This page is all on the Maya. In class I did a project. I will show you my project, I wrote a every thing on this page. All of it is based on what I've learned. Most of it is writing, but my pizza box. I made a little city inside it, called Tulmu
The Maya
A Mayan Family lived all together. The men hunted and farmed. The women would weave and cook.
The Mayans had a class of people. At the top of the list were the nobles with the king. Next, came the priests. The commoners were next. Most commoners were farmers. But at the very bottom were the slaves.
Mayan people were mostly farmers. Their main food was corn, and fruit and vegetables. The Maya used milpa, also know as slash and burn, as a farming technique. That means the land will only stay fertile for a few years. They also used a technique called terracing. They would build walls to level the mountains. Other plants were grown for gum, medicines and dyes for clothing. Mayans raised dogs, ducks and turkeys for food. They raised bees for honey. They hunted for rabbits, birds, armadillos and fish.
Religion was very important to the Mayans. They worshipped everything in nature and explained why things happened because of the gods. Most of the Maya people were farmers, which made the nature gods important. Chac was the rain god. He would bring rain to their people. Itamna was the god of day and night. The Mayas thought of him as their first priest and inventor of writing and also as a god of medicine. Yum Kaax was god of corn and most important to the farmers. Il Chel was a rainbow goddess. She was one of the few gods seen as a woman. She was associated with healing, child birth and foretelling. When a sacrifice took place, it was often just food but sometimes people were also killed The Maya did not sacrifice their own people; they sacrificed hostages from war.
The priests and calendar decided when important festivals should be. One is the Ball Game and the other is the Day of the Dead.
The Olmecs had invented the first team sport ever over 3000 years ago. The Mayans and most of the tribes in Mexico played the ball game. The ball was bouncy but hard enough to injure a player badly. There are about 600 ball courts all over Mexico. They were made with two stone walls on a slant with stone hoops in the middle of the wall. The ball was not allowed to hit the player's hand or ground. Points were scored by hitting the ball through the hoops. It is also believed that the balls scored by hitting the marks on the wall. The game was the battle of life versus death in the Mayan religion. The losing captain of the game was chosen to be sacrificed to the gods. You can watch a ball game at http://www.ballgame.org.
Many Mayan rituals called the dead from the roots of the underworld tree. The Maya talked to the dead for advice on days called Ahau days of the Mayan calendar. Today in Mexico an Ahau day is All Souls' Day in November. This combines the Mayan and Catholic religions. The Maya believed that souls became flowers or butterflies. Marigolds are the same symbol today.
-The Maya lived in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. This is the Yucatan Peninsula.
-The Maya civilization began in 1500 BCE.
-In 900 CE, the Maya left many of their cities. No one knows why. Some theories are: overpopulation, hunger, not enough rain, earthquakes, sickness and war.
-There are many great ruins still here today. The most famous is Chichen Itza. The tallest temple is in Coba
-A new discovery is that the ruins of cities were connected by raised roads now hidden by the jungle. The roads were covered in crushed shells to shine in the moonlight.
-The Maya did not have metal tools.
-For decoration they used copper, gold, silver, jade, shells and feathers.
-The Maya used cacao beans and bells as money.
-The Maya put jewels in their teeth to show what level in society they were. Before they had this done, they got drunk so they would not feel it being done.
-The Mayan year has 365 days. The calendar was hard to understand but it was the most accurate one until the one we use today!
-The Maya wrote using hieroglyphs on stone and even paper made form the maguay plant.
-The language of the Maya is called Mayan or Yucatec. 350, 000 people speak it today.
Mayan writing has two types of symbols. One is called a logograph. This is like our numbers. The other is a phonem which means it is sound based. Mayan has 3000 logographs. They are not all numbers. There are about 70 - 150 phonems which represent different syllables. Many syllable sounds have more than one phonem or symbol. The Mayan did not have D, F, G, J, R. or V sounds in their language.
To make a word, you put the syllables for a word into one glyph block. For words with just one to three syllables, you can chose the big symbols. If it has more than three, then you have to pick the small symbols.
Mayans wrote on stone and paper. To read a sentence, you have to read two columns at a time left to right.
Since there are so many sumbols for the same sounds, there are many different ways to write the same word. Not only that, they had 100 glyphs for places and gods.
You can go to http://halfmoon.org/names.html to learn how to write your name in Mayan. All girls' names start with the NA sound and the lady symbol.
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By the way, the letter X sounds like SH.
This is my pizza box. The maya cityinside of it is Tulum. Here are some facts about Tulum.
- Tulum is one of the few maya citys that has a wall aroud it.
- The god of tulum ist the god of the sea and bees.
- Besides it beautful view Tulum is nothing comped to the other Maya citys.
