Selected Science Fiction: History of the Mayan Conquest of Ma Boyong's Merchant Fleet Section III: The Philosophy of the Ya people

You have kidnappers, I have maza knives.

You have the wolf's tooth stick, I have the Celestial Cover.

You have the watermelon cannon, I have the Pacific Ocean.

--Emperor Taizuwu of the Javanese Dynasty, Khan bijeye, An Open Letter to the Mongol Invaders

The Maya philosophy has always been a fascinating subject of study, elusive, yet vividly reflected in the social life of the Maya. If it needs to be summed up in the simplest words, then the closest summary to the origin of Mayan philosophy is as follows: "Out of sight, not true." ”

This is a kind of negative positivism, and existence without the confirmation of the eye does not count as existence. Then, when some existence threatened the Maya, the first reaction of these natural philosophers was to cover their eyes and refuse to confirm, so that the threat would logically not exist.

They'll keep their eyes covered until they feel safe, or until they no longer have to think about safety—it all depends on the fullness of the beast in front of them. These beasts of the Mesoamerican jungle were also believers in Mayan philosophy, except that they liked to confirm it with their mouths rather than their eyes, and their attitude towards life was much more positive than that of the Maya.

When the Merchant Colony Legion, which had changed its name since they landed, attacked the Naheim tribes, most of the Maya adopted this passive defensive attitude, thus impressing the invaders.

Since the successful landing, Commander Yuhouxi had been busy consolidating the landing field, hoping to build a strong camp here to defend against any attacks that might come from the Maya. During this period, Commander Youhouxi also sent several repulsive detachments to scout the vicinity.

The wizards were busy treating the merchant warriors who were dissatisfied with the local water and soil, which was a severe test, because no one was familiar with the local herbs, so they had to use sledgehammers as an anesthetic, which did not help the treatment, but at least quieted the patient.

The only ones who had nothing to do were the two hundred public relations specialists who wandered around the jungle not far from the camp every day and tried to speak to any creature they saw. The experiment failed on the vast majority of creatures, and even one expert was taken away by a jaguar, but the experiment on macaws was a success.

Macaws are very happy to learn four tones from these outsiders, which can give them more opportunities to play tricks. Public relations experts are even more overjoyed, the so-called highest state of control of public opinion, that is, to let all people perfectly repeat your words without any thinking, these parrots are obviously the best audience.

To this end, the experts also launched a "protect macaw" campaign within the legion, warning hunters and cooks that eating parrots is bad behavior. Most people gladly accepted this conclusion, and macaws had too little meat and too much hair, and were not very popular at the dinner table.

To this day, you can still hear a few words about public relations theory in the mouths of parrots deep in the Jungles of Central America. In fact, the writing of this book is also partly based on the remarks of these parrot descendants, and I will not thank them all here.

Commander Yuhouxi's scout detachment worked so well that they soon discovered a Mayan tribe twelve kilometers from the landing site. The scouts reported that the situation in that tribe was currently calm, and the residents maintained their original pace of life, completely unaware of the arrival of the Yin Shang Legion... Or they pretended not to be aware of the arrival of the Yin Shang Legion.

Commander Yuhouxi carefully analyzed the situation, and he determined that the small tribe—later known as Naheim—was the logistics base for the Mayan Combined Marine Police. If you can control this tribe, you can not only get a lot of supplies, but also expand the area of activity of the Yin Shang Legion. In fact, if it is possible, he urgently needs a local native to be a guide to understand the local political system and military strength, but translation is a big problem.

The attack of the Yin Shang Colonial Legion began in the early morning of July 16, 205 BC. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the attack, in addition to the necessary remaining troops and food hunting troops, Commander Youhouxi sent almost all the main forces: three thousand warriors equipped with bronze swords and wooden shields, three thousand armored men equipped with long goats and spears, fifteen hundred archers, and fifty public relations experts equipped with macaws themselves.

They sang the high-spirited battle song of the Merchants and marched to the Mayan tribes with great vigor, their neat footsteps rumbling. At the front of the line is a jungle path less than half a meter wide, while behind the team is a wide and messy road.

Commander Youhouxi rode on the mount of the wild donkey he had just captured, and went back and forth. The wild donkey, who was arrested this morning on the grass on the other side of the ridge, was initially very untamed and refused to cooperate with anyone, including public relations experts. Once someone takes the reins to put it on, it stands upright or kicks at the back of its hooves. This was the largest resistance encountered since the yin merchant legion landed.

The army was about to set off, and there was no time to slowly domesticate it. Commander Youhouxi then adopted a more extreme quick method, he put on his full set of bronze armor, and then stepped on the back of the wild donkey. The Yin merchants were not yet familiar with the proportional relationship between copper, tin and lead in bronze smelting, and they did not have a periodic table of elements, so the bronzes of the Yin merchants were generally heavy. The heavily armed Commander Youhou Xi sat on the back of the wild donkey, and the donkey let out a mournful cry, bowed his head in humiliation, and could not make another attempt.

"Sometimes violent repression is more effective than reasoning, especially for donkeys." Commander Youhouxi carved this experience on a piece of wood around his waist.

The huge force spent about three and a half hours on the road, and by the time they entered an open field in the jungle, it was almost noon. This was precisely when the sun was at its most intense in one day, and the Mayan sun god, as if unwilling to see his people being bullied, shot the hottest lightsaber at the orientals.

There was some commotion among the warriors, some of them asking for a rest, others asking for lunch, and many more hiding under the lush vegetation on both sides of the road to cool off. The vegetation around this place is very lush, and many shrubs have natural holes under them, so many people have drilled into it. At this time, the follow-up team of the Yin Merchant Corps was still marching towards this open area, and soon the open space was full of people, and they made a loud noise.

When Commander You Houxi saw this situation, he couldn't help but frown. This force, which had honed strong discipline at sea, was now slackening in this damp and sweltering place. In fact, he was also responsible for this, and Commander Youhouxi carefully considered every detail of the military aspect, but forgot to bring a cook.

If you turn back now, then the Yin Merchant Corps will suffer the disgrace of dishonor. Thinking of this, Commander Youhou Xi called hou hou.

"How far is this place from the Mayan tribes?"

"Here it is." Rebuke replied calmly.

"What?" Commander Youhouxi roared, and the wild donkey under his crotch moved his steps uneasily, "Then when is it better for us to attack?" ”

"In fact, we've captured it." The rebuke continued to answer calmly.

Commander Youhouxi was silent for a moment and began to look around, which was nothing more than a small basin slightly thinner than the surrounding jungle, with no traces of trees being cut down, no flat roads, no traces of smoke from fire, and most importantly, nothing that could be called a house. In short, there is not a trace here that can meet Commander Youhouxi's definition of "civilization".

Commander YouHouxi asked with a gloomy face, "Why don't I see any traces of deforestation in the nearby jungle?" ”

"The Maya didn't make tools."

"I don't see the road either."

"They used to flying between the trees with the help of rattan."

"So where are the traces of the fire?"

"Their staple foods are fruit and lettuce."

"Then you tell me..." Commander Yu Houxi seemed to have given up, "what is the difference between them and the monkeys?" ”

"I know at least a little bit of a difference, the Mayans live in their own houses." The reconnaissance apparently had investigated the Mayan habits of life during the reconnaissance of the previous days.

Commander Youhouxi looked around again, and he didn't find any "houses." Before he could ask, the soldiers who were cooling off in the bush holes suddenly screamed, and almost every soldier in the holes found that there were people hiding at the end of the tree holes.

The order of the scene was immediately chaotic, the soldiers in the hole had to rush out, the soldiers outside had to drill in, and the soldiers who did not understand the situation on the periphery thought that lunch had finally arrived, and they took off their bronze helmets and waited for the meal.

Faced with the chaotic situation, Commander Youhou Xi immediately drew his short sword and stabbed the wild donkey. The wild donkey suddenly ate this and hissed loudly in pain. The frequency oscillation of the donkey's roar of up to six thousand hertz suppressed everyone in an instant, and the sword and spear fell to the ground because everyone covered their ears with their hands.

Commander Youhou Xi, who had taken control of the situation at the first time, zema, no, the donkey drove away all the soldiers outside the hole, and pulled a vine from the tree next to him and wrapped it around the mouth of the wild donkey to make it quiet. Then he got off the donkey and loudly ordered the soldiers in the hole to pull out all the suspicious people.

The capture did not last long, and the soldiers pulled about two hundred people out of about two dozen holes. These two hundred people, young and old, men and women, should belong to a natural community in terms of population ratio. Judging from the race, their skin color is also yellow, and the dome skull is somewhat similar to that of the Yin merchants. But most of them were naked, and only a few of them surrounded their necks with plant fibers of unknown texture, leaving other parts bare.

To the surprise of the Yin Shang soldiers, these two hundred men, women and children all maintained the same posture, that is, they covered their eyes with their hands, and their bodies trembled.

At that time, Commander Yuhouxi did not understand the negative empirical philosophy of the Maya, he just felt strange, so he asked for help from the public relations experts accompanying the army.

Public relations theory argues that human beings everywhere share a common psychological negativity, refusing to face reality and gaining an unreliable sense of security. The only difference is that in some regions this characteristic is implicit and an individual act; in others it is explicit and even elevates to a universal attitude towards life, to which the Maya civilization apparently belongs.

Of course, this was only concluded after the sample size collected by the public relations experts was large enough, and that was a long time later. At the time of the Naheim tribe, the expert's answer to Commander Yuhouxi was simply, "They are afraid." ”

Commander Yu Houxi ordered all the older men in the captives, as well as those with plant fibers wrapped around their necks, to be brought to him. As a rule of thumb, the elderly tend to be in the position of decision-makers among uncivilized tribes. As for those who had plant fibers wrapped around their necks, if they were placed in the Yin merchants, this was the lowest level of slave attire, but in the Mayan tribes they were supposed to be nobles or rich people, because everyone else was naked.

The interrogation did not go well, and the captives refused to put their hands off their eyes. Commander Youhouxi had to use an inhumane method, asking people to forcibly break the fingers of the prisoners and prop up their eyelids with small wooden sticks.

The first reaction of the captives when they regained their sight was to cry and roll on the ground. It is understandable that when a person finds that he cannot even escape reality, then his life can really be said to be a failure.

The impatient soldier drew his sword across the neck of the noisy captives, leaving them quiet. The Mayans felt a hint of menace around their necks, and they could no longer close their eyes to argue that the threat did not exist, so they obediently closed their mouths.

The next question is language.

According to the results of excavations of the remains of the ancient Maya civilization, the Maya civilization did have writing. The square hieroglyphs were all engraved on the walls of the Mayan pyramids, taking on a block shape and writing so intricate manner that some people insisted that they were just decorative patterns.

The Maya showed amazing patience in literature, and they were all Impressionist realists. Each text is meticulously crafted and polished, and strives to be perfectly and elegantly displayed in front of the world. If a Maya wanted to record a "load," they meticulously sketched a weathered mother and two children on her back, adding light and shadow and the perspective of the barren land in the distance; if he wanted to express "this rock is heavy," he would mobilize dozens of Maya to spend more than a hundred working days dragging the stone to the wall, using ink made of plant rhizomes to outline the rock, and then kill some of the laborers and set their remains around the stone shadow.

This meticulous attitude made the pace of development of the Maya culture very slow, but it also suppressed the wars within the Mayan civilization community— Mayan kings often found that writing a declaration of war took even more labor than the number of people involved in the war. From an economic point of view, this is obviously an extremely uneconomical thing.

Academia still cannot perfectly decipher the Mayan language, because the system of Mayan grammar is very unrestrained compared to the artistic sense of the Mayan script: its entire grammatical rules present a Brownian motion in the linguistic sense, whether it is vowel letters, temporal changes, or subject-verb sentence structures, which maintain distinct random characteristics, and these language basic morpherics are like the Carnival Spaniards, jumping and swinging wildly throughout the sentence until the whole structure is fragmented, showing a very fanatical non-linear diffraction oscillation , which makes Chaos Scholars fall in love with it.

Even more frightening is the fact that the grammatical rules of the Mayan script vary according to the solar calendar, which has a total of eighteen months, in other words, multiplying the degree of confusion of the above grammar by eighteen. During World War II, the U.S. military used this script as plaintext code and successfully destroyed several Japanese deciphering stations, and the decipherers inside went crazy.

Thus, some scholars have theorized that perhaps the most important profession of the Maya was grammar teacher, and that only they could fully understand the strange structure of Mayan grammar and thus communicate smoothly with the sun and feathered serpent gods.) These grammar teachers eventually formed the priestly class.

Confusingly, apart from the words neatly inscribed on the pyramids, they found no trace of even a single word in any other Mayan ruins. Academics generally believe that this is the result of an attempt by the Mayan grammar teacher class to monopolize knowledge, while some Mexican patriots claim that this indicates that the Maya invented the paperless office as early as BC.

Commander Youhouxi was a wise man with a reverse mind, and he was not overwhelmed by this difficulty. He came up with a genius idea: since he could not communicate with his captives in Mayan, he would teach them oracle bones.

When European white missionaries first set foot on African soil, they were equally ignorant of the local language. So the missionaries used the Bible to teach the Africans to speak Latin and French, and then taught them how to sign the land transfer book in standard flower fonts. Commander Youhouxi only used this method predictably for fifteen hundred years.

Two hundred prisoners were escorted back to the camp. Commander Youhouxi ordered each of them to be equipped with a public relations specialist, three rapper soldiers, and as many parrots as possible, whose task was to speak in the captives' ears day and night and to bombard them with Oracle fatigue. Soon all the human teachers were exhausted and had to switch to parrots to continue.

This furious crammed strategy of forced learning lasted for two months, with one hundred of the two hundred captives dying without being able to withstand rap blows, and another ninety-seven being eliminated for going mad and then being taken away by hunters as bait for hunting wild beasts. Ironically, Mayan men were clearly much less tolerant in this regard than Mayan women.

In the end, only three Maya survived. One of them was an elder in his seventies who was already deaf in his ears; the other was a five-year-old child, in the process of learning the language of teeth and teeth, and although he was proficient in oracle bones, he could not speak Maya at all.

The only person who can be called a "fruit" is a Mayan woman in her forties. She brought to full play the characteristics of women at this age who were good at listening and willing to spread information, graduating with honors, becoming the only translator in the hands of the Yin Merchant Corps who knew Mayan and Oracle.

Commander Yu Houxi could not wait to call the woman who called herself "Fu Rong" into the palace, and he was eager to learn everything about the entire Mayan civilization. Fu Rong was very fat, his whole body was glowing with healthy oil, the breasts on his chest were hanging down to the navel, and only two small eyes looked very clever. Ever since she learned Oracle, she has been diligently practicing her oral skills and has quickly become the most avid person in the camp to spread the word, and she has been left behind.

Seeing this woman, Commander You Houxi couldn't help but think of Ji Chang. This sworn enemy of Yin Shang was once detained in Xianli, where Ji Chang deduced the secret of defeating Di Xin and taught it to Jiang Shang, according to an official who did not want to be named. Jiang Shang deeply understood the mystery, and then launched a public relations campaign, using countless rumors, rumors and gossip to overthrow Shang's rule. It is said that the secret of Ji Chang's performance in Envy is two words: "Bagua"

Commander Youhou Xi looked at Fu Rong majestically, who had met the Supreme Commander alone for the first time, so he seemed a little timid, and rarely kept his mouth closed.

"Can you fully understand me now?"

"Yes, sir." Fu Rong's pronunciation is very standard.

"It was good." Commander Youhouxi nodded with satisfaction, "First tell me about your tribe. ”

"We are city-states, not tribes." Fu Rong plucked up the courage to argue.