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The most important source on traditional Maya religion is the Mayas themselves: the incumbents of positions within the religious hierarchy, diviners, and tellers of tales. More generally, all those persons who shared their knowledge with outsiders in the past, as well as anthropologists and historians who studied them and continue to do so.
The Maya developed a highly complex series of interlocking ritual calendars, and employed mathematics that included one of the earliest known instances of the explicit zero in human history. As a part of their religion, the Maya practised human sacrifice.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, advances were made in the deciphering of the Maya calendar, and identification of deities, dates, and religious concepts. [122] Sylvanus Morley began a project to document every known Maya monument and hieroglyphic inscription, in some cases recording the texts of monuments that have since been ...
Kukulkan was a deity closely associated with the Itza state in the northern Yucatán Peninsula, where the religion formed the core of the Territorial religion. [7] Although the worship of Kukulkan had its origins in earlier Maya traditions, the Itza worship of Kukulkan was heavily influenced by the Quetzalcoatl religion of central Mexico. [7]
This is a list of deities playing a role in the Classic (200–1000 CE), Post-Classic (1000–1539 CE) and Contact Period (1511–1697) of Maya religion.The names are mainly taken from the books of Chilam Balam, Lacandon ethnography, the Madrid Codex, the work of Diego de Landa, and the Popol Vuh.
In 1967, an underground cistern known as a chultun was discovered near a sacred body of water at Chichen Itza, an important ancient Maya city on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Skeletal remains of ...
Schele and Freidel, Maya Cosmos. 1993. Taube, The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatán. Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya. 1992. Thompson, Maya History and Religion. 1970; Tozzer, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. 1941. Zender, A Study of Classic Maya Priesthood. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Archaeology, University of ...
The writings are the main contemporary source for Maya history, [18] without which the knowledge of Maya ethnology would be devastatingly small. [21] Much more would now be known about Mayan history and culture if de Landa had not burned anywhere from 27 to what Mayan Historian George Stuart speculates as "hundreds, maybe thousands of [Maya] books.