Writings By Date| Musings On Mexico | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Neither Erin nor I can think of anything funny or witty to say about the Mayan ruins, simply because they're so fascinating and sad at the same time. We saw the late-era buildings at Tulum, sitting right at the top of a cliff overlooking the Caribbean Ocean, then proceeded to Cobà, one of the oldest ruins, with the largest climbable temple (Nohoch Mul), and also barely excavated. After that, it was Chichen Itza, the best known ruins, and certainly the best excavated of all of them. While Chichen Itza looks like Disneyland on the outside, it's very tasteful inside, with placards just a few inches of the ground, simple wooden fences to keep people from going where they shouldn't, and carefully placed wooden signs, low to the ground, to help people along paths. It was so nice not seeing this place completely plastered with advertising and five million signs the way most American sights would be.
Nobody knows why the Mayans abandoned so many of the sights they did, like Chichen Itza, and while the Spaniards didn't exactly wipe them off the face of the earth, they did work many of them to death, and slaughter many more during the War of the Castes. Essentially, their culture has been all but destroyed over time, and that's an incredible shame, because it's stunning to see how advanced they were. They built observatories to track the movement of the stars and planets, like Venus. They were well aware of the revolutions of the earth around the sun five hundred years before Copernicus pointed it out and got excommunicated for it. They made paper, had a complex set of heiroglyphics (including numbers that were almost identical to the Egyptians), and painted "stellas" (rock carvings) to keep records about a person's life. They had a lunar calendar (20 months of 13 days) and a solar calendar (18 months of 20 days, plus five extra days at the end). That's 365 days: one of our years. The two would meet every 52 years, and at that point, it was the start of a new generation: temples would be rebuilt, right over the last one (at Chichen Itza, you can even go inside the main temple and climb a staircase that used to be the outside of the previous structure), and serious partying would commence. Note the prevalence of 20s too: their numeric system was base 20! I can't get over how interesting that is: it seems so obvious — the Greeks picked base 10 because we have ten fingers, but why not 20 for the 20 digits we have? I'm surprised no other cultures came up with that.
By the time we'd hit all these places, we were starting to feel pretty "ruined" on the ruins, but it's still a fascinating experience, and I think my curiosity about the Mayans has reached that of the Egyptians. (There are even some archaelogists that see so many similarities between the two cultures, that they think some explorers came to South America from Ancient Egypt, and brought these ideas over. Most other archaelogists think this is a load of crap.) Anyone coming to Mexico should see this to understand the history of these people. Granted, 99.95% of the people here today are descended from the Spanish Conquistadors, but some of the culture still lingers today.
