20 CHAPTER 1 ANCIENT AMERICA
penance by bloodletting, the burning of incense, and
human sacrifi ce. Human sacrifi ce on a large scale
already existed in the late Classic period, marked by
growing political turbulence and strife among the
lowland Maya states, but it may have increased in
the Postclassic period under Toltec infl uence.
The Maya priests were obsessed with time, to
which they assigned an occult, or magical, con-
tent. They developed a calendar that was more
accurate than ours in making adjustments to the
exact length of the solar year. Maya theologians be-
lieved that time was a burden that the gods carried
on their backs. At the end of a certain period, one
god laid down his burden for another god to pick up
and continue on the journey of time. A given day or
year was lucky or unlucky depending on whether
the god-bearer at the time was a benevolent or a
malevolent god. Thus, the Maya calendars were
primarily divinatory in character—used to predict
conditions in a particular time period.
The Maya had two almanacs. One was a sa-
cred round of 260 days that corresponded to the
pattern of ceremonial life. This calendar was com-
posed of two intermeshing and recurrent cycles of
different length: one of thirteen days, recorded as
numbers, and the second of twenty days, recorded
as names. The name of the fourteenth day-name
began with one again. A second cycle was the solar
year of 365 days, divided into eighteen “months”
of twenty days each, plus a fi nal period of fi ve un-
lucky days during which all unnecessary activ-
ity was banned. Completion of these two cycles
coincided every fi fty-two years. Stelae bearing
hieroglyphic texts indicating the date and other
calendrical data—such as the state of the moon,
the position of the planet Venus, and so on—were
frequently erected at the end of the fi fty-two-year
cycle and at other intervals.
The Maya developed the science of mathemat-
ics further than any of their Middle American
neighbors. Their units were ones, fi ves, and twen-
ties, with ones designated by dots, fi ves by bars,
and positions for twenty and multiples of twenty.
Place-value numeration, based on a sign for zero,
was perhaps the greatest intellectual development
of Ancient America. In this system, the position of
a number determined its value, making it possible
for a limited quantity of symbols to express numb-
ers of any size. Its simplicity made it far superior to
the contemporary western European arithmetical
system, which employed the cumbersome Roman
numeration consisting of distinct symbols for each
higher unit. The Arabs brought their numeration
concept to Europe from India, the only other place
where it had been invented. Maya mathematics,
however, appears to have been applied chiefl y to
calendrical and astronomical calculation; no record
of Maya enumeration of people or objects exists.
Until recently, it was believed that Maya hi-
eroglyphic writing, like the mathematics, chiefl y
served religious and divinatory rather than utili-
tarian ends. We now have abundant evidence
that many of the glyphs carved on the monuments
are historical, recording milestones in the lives of
Maya rulers. In addition to the inscriptions that ap-
pear on stone monuments, lintels, stairways, and
other monumental remains, the Maya had great
numbers of sacred books or codices, of which only
three survive today. These books were painted on
folding screens of native paper made of bark. Con-
cerned above all with astronomy, divination, and
other related topics, they reveal that Maya astron-
omers made observations and calculations of truly
astounding complexity.
The Maya had no alphabet, strictly speaking;
the majority of their characters represent ideas or
objects rather than sounds. But Maya writing had
reached the stage of syllabic phonetics through
the use of rebus writing, in which the sound of a
word is represented by combining pictures or signs
of things whose spoken names resemble sounds in
the word to be formed. Thus, the Maya word for
drought,kintunyaabil, was written with four char-
acters, the signs of sun or day (kin), stone or 360-
day unit of time (tun), solar year (haab), and the
affi x il. In the 1950s a Russian scholar advanced a
theory that Maya writing was truly syllabic and so
could be deciphered by matching the most frequent
sound elements in modern Maya to the most fre-
quent signs in the ancient writing, using computers
to speed the process of decipherment. The existence
of purely phonetic glyphs in the Maya script is now
generally accepted by scholars, but they seem to be
relatively rare in the deciphered material.