Comprehension STOP Use your dictionary to find out the meaning of the bold words below.
! The Maya
The Maya were a great civilisation who lived for three thousand years from around 2,000 BC. They resided in the Yucatán area of Central America, which covers Guatemala, Belize and parts of Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras.
Mayan cities
The Maya never formed an empire. Their society was made up of separate large cities located in the rainforest. Each city was surrounded by smaller cities, villages and farms and had its own ruler. The cities were connected by sturdy roads through the jungle, which facilitated trade. However, the cities often fought one another. The Maya were very skilled architects. In each city, they built homes, palaces, temples and pyramids to worship their gods, using tools made from stone, wood or shells.
Religion
Religion was very important to the Maya. Everything they did revolved around pleasing their many gods. They believed that the gods watched over them and that demons from the underworld might escape and attack them if they did not worship in the right way. They held religious ceremonies in which priests wore masks and costumes to keep the gods happy and to scare away the demons. They also practised human sacrifice.
Culture
The Maya were skilled potters, weavers, artists, mathematicians and astronomers. They invented musical instruments, sports, chocolate and a 360-day calendar similar to the one we use today. They developed a sophisticated written language, made up of around 800 pictures and symbols. They used this glyph system to carve messages into stone and to write hundreds of books called codices, which contained information about history, medicine, astronomy and their religion. Unfortunately, the Spanish burned all but four of these books after they arrived in 1519 AD.
Decline of the Maya
Around 900 AD, the Maya began to abandon their main cultural centres of Palanque, Tikal and Copán. Historians are unsure why this happened, but suggest that war, hunger, disease, invasion by another civilisation or natural disasters might have played a part. Some Mayan centres continued up until the Spanish arrived.
The Maya were a historically important civilisation, who were extremely advanced for their time. Although we are unsure what caused their culture to decline, their heritage lives on in their descendants in Guatemala and some of its surrounding countries, and in the historians working to learn more about this great civilisation.
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