Maya

Maya civilization did not rise or fall as a single event but developed across roughly three millennia. The Preclassic period, from about 2000 BCE, saw early farming villages grow into the first large ceremonial centers; the Classic period, roughly 250 to 900 CE, produced the monumental city-states most associated with the Maya today, Palenque among them, each an independent kingdom ruled by its own divine king and often at war with its neighbors rather than parts of one empire. Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston's The Maya traces how most southern lowland cities were abandoned within a few generations around 800 to 900 CE, a still-debated collapse likely driven by some combination of drought, warfare, overpopulation and the failure of divine kingship, while northern Yucatan cities continued into the Postclassic period.

Spanish conquest, completed only gradually between the 1520s and the fall of the last independent Maya kingdom, Nojpeten, in 1697, brought forced conversion and the deliberate destruction of Maya writing: Bishop Diego de Landa's 1562 burning of Maya books at Mani is the best documented such act, and only four Maya codices are known to survive today. Colonial and, later, national rule in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras subjected Maya communities to land seizure and discrimination that continued well into the twentieth century, including armed conflict in highland Guatemala's civil war. Maya identity nonetheless persists: around six million people across the region speak a Mayan language, Maya-led movements have pressed for land rights and recognition, and popular misreadings of the Maya calendar, such as the 2012 "end of the world" phenomenon, misrepresent a still-practiced culture as a closed ancient mystery.

The Popol Vuh, a K'iche' Maya narrative first set down in the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century and translated in full by Dennis Tedlock and by Allen Christenson, is the fullest surviving account of Maya cosmology: it tells of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who defeat the lords of the underworld Xibalba and avenge their father Hun Hunahpu, and of a creation reaching its final, successful attempt with humanity shaped from maize. Deities named across Maya tradition more broadly include Itzamna, a creator and sky god, Kukulkan, the feathered serpent later closely associated with the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, and Chaac, god of rain and lightning, still invoked in agricultural ceremony in some communities today.

The Maya kept three interlocking calendars: the two hundred sixty day Tzolkin, combining thirteen numbers with twenty named days for divination and ritual timing; the three hundred sixty five day Haab, an approximate solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus five unlucky days; and the Long Count, a linear day count from a mythological starting point that let Classic period inscriptions date events precisely across centuries, whose completion of its thirteenth baktun in December 2012 was popularly, and wrongly, read outside Maya communities as a prophesied apocalypse. Maya hieroglyphic writing, a mixed logographic and syllabic script, resisted full decipherment far longer than Egyptian or cuneiform; J. Eric S. Thompson's influential mid-twentieth-century work mistook much of it for purely calendrical and astronomical notation, and it was epigraphers working from the 1960s onward who showed that most surviving texts instead record royal history, in the words of the kings themselves.