Maya History Trivia

1. What name is used for the Mayan method of timekeeping?

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: The Long Count

The Mayan calendar operates on a base-20 system, and the primary unit is the "k'in" or day. Rather than the Gregorian calendar that is linear (it counts down all the way to a Judgment Day), the Mayan calendar is cyclic, counting down the number of days until the next creation cycle. The last creation cycle began August 11, 3114 BC (according to the Gregorian calendar) and will end on December 21, 2012, which is the beginning of the next creation cycle.

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: Numbers

Numbers were the first part of the Mayan writing system to be deciphered. This decipherment took place during the 19th century and the Mayan numbering system turned out to be very sophisticated. For example: a shell symbolized a zero, a dot stood for 1, and a bar for 5, and so on.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: East Asia

The Mayas' ancestors crossed over from Asia via the Bering Straits into North America. It is likely that there was a land bridge crossing the continents at that time, many thousands of years ago. These people left one of the coldest regions of the world and settled in one of the warmest.

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: 5,125.37

At the end of the cycle, some believe that rather than experiencing Doomsday, the world's problems will be resolved as we all move to an "enlightened collective consciousness."

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: Fray Diego de Landa

Fray Diego de Landa (1524-79) was bishop of Yucatan (south east Mexico) from 1572 until his death in 1579. Whilst attempting to understand the Maya and their system of writing he also, possibly for religious reasons, went to great lengths to obliterate much of what he discovered. He seems to have loved the Maya whilst at the same time having no compunction about physically torturing them. It is known that he regarded the Maya as 'moral' beings worthy of salvation, a view not held by his Catholic superiors and one which got him into considerable trouble. He burned most of the surviving Mayan codices but left enough for future scholars to decipher accurately.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: They were all burnt by the Spanish

The Spanish had no respect for knowledge or religion other than their own. They waged total war against the Maya and slaughtered as many as they could and sold the survivors into slavery. Only four books were ever found. These four (today found in Dresden, Paris, Mexico City, and Madrid) have been copied and studied by anthropologists. The rest were lost.

From Quiz The Ancient Maya

Answer: pioneering open heart surgery

While everyone knows that the Maya knew about the quantity zero, many of us continue to labor under the delusion that the wheel and the 'true' arch did not exist in the pre-columbian New World. In actuality, the Maya world contains many examples of the 'true' arch. That the corbelled arch is the far more common architectural device has been attributed by some archaeologists to the fact that it is a far more stable construct. In Central America, one of the world's most seismically active areas, it is not surprising that builders would opt for an arch that favored stability during earthquakes. As for the wheel, numerous pre-Columbian wheeled artifacts -- mostly toy figures -- have been found. That the wheel was not in widespread use as transport is not surprising when we consider that the Maya had no draft animals.

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: Milky Way

The Great Rift is a series of dark dust clouds that stretch from the Sagittarius Constellation to the Cygnus Constellation. Jenkins says that it represents the Mayan "Womb of Creation." He believes that when the sun passes the Great Rift we will "reconnect with our cosmic heart" .

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: What do you say, we do not understand you

Yucatan or in the Mayan, 'uicathan,' was a word used by Mayans when being interrogated by the Spanish about the name of their land. Upon being asked repeatedly by the Spanish, "What is your land called?" they responded with, "Uicathan (what do you say, we do not understand you)" which is hardly surprising as they spoke not a word of Spanish. The area in question then became known as Yucatan.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: Light and shadow fall on one side of the pyramid in the shape of a snake.

Many of the buildings in Maya temples are aligned so that light hits them in a certain way on the equinoxes or the solstices. The Maya were masters of astronomy.

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: Hipparchus

The realignment of the sun with the Milky Way happens every 26,000 years; at this time the black hole at the center of the Milky Way realigns with the sun. Hipparchus noticed a slight difference between the solar year and the stellar year. The solar year is the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun, and the stellar year is the time it takes the sun to realign with the stars. Though Mayan astronomers may have known this, but there is no evidence that they did.

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: A Mayan book

The Dresden Codex is one of the only four surviving 'books' of the ancient Maya of Central America. Probably painted by Mayan scribes some time before the Spanish conquest of Mexico it contains hieroglyphs and animal symbols and it is full of dates and astronomical calculations. The 'book' is in fact a folding screen that folds out much like a travel guide and has a length of almost 12 feet. It was taken by Cortes to Europe in 1739 where, reputedly, it was purchased by the royal library of the court of Saxony in Dresden.

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: A new cycle would begin.

Since the Mayan astronomers saw time as a cycle, they believed that when one cycle ended, another began. There is no clear evidence of what the Mayans thought would happen.

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: Yuri Knorosov

Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov was possibly the first to get on to the completely right track with the decipherment of Mayan glyphs. He published his first work (in Russian) in 1952. Unfortunately, the middle part of the 20th century was dominated by the opinions of Sir Arthur Thompson who favoured a different but, as is now accepted, incorrect approach. It was many years before Knorosov's work became fully recognised and accepted depite the many important papers that he published. Sir Arthur Thompson bitterly attacked Knorosov's work and began what was almost a vendetta against him. However, younger Mayanists (mainly from the USA) were coming to the fore, and they realised that Knorosov was onto something of vital importance. Knorosov finally managed to get to Central America in 1990 when he visited the Maya ruins in Guatemala.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: On a cliff over the beach

Tulum is build on a beautiful site by the beach facing the Carribean Sea. It is found on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: flood

The Dresden Codex has been dated to the eleventh or twelfth century and may be the earliest known book written in America. The pictures show a destructive flood. Some believe this represents the last turnover of the Long Count in Mayan mythology. Most Y12 Doomsday predictors do not use a flood prophecy.

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: Turkey

In 1876 Leon de Rosny, by applying the Landa alphabet to the first sign in the Madrid Codex, dicovered that this entire glyph meant turkey. Rosny went on to make highly educated guesses and proposed that Mayan writing was a phonetic system based on syllables. His ideas were rejected by the likes of Thompson who favoured a logographic explanation and it was left to Knorosov to finally prove that Mayan writing was indeed phonetic.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: A ball court

Part of the Maya religion was to host a game in which two teams tried to hit a rubber ball through one of two high hoops built into walls on opposite sides of a court. The game represented the struggle of light and darkness and the losing team was sacrificed. Many people believe that it was the winning team, or the captain of the winning team that was sacrificed and that the team considered it a privilege.

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: Dog

Yuri Knorosov, taking de Rosny's work a stage further, noticed that the first sign of the dog glyph was identical to that of the second sign of the turkey glyph. If the first sign in the dog glyph had the sound value of tzu, which by now was known to be so, then it followed that the second sign could be read as 'l', thus reading - 'tzul', meaning dog.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: The sacrifice would lie down on his back and the bump pushed his chest up so the priest could more easily remove his heart

The sacrifice and other offerings were thrown into a sink hole. Many of the artifacts that are today found in museums throughout the world have been brought up by divers excavating sink holes in Maya cites.

From Quiz The Ancient Maya

Answer: Olmec

Olmec. Not much to say about this one. The Aztec and Zapotec were not contemporary with the ancient Maya. The Inca lived on a completely different continent.

From Quiz Are We Doomed? Or Not?

Answer: Day

The primary unit of The Long Count was the day, or "k'in." The Long Count consists of thirteen cycles, corresponding to the levels of Maya heaven that make up a creation period. At the end of one creation (December 21, 2012), a new cycle begins.

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: 18

The Maya increased the day count by simply adding a third (pictorial) wheel to their calender. The Mayan month had 20 days with the exception of one month which had 5 days.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: Most were cremated, some were buried.

The highest ranking members of society were buried. All others were cremated. The pyramids were built on the the graves of kings. The Maya king was both the political and religious leader.

From Quiz The Ancient Maya

Answer: jaguar

'Balam' means jaguar. As in the the name of one of the rulers of Palenque, 'Yax Kan Balam,' pronounced 'yash kahn bahlahm.' It means 'Lord Serpent Jaguar.'

From Quiz Deciphering Mayan History

Answer: Speaking with the throat unconstricted or constricted

It was Bishop Fray Diego de Landa who discovered that these changes, constriction of the throat whilst speaking, made all the difference to understanding what a Mayan actually meant when he spoke. For example: 'cutz' = turkey: 'kutz' = tobacco. 'muk' = to permit: 'muc' = to bury.

From Quiz Maya People

Answer: Jaguars, snakes, turtles, birds

The Maya colored their richly decorated temples with bright natural pigments. Some of their psychedelic images have led to speculation that they experimented with mind expanding roots and cacti as part of their religion.

From Quiz The Ancient Maya

Answer: more accurate than our own

In fact, the Mayan calendar is far more accurate than our own. The Maya had two calendars: one that was ceremonial, and another that was simply functional. The functional Mayan calendar was based on a cycle of 13 months of 20 days each. At the end of each cycle there was a five day interim time. By using this calendar the Maya were able to specify an exact date within a 52,000 year cycle. By contrast, the calendar that we use is able to specify an exact date within a 2,000 year cycle at best.

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