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Learn The Maya Civilization

Rival city-states, a fully readable script and a people who never disappeared.

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The Maya civilization developed in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras and El Salvador over more than two thousand years. It was never a single empire but a network of rival kingdoms, such as Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque and Copán, which flourished in the Classic period from about 250 to 900 CE. Maya scribes wrote in a logosyllabic script that scholars can now read in large part, recording royal histories and calendars. Learnr builds short lessons on the cities, writing, religion and the living Maya peoples of today.

How to learn The Maya Civilization, step by step

Learn the three periods and their sites. Pair each period with places: Preclassic El Mirador, Classic Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque and Copán, and Postclassic Chichen Itza and Mayapán. Treat period boundaries as approximate, since they vary by region and scholars revise them as new sites are dated.
Understand how the script works. Maya writing mixes logograms for whole words with syllable signs. Learn how Yuri Knorozov's phonetic work and Tatiana Proskouriakoff's insight that inscriptions record real rulers' lives cracked it open. Michael Coe's Breaking the Maya Code tells the story well.
Practice reading dates and numbers. Maya numbers use dots for one, bars for five and a shell sign for zero, counted in base twenty. Learn the Long Count and the 260-day and 365-day cycles, then see why the end of a cycle in 2012 never predicted the end of the world.
Follow one dynasty in detail. Study Palenque under K'inich Janaab Pakal or the long war between Tikal and Calakmul. Martin and Grube's Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens turns inscriptions into readable dynastic histories that show how alliances, captures and accessions were recorded.
Weigh the collapse explanations. Many southern lowland cities were abandoned between about 800 and 1000 CE. Compare evidence for drought, endemic warfare, environmental strain and loss of faith in kings, and note that northern cities like Chichen Itza grew during the same era.
Keep sites and rulers sorted with short reviews. Maya history has many sites and rulers with unfamiliar names. A few minutes of Learnr review each day, kept going with a streak, makes the map of kingdoms and their rivalries easy to recall.

What you'll learn

Place the Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods on a timeline with key sites
Explain how Maya hieroglyphic writing works and how it was deciphered
Read a basic Long Count date and explain the 2012 misconception
Describe the rivalry between Tikal and Calakmul and Classic Maya kingship
Evaluate the debated causes of the southern lowland collapse

What's inside your The Maya Civilization course

A sample path Learnr builds for The Maya Civilization. Your real course adapts to your goal and level.

1. Land, farming and the Preclassic Maya
2. Classic kingdoms and divine kings
3. Writing, numbers and calendars
4. Religion, the ballgame and the Popol Vuh
5. The Classic collapse and the Postclassic north
6. Spanish conquest and the Maya today

How long does it take to learn The Maya Civilization?

Plan on about 4 to 7 weeks at 3 hours a week for a solid overview. Learning to read glyphs yourself is a longer hobby, often several months of steady practice with workbooks and sign lists.

What you need before you start

None. A map of Mesoamerica helps you keep cities straight, and the course explains the vigesimal number system from the beginning.

Common mistakes to avoid

Saying the Maya mysteriously vanished. Classic southern cities declined, but millions of Maya people live in the region today and speak around thirty Mayan languages.
Calling the Maya an empire. They were independent kingdoms that sometimes formed alliances under powerful cities but never united into one state.
Mixing up the Maya, Aztecs and Inca. They lived in different regions and eras, spoke unrelated languages and had very different political systems.

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The Maya Civilization questions, answered

Can scholars read Maya hieroglyphs?

Yes, in large part. Since the decipherment breakthroughs of the twentieth century, specialists can read most inscriptions, though some signs and passages remain uncertain.

What is the Popol Vuh?

A K'iche' Maya book of creation stories, the Hero Twins and royal genealogies, written in the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century and copied by the friar Francisco Ximénez around 1700. Dennis Tedlock's translation is widely read.

When did the Spanish conquer the Maya?

Conquest was slow and uneven, lasting from the 1520s through much of the century. The Itza kingdom at Nojpetén, in what is now Guatemala, held out until 1697.