13th cycle, for the first time in approximately 5125 years. However some researches do believe that the date should be 12/23/12 instead.
The past couple of readings have mentioned "mound agriculture". I didn't know what that was so I looked it up. I found that this was where plants (usually potatoes) would be planted over large mounds of grass and dirt that had been used as burial grounds. The bodies were thought to be good fertilizer. One of these mounds still exists in Tennessee (here is the Wikipedia article but its location is restricted and it is not available for tourists. Here is a picture of a mound like the ones used in mound agriculture.
Also, I found some pictures (Pic1 Pic2) of Tula, a big city that was called in the reading "the successor to Teotihuacan".
In the reading, it mentioned that the "Maya civilization largely abandoned the lowlands in the ninth and tenth centuries. [After this] new building in ceremonial centers ended. Inscriptions ceased. The royal cult disappeared. Evidence vanished of rich elites and professions specialized in learning and the arts." I was wondering, what did these "lowlands" look like and what happened afterwards. Why did the Mayans decide to "largely abandon" them?
I found out that they were located on the Yucatan Peninsula and they have an average elevation of less than 500 feet above sea level. There are many tropical rainforests here.
I found a great
site
which gives some evidence of why the Mayans decided to leave the lowlands. It is believed that the Lowlands could not sustain high populations. Another reason that they abandoned them was because the lowlands provided thin soils, seasonal drought, and an absence of permanent natural water sources. However, at the same time, these elements made the Mayans a great civilization. I found a
book cover
which pretty much, the title sums up what the lowlands did to the Mayan civilization. It was a time of "Collapse, Transition, and Transformation."
I was interested in learning more about Mayan dress. I was trying to picture the Mayans while the reading was describing them, and I wondered what they wore, and if/how that reflected the culture and interests of the Mayans, like keeping time and the spill of royal blood. This website has some helpful information on this. It says that the pattern of a diamond was common on Mayan clothing, and that the diamond represented the universe. They give an example by saying that a diamond is found many times on clothing at Yaxchilán, a site of Mayan ruins. I also learned from that site that huipíles are garments not only worn by women, but are used to adorn statues of saints. Here is a picture of huipíles. It was traditional for mothers to teach their daughters how to weave huipíles. That website also mentioned that most of the designs and patterns on Mayan clothing have meaning to them. They represent weather cycles, gods, saints and ancestors.
Maize cultivation provided many pro's for the Mayan civilization. However, I found some of the Maize diseases. Maize Dwarf Mosaic Virus, corn smut, and Stewart's wilt are the most common. Maize Dwarf Mosaic Virus is a pathogenic virus of the family Potyvirus. Symptoms include chlorotic spots on the leaves. Later, the plants may get red streaks through it. When all three of these diseases are established, it results in major crop loss which could potentially hurt the civilization. See this site for more information on the Maize Dwarf Mosaic Virus.
I was interested in looking more into the Mayan astronomy. The Mayans were pretty advanced in the field of astronomy, but I was curious how they knew so much since they didn't have high-powered telescopes or other instruments of the sort. When I went here, it had a good description of the whole idea behind the Venus thing. The Mayans were enthralled by Venus and believed it to be more important than the sun itself. It says that it would take 2922 days for Venus, the sun, the earth, and stars to all align, and the site has a good picture of that. I started looking for a picture of what a "zenial passage" would look like, however, I came across the Mayan calendar. The calendar is a large circle with many different turning parts.
The term "zenial passage" still hadn't really made itself clear to me, and I wasn't really sure what it was since it was mentioned in all the sites. On the Wikitionary, yes the Wikitionary, the definition was "The passing of the sun directly overhead such that no shadows are cast by a pole sticking straight up from the ground. These conditions only occur in locations between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn." So, this just means the sun is right overhead so there's no shadows, but this only happens where the Mayans were. While it came from crystalinks, I think its still an accurate definition. I was able to find, however, on this Wikipedia article on the Mayan calendar about Venus. It said that they were very skilled, and were able to predict the cycle of Venus. Much of this was found in the Dresden Codex. It even said that they could've tracked other planets such as Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter
I was first confused about Tula and what and where it was. This is a map of where Tula is in Mexico. The ruins there are sacred and it is predicted that there were about 60,000 people living there in that five square radius at their time of power (900-1100 AD). Here is a picture and a short description about the ruins at Tula. A question I had about Tula was specifically, what kind of experiments and advances in urbanization did Tula cause? Another question I had in general was, what part of the Americas is the book talking about when they said that they buried the dead extravagantly and about the large trade networks? Relating to my topic of Moche construction, it mentioned in the reading about adobe. I was wondering what this was exactly and adobe is a type of brick are made from natural building material such as sand, clay, water, and some type of fibrous material. It is then shaped and put in the sun to dry. Something else that caught my interest was the royal blood letting and I was wondering what the special ceremonies were like. This is a very information paper that I found which talks about royal blood letting in general and answers part of my question about the blood letting ceremonies.
i got really interested in tula. I did some research on it and found out today they are located 50 kilometers northwest of Mexico city. Also i learned about Tollan, it was the capital of the Toltec Empire. They founded about AD 750 right before the Teotihuacan empire crumbled or as it was crumbling.
I was wondering about an island that the reading mentioned on the Last page -> Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon, so I found a map of where it is.
www.visionofbrazil.com/Destination/images/DestinationMapImage.aspx?id=18
">Map of Marajo
Here is what it looks like(pictures) -->
www.condorjourneys-adventures.com/images/brazil_marajo2.jpg
">Picture1
www.condorjourneys-adventures.com/images/brazil_amazon2.jpg
">Picture2
I was trying to find out more about the urns, but couldn't really find anything. But then when I was looking around about Marajo Island, I found a New York Times article, which shows pictures and descriptions of the island. And it also has a picture of what they call a funerary urn. "Funerary urns (also called cinerary urns) were used by many civilizations. After death, a body would be cremated and the ashes were typically collected in an urn" --> Wikipedia
In the section of the reading about Maize, it mentions that burial mounds appeared between the "Dakotas" and the Red River. I did not know where either of these were, so I looked into this. To be honest, I suspected that the Dakotas were where we know North Dakota and South Dakota to be, but I wasn't sure. According to Wikipedia , "Dakotas" is what I thought it was. I also found a picture of the Red River.
The reading talked about how Mayan art, specifically how it featured sacrifice in it. I found this interesting because I had noticed this a little but when looking into my last post, but thought it was cool that it was now mentioned. This Picture
shows that there was a lot of sacrifice in this art. I had not realized just what a big part of mayan culture the sacrifice was until looking into this and and seeing this part of the reading.
I wanted to learn about Mayan math, since it is one of the main things that the Mayans are known for. They used a 20 digit system, called a vigesimal system. There are three symbols used that represent all the numbers: a dot means one, a bar means five and a shell means zero. The numbers are written horizontally, so the symbols are stacked on top of each other to make a number. Using their math, the Mayans could calculate things like the length of a year very accurately. Something that I found interesting was that the Mayans had a concept of zero, because most civilizations had no concept of zero at this time. Here and here are two good sites that explain Mayan math.
Sorry i was a little bit late but i was working on my lit epic and kinda got carried away.
While reading I got sort of interested in what the sacrifices were like in Mayan culture. One idea that the Mayans had come up with were that the gods had, in the beginning, sacrificed their own bodies so that man could have life. Another idea of the Maya was that they owed the gods life and blood so they would sacrifice people and people's blood to give back to the gods. Another type of sacrifice practiced by the Maya was that of Autosacrifice. This was the act of bloodletting. Bloodletting was giving blood from yourself to the gods by piercing body parts or cutting yourself.
One example of Autosacrifice in the Maya culture was that of the finding of a queens tomb in Waka. In her genital area was a ceremonial stingray spike which can be seen as she was autosacrificing using the blood from her genitals.
Here is the link...I couldn't get the correct format to work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_in_Maya_culture
In the reading, one of the places that was mentioned was Tula, a metropolis to the northwest of Teotihuacan. This is a website that contains a great deal of information on Tula, and also has many pictures of the ruins. There are still parts of step pyramids and pillars left standing in the ruins. There are also many carvings on the still-standing structures.
I was interested in learning about the Mayan writing as a whole. I found that their writing was acctually quite complex and was not read in the way one would think. Rather than being read across or up and down, the Mayan writing was acctually read in a paired column form. This meant that the first glyph would be in the top left corner, the next glyph to the right of the first. The third glyph however would be located underneath the first. The fourth is located under the second and the reader continues in a zig-zagging pattern before returning to the top of the next column and continuing on. The calender is similar to that of the eastern cultures, but instead of starting on 1, the first day of the month is refered to as 0. Their language was phonetic, with different syllabes represented, rather than letters. This site has a good chart of the Mayan symbols, used to represent sounds. The Mayan language also has what is called a glottal stop, where there is a constriction of the larynx before the vowel, giving it an explosive sound. The Mayans would then combine these smaller symbols, to form larger "words". In addition to these symbols, there were also larger glyphs that could represent commonly used words in the Mayan language, such as shield and snake. These words could be written many ways, and so different scribes would write the same word different ways.
I was looking up Mayan wars and found this website about a Mayan civil war. It was recently discovered because of hieroglyphs, unearthed by a hurricane last summer that blew away part of the dense rain forest covering a Mayan pyramid at a site known as Dos Pilas, in what is now Guatemala. The hieroglyphs say that Dos Pilas was then an outpost of the city Tikal, which was 75 miles away, and that the ruler of Dos Pilas was the brother of the ruler of Tikal. Then, people from the city-state Calakmul, which was 60 miles away, in what is now Mexico, invaded Dos Pilas and took the king prisoner, eventually restoring him to the throne but making him a pawn of Calakmul. The Dos Pilas puppet-king eventually turned on his own brother and invaded Tikal itself, killing his brother in the process. Tikal came back a few years later and overthew Calakmul.
In the reading it mentioned how important corn was but, I don't think that it stressed enough how important corn was. Some cultures(Zuni tribe and others) worshiped corn (golden corn from Wednesday here).
The Mayan also had a lot of corn so much in fact that it was used in pretty much every dish from chocolate to cold drinks (Scott Kenny made some for our 6th grade History project, it was rather good).
I was also wondering where the idea for the Mayans not cut themselves in peculiar places came from. And I'm honestly kind of nervous about looking it up.
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