The Maya, famous for their calendar, founded one of the most famous civilizations of pre-Columbian America. Descendants of the ancient Maya, some of whom still speak languages belonging to the Mayan language family, live in the territory of modern El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Mexico.
The earliest traces left by the Mayan culture date back to the second millennium BC. At this time, the tribes of hunters and gatherers gradually began to settle across the territory, including the western departments of El Salvador and Honduras, almost all of Guatemala and part of the states of Mexico. In one of the oldest Mayan settlements discovered on the territory of modern Belize, people supposedly lived from two thousand years BC to the first millennium AD.
The most ancient Maya texts discovered are dated to the seven hundredth year BC. The language of these inscriptions belongs to the same branch of the Mayan language family as the modern Chorty, the majority of whose speakers live in Guatemala. The first attempts to decipher Maya texts date back to the beginning of the 19th century, although significant progress in this appeared only in the middle of the 20th century. Mayan characters could convey both a single syllable and a whole concept. In addition, different images were used to denote the same syllable, which did not facilitate the work of the researchers.
By the seven hundredth year BC, the emergence of settlements on the site of the city of Tikal in the territory of modern Guatemala belongs. From the fifth to the ninth century AD, this city became one of the centers of Mayan culture. The inscriptions found in Tikal and the results of archaeological excavations allowed researchers to get an idea of the Mayan history of the heyday of this civilization. Mayan settlements were city-states connected by a network of roads. Trade was conducted between individual cities, although wars between them were not uncommon. In a number of such cities, the power of the supreme ruler was inherited, the same rulers performed the functions of military leaders.
The pantheon of this people consisted of a large number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic deities who performed various functions; geographical objects and time units had their patrons. To interact with these forces, the Mayan priests developed a complex system of rituals based on a cycle of two hundred and sixty days.
IX-X centuries AD are considered the end of the Mayan civilization. By the 10th century, Tikal had already been abandoned; at the beginning of the 11th century, as a result of the struggle for power between representatives of warring aristocratic groups, another Mayan cultural center, Chichen Itza, was destroyed. The last of the major Mayan cities was Mayapan, founded in the 13th century. A number of researchers are trying to explain the decline of the Mayan civilization by climate change. One of the last Mayan cities was Tayasal, captured by the Spaniards in the 17th century. Today, in its place is the administrative center of one of the departments of Guatemala.
