The Maya civilisation developed in southern Mexico and Central America, in today's Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, over more than three thousand years. Known for its cities with monumental pyramids and palaces, its fully developed writing system, its calendars, astronomy and mathematics, it reached its height in the Classic period, from about 250 to 900 CE. Millions of Maya people live in the region today.
Origins
Maya settlements developed from around 2000 BCE, as people grew maize, beans and squash. In the Preclassic period, cities such as El Mirador, in northern Guatemala, built enormous pyramids by around 300 BCE. Lidar surveys, using lasers from aircraft, have revealed that the lowlands were densely settled, with causeways, terraces and reservoirs.
The Classic period
From around 250 CE, the Maya lowlands were home to dozens of city-states, ruled by divine kings, k'uhul ajaw. Great cities included Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque, Copán, Yaxchilán and Caracol, some with tens of thousands of people. Tikal and Calakmul were great rivals, building networks of allies and vassals. Cities had temple-pyramids, palaces, plazas and ballcourts, where a ritual ballgame was played with a rubber ball. Kings recorded their deeds on carved stone monuments, stelae. At Palenque, the tomb of King K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who ruled from 615 to 683, was discovered inside the Temple of the Inscriptions in 1952, with a jade mask.
Writing
The Maya developed the most complete writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, with logograms and syllabic signs, carved on monuments, painted on pottery and written in bark-paper books, codices. Spanish priests burned most codices; only four survive. The script was largely deciphered from the 1950s to the 1990s, by scholars such as Yuri Knorozov, Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Linda Schele, revealing the names and histories of kings.
Calendars and mathematics
The Maya used a mathematical system based on twenty, including a symbol for zero. They used several calendars: a 260-day ritual calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, which combined to form a 52-year cycle, and the Long Count, which recorded days from a starting date in 3114 BCE. The end of a Long Count cycle in December 2012 led to modern misconceptions about the end of the world. Maya astronomers tracked the movements of Venus and predicted eclipses.
Religion
The Maya worshipped gods of maize, rain, Chaak, the sun and others. Kings performed bloodletting rituals to communicate with gods and ancestors, and captives were sometimes sacrificed. The Popol Vuh, a book of the K'iche' Maya, written down in the sixteenth century, tells the story of creation and of the Hero Twins.
The Classic collapse
Between about 800 and 950 CE, many cities of the southern lowlands were abandoned. Causes may include prolonged droughts, shown in climate records, warfare, overpopulation, environmental degradation and political breakdown. In the north of the Yucatán, cities such as Chichén Itzá and later Mayapán flourished.
Spanish conquest
The Spanish conquered the Maya region over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the last independent Maya kingdom, Nojpetén, fell in 1697. Today, about six million or more Maya people speak about thirty Mayan languages.
On our maps
Our maps from 1 BCE onward show Mesoamerica, where the Maya lived beside powers such as Teotihuacan and the Toltec, and later the Aztec Empire.
In pictures
4 images · scroll →From the atlas
Maya civilization in time and on the map
Maya civilization ran from 2000 BCE to 1521. Borders of Time has 28 world maps from those years: 2000 BCE, 1500 BCE, 1000 BCE, 700 BCE, 500 BCE, 400 BCE, 323 BCE, 300 BCE, 200 BCE, 100 BCE, 1 BCE, 100 CE, 200 CE, 300 CE, 400 CE, 500 CE, 600 CE, 700 CE, 800 CE, 900 CE, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1279, 1300, 1400, 1492 and 1500.
Living in those years, among others on this site: Laozi (604–500 BCE), Thales of Miletus (650–548 BCE), Chandragupta II (400–500 CE), Democritus (460–360 BCE), Galen (200–300 CE), Homer (900–800 BCE), Lalibela (1200–1300), Nagarjuna (150–250 CE), Sappho (650–550 BCE) and Al-Khwarizmi (750–846 CE).
Other events of the same years: Battle of Megiddo (15th century BCE) (1457 BCE), Battle of the Ten Kings (1400 BCE), Battle of Kadesh (1274 BCE), Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–1150 BCE), Battle of Muye (1046 BCE), Battle of Qarqar (853 BCE), Siege of Lachish (701 BCE), Assyrian conquest of Egypt (677–663 BCE), Fall of Nineveh (612 BCE) and Babylonian captivity (597–538 BCE).
Quick answers
- What is Maya civilization?
- Mesoamerican former civilization.
- When did Maya civilization begin?
- It dates from 2000 BCE to 1521.