History of the discovery of the Maya civilization
It is July 31, 1502. Christopher Columbus is on his fourth voyage to the "Indies" and is looking for a passage to the Indian sea. The ships are stopped in front of the island of Guanagua, in the Gulf of Honduras, when a large canoe approaches. There are about forty people on board as well as a number of beautiful goods. They are such rich and elaborate goods that Columbus senses the existence of an evolved civilization but instead of following the merchant to the coasts of Yucatan and discovering the world of the Maya, he decides to continue sailing southwards, thus losing the opportunity for a great discovery.
In 1511 a Spanish ship sailing to Cuba ends up on the rocks of Jamaica and sinks. Some castaways end up on a beach in the Yucatan, in a place that today is called Campeche Bay, in front of the island of Cozumal, in the middle of Mayan territory, where they are captured and killed. Only two are spared: Geronimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo the Sailor (later called Gonzalo Guerriero). The former becomes a slave to the Mayan leader of Tulum while the latter integrates into another tribe.
After 8 years Hernan Cortes lands with his ships on the Yucatan coast, near today's city of Campeche, and learns of the existence of the two Spanish men. Cortes offers the Maya a ransom for their release which is accepted. Geronimo de Aguilar is released and returns to the Spaniards; Gonzalo Guerriero refuses and stays in his village. By now he feels like a Maya.
The ships of Cortes leave the Mayan territories and head north towards the lands of the Aztecs where the great clash between the two worlds will take place, but they leave the Mayans a terrible gift: smallpox that soon spreads and wreaks havoc.
Eight years later, when the Emperor Montezuma is now dead and the Aztec empire annihilated, the Spaniards return to the lands of the Maya to bring war and destruction. The Maya defend themselves, they win many battles, but others lose and one after another the Mayan cities fall. In 1546 almost all of the Yucatan was in the hands of the Spaniards and 150 years later (in 1696) the last Mayan city also fell, hidden in the Petan forest, Peten Itza, ruled by a prince who resided in a palace on an island. in the middle of a lake. The thread of the Mayan civilization is broken. The survivors disperse among the mountains and the forests, the missionaries burn all the books "of the devil", the Conquistadores destroy everything they can destroy, the forest covers 3000 years of history.
In the following centuries, the Mayan world, which has been completely forgotten, is remembered by brief notes from adventurers, priests, military and government officials who leave after stumbling upon some ruin. And the misunderstanding begins to structure itself.
In 1786 the captain Antonio del Rio sent to Palenque by Charles III of Spain stated that the natives had had contact with European populations and had learned their arts in exchange for hospitality. At that time it was inconceivable that there were peoples who evolved on their own outside the Old World.
Count Frederic Maximilian de Waldeck - the last adventurer and great artist - also reached the same conclusions, who creates and publishes splendid illustrations of the Mayan ruins where, however, you can see glyphs in which elephants and cuneiform characters appear, things completely unrelated to the Mayan world.
Waldeck's drawings arouse curiosity in an American writer John Stephens and an English draftsman Frederck Catherwood. The two after years of exploration in the Yucatan forests discover, describe, draw and publish a very rich documentation that reveals this great civilization to the world
We are in the mid-nineteenth century and the Maya are ready to be delivered to the archaeologists who begin to study them and to reconstruct the phases of their history:
- Pre - Classic period, from about 2000 BC to 200 AD
- Classic period, from the year 200 to 800
- Post - Classic period, from the year 800 to the arrival of the Spaniards
Civil life in Central America is essentially the fruit of corn, cultivated, as archaeologists indicate, at least since 2500 BC The Mayan civilization has its roots in a period of maturation called "formative", during which farmers lived in permanent villages. It was then that pottery was invented and new forms of social stratification were experimented, especially evident in the burials, from which the eminent role of priests emerges. The first pyramids were also built in Peten and Yucatan.
In the subsequent Classical period, no fewer than 500 Mayan centers flourished. The earliest date we have appears on a stele carved in Tikal: it is 292 of our era. Archaeologists distinguish between an early classical period (about 200-625 AD), characterized by the construction of imposing architectural structures and large, richly carved stone steles, often with important hieroglyphic inscriptions; a period called "flowering" (625-800 AD), during which architecture, astronomy, sculpture, painting, writing took on the most monumental aspects, and a "period of ruin" (800-925 AD), when one after another the ceremonial centers of Peten and Yucatan suffered the effects of the great collapse of the Mayan civilization.
The sudden "collapse" at the end of the Classical period is an event not yet fully explained. Wars between the various cities, epidemics, natural disasters, social crisis, environmental collapse and other causes have been hypothesized, but none would explain the sudden abandonment of the great Mayan centers. The recent discovery by three American researchers seems, however, to finally convince. The three researchers chemically tested the soil of Lake Chichancanab, in the center of the Yucatan peninsula. The results indicate that between 800 and 1000 AD the areas inhabited by the Maya suffered a period of prolonged drought. Tests show that starting from the year 800, the previously humid climate began to become drier, to the point of causing the lake to dry up. They are data that, if confirmed for the entire great territory of the former Mayan empire, would explain the reason for their decline.
The Mayan economy, in fact, was based almost solely on agriculture. Thanks to an evolved system of canals for the transport of water and to special terraced crops, the Maya had managed to achieve considerable well-being, right up to the year 800. Then the great thirst, poverty. The end of a civilization.
The latter hypothesis is linked to the theory of the inversion of the solar magnetic field. At the time of the Maya's disappearance, both the solar magnetic field and that of the sunspots underwent an inversion. The consequences it brought on earth were sterility and genetic mutations especially in the equatorial areas. Sunspot activity caused a mini ice age that caused a severe drought on the land of the Maya causing their decline.
What is fascinating about the Mayan decline is the fact that they seemed to have predicted a magnetic reversal of the sun and anticipated the effect of that event by systematically abandoning their cities.
