Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica, the cultural region running from central Mexico into Guatemala and Belize, was defined not by political unity but by a shared religious and intellectual culture that persisted across millennia and many peoples, from the Olmec through the Maya to the Aztec. Its hallmarks were remarkable: a sophisticated calendar system, combining a 260-day ritual cycle with the 365-day solar year in a repeating "Calendar Round," and among the Maya the Long Count that tracked vast spans of time; hieroglyphic writing (fully developed among the Maya); monumental pyramid-temples; the ritual ballgame with its cosmic symbolism of the movement of sun and stars and its associations with sacrifice; and a pervasive theology of blood and sacrifice, including human sacrifice, understood as necessary to sustain the gods and keep the sun in motion and the cosmos in being.

Widely shared deities crossed the region under different names: the feathered serpent (Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs, Kukulkan to the Maya), the rain god (Tlaloc, Chaac), and the maize god. The cosmos was structured in layered heavens and underworlds (Mictlan, Xibalba), and time itself was cyclical, subject to periodic destruction and renewal. Though the Spanish conquest and forced conversion shattered the public religion, much survived in transformed, syncretic form in the living traditions of indigenous Mesoamerica.

The Maya wrote books, and almost none of them survive. Spanish clergy destroyed them systematically as idolatrous, most notoriously at Mani in Yucatan in 1562, and the climate destroyed most of the rest. Three bark-paper codices have been accepted for a long time, and a fourth was disputed for decades before analysis largely settled in its favour. That is the entire surviving library of a literate civilisation.

The man who directed the burning at Mani, Diego de Landa, also wrote the account that later made decipherment possible. His attempt to record the script as an alphabet was wrong about how it worked but preserved sound values, and it became the key that twentieth-century scholars turned. Yuri Knorozov argued in the 1950s that the script was partly phonetic, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed that the inscriptions recorded the reigns of actual rulers rather than only astronomy and ritual. Between them they turned the monuments into history.

Alongside the codices sit texts written in indigenous languages using the Latin alphabet after the conquest, of which the Popol Vuh is the most important, and Spanish accounts of Nahua religion compiled with indigenous informants.

Every one of those sources was produced under colonial conditions, by people with reason to shape what they said. The inscriptions carved before contact are the only body of evidence in the region that is not, and that is why their decipherment mattered so much.