The rainforests of Central America are buried with stunning ancient cultures. It's -- it's Mayan culture. Mayan culture is located in present-day Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala, and part of Mexico. Most people don't really know much about these places, after all, they are thousands of miles away and cannot be easily reached.
As a result, Mayan culture has never been able to escape the veil of mystery. There is always a considerable gap between the Mayan culture that people imagine and the real Mayan culture. These fantasies, with some romance, are also mixed with some wonderful elements, so that people's understanding of Mayan culture is always far from reality. In this short article, let's briefly discuss what misconceptions about Mayan culture.
The establishment of The Mayan culture by the merchants can be said to be a misunderstanding of east Asian qualifications. The version of the story circulating is that in the early years of the Republic of China, Mexico suffered a major earthquake, and the Qing officials sent Ouyang Geng to Mexico to comfort overseas Chinese. Before leaving, he was instructed by Wang Guowei, Luo Zhenyu and others to investigate whether there were merchant immigrants in the Americas. As a result, it is said that Ouyang Geng actually encountered a group of Indians in the Chihuahua region of Mexico to "stop the car and claim injustice". Saying that he is a descendant of Chinese, he hopes that Ouyang Geng can return to China to report.
After the early years of the Republic of China, some amateur researchers and academic scholars joined the discussion one after another. Some of the discussions were quite in-depth, and some were chiseled off. To this day, many people still talk about this rural strange talk.
Most people think that this passage of merchant immigration to establish Mayan culture is of little value. However, the author believes that the real root of this story lies in the similarity between the Yinshang cultural relics and the Cultural Relics of Central America. How to explain such similarities is a difficult question. From the perspective of time and the ideological structure behind the cultural relics, there is no relationship between our Central American culture and the ancient Chinese Yinshang culture, and there is no direct cultural transmission relationship. Zhang Guangzhi proposed the idea of the Mayan-Chinese continuum at the bottom of Asian and American witchcraft, which, although limited to cultural discussion, provides a key to our understanding of this phenomenon. In summary, this is a misunderstanding and an interesting topic of academic history.
The Mayan script is arguably the most complex and beautiful writing system in the Western Hemisphere in the pre-Columbian era. In the past few decades, most of the books and high school textbooks published in Chinese say that the Mayan script is still undecipherable. When the author studied Mayan culture in middle school and high school, he also thought that the Mayan script could not be cracked, and he always hoped that one day he could do his part to crack the Mayan script.
Unexpectedly, when I arrived at the university, I finally had access to more relevant materials, only to find that as early as the 1980s, the interpretation of the Mayan script had made breakthroughs. In the 1990s, the research of a gifted child, David Stuart, put together the last piece of the puzzle to crack the Mayan text. To this day, as long as the preservation is not too bad, Mayan inscriptionists can roughly interpret its meaning.
Through the interpretation of the Mayan script, we can better understand the history of the Mayan culture in the classical period. In addition to archaeology, we have opened up another way to understand the ancient Mayan culture, and we can understand that the Mayan culture is far more complex than we think, and it is more wonderful than we think.
In 2012, when Mayan doomsday prophecies swept the world, many celebrities became experts on Mayan culture, alarmistly saying that The Mayans predicted the end of the world on December 21 (or 23), 2012. For a time, some people panicked, and some people bought goods from the haunted house and ran to the mountain to hide. As a result, the wind and sun were beautiful that day, and the sun was still rising in the east and setting in the west, and there was not even a "sky without a light". In fact, this misunderstanding is closely related to the "Mayan calendar".
The Maya created an extremely complex system of calendars, which led many to believe that the Maya had a high degree of astronomical knowledge and even the ability to speak languages. We created the Drogin calendar, the Hab calendar, the Long Chronicle calendar. In the Mayan texts, these are the three basic calendars that you will encounter.
Among them, the long-term calendar is the source of the "rumors" of the end of 2012. The so-called long-term calendar is calculated from August 23, 3114 BC, through a series of unique counting units, ending at 13 Baktun, that is, 13 144,000 days. After conversion, it was december 23, 2012. But how did the ancient Mayans view that day? I think this must be understood by going back to the ancient Mayan inscriptions. So, did the second phase of the Mayan script crack bring earth-shaking changes to our understanding of the ancient Maya?
The Mayans and Aliens are intricate (?) ) relationship should be a classic misunderstanding of the world. Many people always think that the Maya have many incredible cultural achievements, and these cultural achievements are not something that the Maya themselves can do, so they think that there should be alien help to allow the Maya to complete these high-level performances.
If you think about it, the cultural achievements of the Maya certainly have many brilliant and high-level performances; however, they are not beyond the scope of other ancient human civilizations. Even the achievements that most ancient civilizations could achieve, such as metal tools, wheels, etc., were not achieved by the Maya. If the Mayan is a gamer, his achievement frame should be bleak. That is, we only look at the part, but forget the whole? "Look at the parts, forget the whole," and the same is true from another perspective.
Some focus on what appears to be an alien Mayan artifact, the most famous case being the sarcophagus lid of Lord Pacal in Palenque. The sarcophagus lid is depicted with intricate depictions, and some do-gooders claim that this is the scene of Maharaja Pakar taking off in a space shuttle to allude to our Relationship with the Mayans and aliens.
However, if we look at the "whole" first, that is, the religious beliefs and ideas of the Maya, the lid of the coffin has a completely different meaning. There are many related artifacts that can prove that the picture on the lid of The Pakar's coffin symbolizes that The Pakar is on his journey to the afterlife.
In fact, I often share it with middle school and high school students, which is a kind of logical thinking problem. If, if you cling to a single piece of evidence, without reference to other relevant evidence, or even counter-evidence, then this is definitely an imprecise way of inferring. Or, we can say that this is a kind of pseudo-archaeology. I think, let the Mayan land belong to the Maya, and the alien land belongs to the alien!
The Mayan archaeology of the 1960s can be said to be the era of Eric Thompson, and his basic views on Mayan culture have long been the basic presuppositions of maya culture in the academic community. In Thompson's image of Mayan culture, the Maya were a peace-loving people. The city we see is nothing more than a ceremonial center, which is not usually inhabited by people, and only three or three priests who observe astronomy live in it (astronomical otaku people?). ）。 Moreover, the Maya did not have large-scale wars and did not often offer sacrifices to the living. In the records of European colonists, the records of the sacrifices of the maya living people we see are all the influences of the Toltecs in central Mexico (our Maya are very well-behaved, and the Toltecs brought him badly).
Thompson's era was an age that did not yet have the ability to read most inscriptions. Thomson was also rather pessimistic about the interpretation of the inscriptions, arguing that the Mayan script was merely a record of the astronomical calendar, without any historical record. But Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a female researcher from Russia, began to challenge his views. In her murals in Bonampak, she discovered the bloody and violent side of Mayan culture. At the same time, he also began to study the interpretation methods of maya scripts, and gradually discovered the chronology written in ancient Mayan scripts, which not only recorded astronomical phenomena, but also recorded history.
Gradually, we begin to overturn many of Thompson's presuppositions and re-understand the history and life of the ancient Mayan culture. However, a few Chinese-language books or introductory articles sometimes use Some Thompson's presuppositions to explain Mayan culture. For example, some high school history textbooks use the term "etiquette center" to describe Mayan cities, but only use the etiquette center as a general term, not knowing the academic context behind it, and similarly, there may be a wrong perception of Mayan culture.
If you go to Central America in person, you will find that in the lush rainforest, there are many huge ancient cities, which have long been empty. Rainforests took over the land a thousand years ago. So, people came to the conclusion that the Mayan culture mysteriously disappeared.
However, there are still millions of Mayans living in the rainforests of Central America, and some of the cultures and customs of their ancestors have been preserved. In this way, is there a considerable conflict with the "mysterious disappearance of the Mayans"?
In order to facilitate research, archaeologists divide the Mayan culture into pre-classical, classical, classical, and post-classical periods.
The so-called "mysterious disappearance of Mayan culture" mainly refers to the decline of classical Mayan culture during the end of classical period. During this period, we saw many Mayan cities abandoned and the population of the Lowlands declining rapidly. The scripts, monuments, and temple forms used in the Classical Mayan culture were gradually discontinued. As for the causes of weakness, at present, Mayan scholars have put forward quite a number of theories and theories, which have been integrated into a general outline. Although, we cannot yet say with 100% certainty why the Classical Period of Maya culture weakened. But at least there is already a more correct direction.
But where did the Mayans go? Archaeologists have also found that although the low areas of mayan cities were abandoned. But a group of Mayans, who embraced the culture of central Mexico, once again built one city after another on the Yugadun Peninsula in present-day Mexico. For example, Chichen Itza, which often appears in history textbooks and various books, was a large city established during this period.
Thus, the Maya did not mysteriously disappear, and after experiencing the decline of the end of the Classical Period, they revived the Yugadun Peninsula, and the Mayan culture combined with the continued development of the culture of central Mexico. It was not until the Spaniards arrived in the Americas that the conquerors entered the Mayan region, destroying the Mayan culture of the post-Classical period.
I believe that many seventh-graders must be impressed by the story of the feathered snake god in the battle of Montezuma in the game "Century Empire II". Many also believed that, in addition to "guns, germs and steel", the Aztecs believed that the Spaniards were the returning feathered serpent gods, and that this was the reason why the Spaniards were able to conquer the mighty Aztec Empire with a small number of military powers. In fact, we now have no evidence that the Aztecs believed that the Spaniards were feathered serpent gods. The origins of this legend that we can now trace are documents written by Spanish conquistadors after the conquest of the Aztecs.
The process of the Spanish conquistadors conquering the ancient Civilizations of Central America such as the Incas, Aztecs, and maya has many similar storylines, and these storylines are quite wonderful, which is easy to remind people of the return of the feather serpent god. That being the case, how do we understand the story of the return of the feathered serpent god and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America? I think that some cultural anthropology and the comparison of related cases are quite necessary. Through these comparisons, I would like to talk to you about the fact that we should not tell the legend of the feathered serpent god as a historical fact. The meaning behind these stories should be understood from a more rational point of view.
The above problems are probably misunderstandings of the Mayan culture that we will come into contact with. Let us start from these misconceptions and unveil the mystery of Mayan culture.