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The Maya area within Mesoamerica. The Maya (/ ˈ m aɪ ə /) are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica.The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical region.
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 .
A Classic period Maya polity was a small kingdom (ajawil, ajawlel, ajawlil) headed by a hereditary ruler – ajaw, later kʼuhul ajaw. [5] Both terms appear in early Colonial texts including Papeles de Paxbolón [6] where they are used as synonyms for Aztec and Spanish terms for rulers and their domains.
The Maya recorded their history and ritual knowledge in screenfold books, of which only three uncontested examples remain, the rest having been destroyed by the Spanish. In addition, a great many examples of Maya texts can be found on stelae and ceramics.
The Chʼortiʼ area, which had Copán as its cultural center, was the headquarters of the ancient Mayan civilization. The Chʼortiʼ people in Honduras are known for their first ruler Yax K'uk' Mo' (pronounced 'Yash Kook Mo') who was the founder and first king of the dynasty that ruled the Maya city of Copan (also known as Oxwitik) for nearly ...
Ancient Maya art comprises the visual arts of the Maya civilization, an eastern and south-eastern Mesoamerican culture made up of a great number of small kingdoms in what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Many regional artistic traditions existed side by side, usually coinciding with the changing boundaries of Maya polities.
The oldest surviving written account of Popol Vuh (ms c. 1701 by Francisco Ximénez, O.P.). Popol Vuh (also Popul Vuh or Pop Vuj) [1] [2] is a text recounting the mythology and history of the Kʼicheʼ people of Guatemala, one of the Maya peoples who also inhabit the Mexican states of Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatan and Quintana Roo, as well as areas of Belize, Honduras and El Salvador.
When scholars first investigated in the early 20th century, they thought that the Lacandon were the direct descendants of ancient Classic Maya people who fled into the rainforest at the time of the Spanish Conquest and remained linguistically and culturally pristine ever since. They made that assumption because the Lacandons' physical ...