In 2012 the whole world was waiting for the end of the world "according to the Mayan calendar." The fateful year passed, but the end of the world did not happen. The "Mayan prophecy" turned out to be a myth - the most popular in a series of misconceptions about the ancient Indian people. But there are others …
Maya disappeared long before Europeans
The centers of the classical Maya, such as Tikal, Copan, Palenque, were really abandoned in the X century, but in the north, on the Yucatan Peninsula, their culture existed for a long time. And other areas of the Maya, too, were by no means deserted. So the Maya still managed to fight the invaders from overseas. And Christopher Columbus himself was the first to meet with them! In the 40s of XV! century Yucatan was conquered, in 1697 the last independent state fell - Tayasal, and the Maya were forgotten. The second myth was born.
America has been inhabited for centuries by savages
There were no highly developed indigenous civilizations in the New World, they say, no, there weren't and cannot be. In 1832, the ruins of Palenque were explored by Jean Frederic de Waldeck. Returning to Paris, he published a book on Mayan antiquities. She was popular with artists, but went unnoticed by archaeologists. Waldeck was a romantic, not a scientist - he believed that the builders of Indian cities were Atlanteans or Egyptians, and accordingly "corrected" the drawings. Therefore, despite their non-artistic merit, they are of no scientific value.
Then the American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and the English artist Frederick Catherwood set out in search of ancient cities. The expedition lasted from 1839 to 1841. In 1842, Stephens' book “Traveling Impressions from a Trip to Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan” was published in New York, and two years later his partner Catherwood published his own work. Stephens' account was detailed and circumstantial, and Catherwood's masterfully executed drawings reproduced the monuments of ancient cities with an accuracy surpassing photography. They have not lost their documentary significance even now: after all, much that was then captured was overgrown or destroyed in subsequent years.
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The world was faced with the fact: in America, the "land of savages", they found traces of a mighty ancient civilization. A little later, the Frenchman Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg found the surviving Mayan manuscripts in the archives: a part of the Madrid Codex, the Maya-Quiche epic Popol Vuh, recorded the only surviving Mayan play Rabimal-Achi. However, scientists did not believe for a long time that the cities in the selva were built by the Indians.
Maya cities were not built by Maya
In the XVI century. "Defender of the Indians" Bartolomé de Las Casas hypothesized that the Indians are the descendants of the missing "ten tribes of Israel" who moved to the New World. In the XIX century. the idea was developed by the Mormons. In their opinion, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (also known as the Mayan Kukulcan) is Jesus Christ.
Another hypothesis about the origin of the Maya - "Atlantic", was first expressed back in the XV! century. When the ruins of Mayan cities were discovered in the 19th century, Atlantis was remembered again, and the sunken mainland was proclaimed the common cultural center of the Old and New Worlds, the "cauldron" of all high civilizations of antiquity. The first "Atlantologist" is considered the American Ignatius Donnelly, who in 1882 published the book "Atlantis - Antediluvian World". In Russia, N. F. Zhirov was his follower.
The version about the Egyptian origin of the Maya is relatively late. It was first put forward by Waldeck, one of the first "discoverers" of ancient cities. But the Atlanteans were not forgotten either. The civilization was brought to the Nile Valley by colonists from the New World, who were trained by … immigrants from Atlantis - the Frenchman O. Le Plongeon believed. And the Englishman E. Smith put forward a "geolithic" theory, according to which all high cultures originate from Egypt.
Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl 1969-1970 crossed the Atlantic in the papyrus boat Ra. He managed to demonstrate that the sailing of the Egyptians to America is technically possible. But were they actually carried out?
The theory refutes the time factor. The heyday of Ancient Egypt - III millennium BC, Mayan civilization - the turn of our era. The Greeks were also "sent" to the New World - from Odysseus to the warriors of Alexander the Great - Phoenicians, Asians, Africans, Romans … The latter, by the way, did visit Mexico - during excavations they found several ancient Roman gizmos. However, it is unlikely that sailors from Rome got there on their own, and it is doubly doubtful that they were the teachers of the ancient Maya. There are similar cultural features on both sides of the ocean, but they are caused not by pre-Columbian connections, but by the general laws of the development of civilization.
Research, meanwhile, continued. The excavation data showed that the ancient cities were built by the Maya themselves. But what were they called in reality (well-known names are conditional)? Who were you running? Why did the inhabitants abandon them? One could only guess about this …
Abandoned cities
One of the authors of this myth was the Mayanist Silvanus Morley, and the popularizer was Kurt Walter Keram. He paints an epic picture of resettlement:
“A whole people, consisting mainly of city dwellers, suddenly left their sturdy and strong homes, said goodbye to the streets, squares, temples and palaces and moved to the far wild north. None of these settlers ever returned to their old place. In order to visualize the monstrous and completely incomprehensible nature of this incident, let us imagine, for example, that the French people … suddenly, unexpectedly, would move to Morocco. Having barely arrived at the place, they would have started building what they had just left to their fate - temples and cities."
The Mayan cities of the classical era did indeed perish - but not all of a sudden and not all at once. The agony took about a century. The cause of the catastrophe was called: land depletion, epidemics, famine, foreign invasion, uprising … This issue has not yet been resolved.
Classless society
While some mourned the untimely destruction of cities, others argued that the Maya … did not have them. The ruins discovered by archaeologists are ritual centers where priests lived, and people came only to perform rituals. If there are no cities, there are no merchants, no artisans, no warriors, no kings! Only priests and peasants. Some went even further, arguing that the priestly posts were also elective, held only for a short period, after serving which, the "people's choices" returned to work on earth. The well-known Mayanist Eric Thompson adhered to similar views (though not so radical).
Time obsession
Thompson and his followers ascribed to the Maya a kind of “philosophy of the time and insisted that steles and altars were erected only to indicate its course. Thompson believed: no text praises a ruler or a conquest - their content only notes philosophical ideas.
This view was caused by the fact that for a hundred years, of all the Mayan hieroglyphs, only calendar symbols were deciphered. One of the codebreakers was Eric Thompson himself. Desperate to understand the texts, he proclaimed that they contain nothing but dates.
The more scientists studied the Maya, the more questions, false interpretations and hypotheses arose. The surviving codes, inscriptions on steles and household items could answer many questions - but they were silent.
Who deciphered the Mayan hieroglyphs?
The first attempts at deciphering were made after the work "Report on the affairs in the Yucatan" by the brother of Diego de Landa was discovered. Landa cited in the manuscript the so-called "alphabet" - 27 Mayan characters, which, in his opinion, correspond to the Spanish letters. He provided the "alphabet" with examples, but they did not help the researchers, but, on the contrary, confused them. The two-letter word "le" ("snare") was written in four hieroglyphs, and the word "cha" ("water") - in three.
Several generations of codebreakers fought over the "Landa alphabet". Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov understood that there was a misunderstanding between the Mayan scribe and the monk.
Landa, dictating, called each letter by name, and then - the whole word. The Indian, just in case, wrote down everything he said. The result was a nonsense that was confusing. After reading the examples "according to Landa's method," the scientist was convinced that the guess was correct.
Knorozov proved that the signs of the "alphabet" do not convey letters, but their names - vowels and syllables, and substantiated the general principles of deciphering the Maya writing. His work served as the basis for further research. However, it took decades for the hieroglyphs to “speak.
So it would be more correct to say that Knorozov did not “decipher”, but determined the approaches, laid the foundations for deciphering.
Currently, more than two-thirds of the hieroglyphs have been deciphered. The course of historical events is being restored, the names of the cities are being returned, the established ideas are crumbling.
The "enlightened theocracy" turned out to be as much a utopia as the "classless society", ruled by priests elected from the peasants. The priestly estate … did not exist or played an insignificant role, and the power of the king was hereditary. The idea of the peacefulness of the Maya, their obsession with the "passage of time" and the otherworldly turned out to be a myth. The stone chronicle has preserved information about victorious campaigns, coups, struggles and alliances with foreigners.
Maya ceased to be a "mysterious", "unique", "unknowable" people. Some of the myths generated by the lack of information have become a thing of the past. Some remained - the popularization of scientific achievements lagged behind discoveries for decades. The myth about the Atlanteans and other transatlantic "professors", about the abandoned cities, some others associated with the "unknowable" and "mystical" turned out to be tenacious. These myths are loved by journalists. But rewriting the same thing over and over again is boring. Fresher myths were needed. It didn't take long. Appeared …
Crystal skull
The most famous skull is "Mitchell Hedges", or the Skull of Destiny. They say that it was discovered in 1927 by the daughter of the archaeologist F. A. Mitchell-Hedges Anna during the excavation of the Mayan city of Lubaantuna. The skull was crafted from a single crystal crystal, the lower jaw was attached separately, the eye sockets glowed and reflected light rays thanks to a system of channels and prisms in the back. In 1964, Anna handed the artifact to art critic Frank Dorland, who handed it over to Hewlett-Packard for study, but the experts did not understand how it was made. When and for what it is also not clear.
It is believed that the skull could serve for the accumulation and transmission of information, could be a tool for fortune telling, a kind of magnifying glass, used for medicinal purposes and even fulfill wishes. There is also a "technical" hypothesis - a prism carved into the back of the artifact reminds some … the working body of a laser device!
Other crystal skulls were also found. In the 19th century, a Parisian and a skull from the British Museum appeared, many crystal artifacts appeared in the troubled nineties, recently the "Himmler skull" was discovered. At the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, crystal skulls became fashionable. Many publications were dedicated to them, and in 2008 the film "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was shot.
In fact, the skulls are fake. The Skull of Destiny was not found in the excavation, but was acquired by Mitchell-Hedges at an auction. The early skulls are the fruit of the work of the French adventurer Eugene Boban. The sinister artifacts corresponded to the European idea of the Indians with their bloody rites and "mystical rituals", which was used by the swindlers.
Astronaut Pakal
In 1952, Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz discovered a tomb with a sarcophagus in the pyramid of the Temple of the Inscriptions. The deceased was distinguished by an unusually large height for the Indians -173 cm. Soon there was a version that he was a European who crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus and became the deified ruler of Palenque.
In 1968, science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev put forward a more extravagant hypothesis. In his opinion, … an alien is buried in Palenque. The relief on the lid of the sarcophagus depicts an astronaut piloting a spaceship. The burial mask and sculptures found in the crypt depicted people of strange appearance - with the bridge of the nose above the eyebrows.
This hypothesis was made famous by the Swiss Erich von Daniken in the bestseller "Memories of the Future". Few did not read in childhood the description of the "alien from Palenque" - reprints from von Daniken's book were placed in many publications. Attached to the write-off were an image of the relief and a drawing of the "rocket" with explanatory inscriptions.
On the surface, the evidence was compelling. However … the science fiction writers slightly "corrected" the drawing: they smeared some details that were not connected with a solid line, and, in order to give the "astronaut" a more natural pose, they placed the entire image in the wrong, transverse position, while the slab must be viewed longitudinally.
The inscriptions on it could tell about who was buried in the sarcophagus, but when reading them, scientists made mistakes. American Mayanists David Kelly and Merle Green Robertson stated that the deceased was an 80-year old man named Pacal (Shield) who ruled Palenque from 615 to 683 AD. married a twelve-year-old teenager: first - to his mother, then - to his own sister, was a dwarf and suffered from leg deformities due to incestuous marriages. The interpretation of the inscription, made by Alberto Ruz himself, turned out to be just as inaccurate, Palenque managed to read hieroglyphic texts only at the turn of the XX - XXI centuries. It turned out that the Mayan ruler is buried in the Temple of the Inscriptions - not an alien. His name was indeed Pacal, but at the age of 12 he did not marry his mother, but was enthroned by her. The inscription on the sarcophagus is a list of the king's ancestors. Pa-kal's biography was restored on the basis of other texts. The sarcophagus of Pa-kal was called "The Stone Ark of the Corn God", and the temple itself - Bolon Yet Naah - "The Hall of Nine Accomplishments."
Concluding the story about the myths associated with the Maya, one cannot fail to mention the most important one - the myth of the end of the world. It is clear that this is a commercial project. However, does it have a historical, scientific basis?
According to the famous American Mayanist Michael Ko, the religions of the peoples of Mesoamerica, including the Maya, are characterized by the idea of repeating cycles of creation and destruction. The length of each was 13 Bak-tuns - a little less than 5200 years - and Armageddon was supposed to come on the last day of the thirteenth Baktun, when the next great cycle will end according to the “long count” calendar.
There is also a "prophecy" left by the Maya themselves. In 1996, Mayan writing specialist David Stewart and his colleague Stephen Houston discovered an inscription stele from the Tortuguero site. After decryption, it turned out:
“The thirteenth four hundredth anniversary will end on the 4th of Ahab on the 3rd of the month of Kankin. On that day, Bolon Yokte, the god of change, will descend on (from / from?) Black? and will do ??
This obscure text is the famous prophecy about the end of the world. However, its translation is inaccurate, since some of the hieroglyphs are damaged. In addition, this is part of another, larger inscription about the consecration of the building.
We learned about the "prophecy" and the "end of the world" not from scientific works, but from esoteric books such as "The Mayan Factor" by Jose Arguelles, "Mayan Cosmogenesis: 2012" by John Jenkins and others. Later, fantastic thrillers appeared, as well as disaster films.
In modern myth, Maya and Aztec representations are mixed. The Aztecs did have legends about the apocalypse. According to their beliefs, we are living in the Fifth Age, which, like the four before it, must end in disaster. But they did not give exact dates. The Maya had the so-called Long Count. The initial day of the cycle is August 6/11/12, 3113/14 BC, and the final day is December 21/23, 2012. However, the Maya did not expect the "end of the world", since in 4772 they were going to celebrate the anniversary of the coronation of King Pakal.
Source: “Interesting newspaper. The world of the unknown T. Plikhnevich