Jaguar in Mayan culture

The jaguar was supreme symbol of kings; he was master of the underworld and of war. It is the jaguar head symbol for power or rule. This was typically used in a leadership or protector role. The jaguar’s significant to the people of Tikal was represented in stone as well.

Temple I, the Temple of the Jaguar, was built with nine terraces, each representing one of the lords of the underworld.

The Maya people built a powerful empire. The ruler wanted to be as powerful as the jaguar. They wanted other people to think they were just as strong as brave as the animal. Sometimes the rulers wore jaguar fur.

Stone carving of jaguar

They also added the word ‘jaguar’ to their names. Two of the rulers were called Shield-Jaguar and Bird Jaguar.

Bird Jaguar – a Mayan warrior and leader was born in 709, He is the son of Shield Jaguar who ruled Yaxchilan when Bird Jaguar is born. Shield Jaguar rules for more than sixty years and doesn’t die until the year 742.
Jaguar in Mayan culture

The importance of maize in Mayan culture

Like all of the people of Mesoamerica, the Mayan people have at the center of their world, of their vision of the world in its terrestrial and cosmic aspects, the cultivation of maize.

Mayan culture has always relied upon the development of a maize-based agriculture and to this day maize remains the economic and social base of the culture.  The success of the maize crop was so essential to physical and financial well-being that it permeated many Mayan myths, symbols, and ritual.

Within the Mayan religious traditions, corn occupies an outstanding position. Besides representing the basic staple food, corn is scared to the Mayan culture since it is believed that the gods is used it as the main substance to create the first human being.

The Maize god also plays a very important role in the world’s creation and in sustaining life; thus, maize production h splayed a central role in the development of the Mayan civilization in different ways. For Mayan creation myths explain how the world and the people in it could be annihilated on a divine whim, and it was the duty of the people to please the gods so fully that the world would not be destroyed again.

The gods would suitably reward victims of sacrifice with an exalted place in the heavens.
The importance of maize in Mayan culture

Ancient Mayan civilization

The Maya built splendid temples and pyramids were accomplished artists and developed a sophisticated calendar, as accurate as any in existence in the world at that time.

Mayan people are excellent timekeepers. By following the movement of the planets, Mayan astronomers have calculated the yearly path of Venus around the Sun with an error of only fourteen seconds per year. 

The Maya built tremendous cities – Tikal, the most important Mayan political center, may have been populated by more than 100,000 people.

The Maya people were an agrarian people who cleared the dense rainforests, developed farming and built a patchwork of city-states.

Mayan warfare was a unique with a tremendous amount of religious significance. Days of religious would preceded a battle, and the King and nobility would actively participate in combat. The purpose of warfare was not to gain territory, but to acquire slaves, who were used in large scale building projects and farming. 

During the Classic period, dance performance functioned as a metaphor for civilization in three principal modes. It was image of divinity. It also structured society and played a key role on socialization and finally it was essential to the definition of the state, both representing and enacting royal authority.

The Maya speak as many as twenty-three different languages or dialects – regional variations that have different pronunciations from other regional varieties of the same languages.

The Mayan written language consists of glyphs. Unlike other language systems in ancient America, the Mayan glyphs are not just pictures of object. Many of them also represent specific sounds.

The Maya inscribed their glyphs on far more imperishable materials like stone stelae, staircase, door lintels, facades, and pottery.

The origin of Maya writing is intertwined with that of the neighboring Mixe-Zoqueans, who developed a script related to Maya writing during the Late Pre-Classic.

Like other pre-Columbian recoding systems, Maya writing was not static, but developed and changed over some 2,000 years of use.
Ancient Mayan civilization

The Ancient Maya

The Ancient Maya
The Maya are a diverse cultural group, and this was as true in ancient times as it is today.

Though linguistic evidence would suggest a proto-Mayan community of as few as 5,000 people in northwestern Guatemala around 2,600 BC these original Mayans had by 1,000 BC managed to spread as far as north as the Yucatan peninsula and as far as northern Honduras.

By the Classic era (AD 300-900) they were a thriving concern in the Highland Chiapas state, Mexico; Belize; El-Salvador; the highlands and lowlands of Guatemala; and both the east and west coasts of Yucatan.

While the languages of these various groups differed there were, nevertheless, certain elements that bound the group together (and it must be said that many of these elements were also shared by other high cultures of Mesoamerica, such as the Teotihuacanos, Toltecs, Aztecs, Olmecs, and Mixtecs).

Chief among these traits were a subsistence based on slash and burn agriculture (although recent evidence has tended to indicate that irrigation was practiced on a larger scale than previously thought); a stratified society of hereditary priests and rules; a sophisticated network of trade and commerce and a religion combining a number of elements, such as a reverence of the sun (kin)m and pantheon of similar deities.

But perhaps them most outstanding of the Maya characteristics that archeology has brought to light is the ability to write and to reckon time in a sophisticated vigesimal number system.

Much of the glyphic record consists of astrological predictions entered in the three surviving codices but many texts also related to the subject of specific kings, and are found on the stone stelae that dot Maya sites of the Classic period.
The Ancient Maya