Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The name "Olmec" means "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the language of the Nahuas, and was the Aztec term for the people who lived in the Gulf Lowlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, some 2,000 years after the Olmec culture died out.
The rulers seem to have been the most important religious figures, with their links to the Olmec deities or supernaturals providing legitimacy for their rule. [2] [a] There is also considerable evidence for shamans in the Olmec archaeological record, particularly in the so-called "transformation figures". [3] Figure from Las Limas monument 1.
Scholars generally acknowledge six cradles of civilization: Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in Afro-Eurasia (previously called the Old World), [6] [7] while the Caral–Supe civilization of coastal Peru and the Olmec civilization of Mexico are believed to be the earliest in the ...
The Olmec civilization ended in 400 BC, with the defacing and destruction of San Lorenzo and La Venta, two of the major cities. It nevertheless spawned many other states, most notably the Mayan civilization, whose first cities began appearing around 700–600 BC. Olmec influences continued to appear in many later Mesoamerican civilizations.
They further noted that in the 1980s, Van Sertima had changed his timeline of African influence, suggesting that Africans made their way to the New World in the 10th century B.C., to account for more recent independent scholarship in the dating of Olmec culture. [4] They further called "fallacious" his claims that Africans had diffused the ...
The Norte Chico civilization in Peru dating back to about 3500 BCE is the oldest civilization in the Americas and one of the first six independent civilizations in the world; it was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids. It predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two millennia. [1] [2]
Aztec glyphs for the member-states of the Aztec Triple Alliance: Texcoco (left), Tenochtitlan (middle), and Tlacopan (right). Tlatelolco (Classical Nahuatl: Mēxihco-Tlatelōlco [tɬateˈloːɬko], modern Nahuatl pronunciation ⓘ) (also called Mexico Tlatelolco) was a pre-Columbian altepetl, or city-state, in the Valley of Mexico.
A series of Olmec-style basreliefs from Chalcatzingo in the state of Morelos portrays crocodilians breathing rain clouds from their upturned mouths. Portable green stone Olmec sculptures depict crocodilians in similar positions, indicating that they are probably also breathing. [4] In the Maya tzolk'in, the day Cipactli corresponds to Imix.