There was nothing mysterious about the demise of one of the great Mesoamerican civilisations, argues Sean Ledwith

One of the curious features of this era of capitalism in the early twenty-first century is the system’s obsession with its own possible destruction. Countless recent films, books and television series are premised on the contemporary world order being overwhelmed by a catastrophic event that pushes humanity to the brink of extinction. This collective neurosis is to some extent justified as climate change, escalating militarism and our experience of the Covid pandemic have made imminent apocalypse almost a regular feature on news bulletins, rather than just the stuff of science fiction. 

Beneath the arrogance and bluster of the world’s ruling elites, there is clearly a growing awareness at even their elevated level that a system founded on massive inequality within states and aggressive economic and military competition between them inherently carries the risk of crises spinning out of their control and that they are quite feasibly on borrowed time.

End of the world, again

One of the manifestations of this ideological crisis of confidence within the system came in 2012 when there was a significant level of anxiety across the world that one of the great pre-industrial societies of Central America, the Maya, had predicted that the catastrophic event would take place in that year, on 21 December to be precise. This notion was founded on calculations supposedly derived from the Mayans’ famously pioneering form of mathematics. One estimate at the time indicated 10% of the world’s population believed that the prediction would be fulfilled. The film 2012 which was released in that year to cash in on the gloomy Zeitgeist came with the tagline: Predicted by Mayans, Confirmed by Science.

Matthew Westall, Professor of History and Anthropology at Penn State University and a specialist in Mayan Studies, speculates on the roots of this Western misconception of the nature of one of the great Mesoamerican civilisations:

‘What makes 2012ology different is the starring role it gives to the ancient Maya, who seem to have captured the popular imagination. They are cast as a mysteriously wise civilization, one that disappeared into the tropical forests of Central America, taking a sacred knowledge that has only recently started coming to light. We are drawn to ancient civilizations whose knowledge has been buried — literally — for hundreds or thousands of years. In recent decades, the Maya have taken a star turn, as more of their ancient cities in Mexico and Central America have been unearthed and their hieroglyphic texts deciphered.’

Mayan mish-mash

The supposed apocalyptic mentality of the Maya is ironically more a product of the intrusion of Franciscan missionaries who accompanied the Conquistadores on their destructive onslaught on Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century. Mayan texts from the colonial era such as The Book of Chilam Balam display the influence of Christian millenarian fervour and helped create the misconception that all previous iterations of the culture were saturated in fatalism about the end of the world, which they were not. Environmental campaigner, Michael DeLuca, notes how texts such as this are interesting in so far as they record the impact of the West on Mesoamerica, but are less valuable as insights into the original worldview of pre-Columbian civilisation:

‘The Chilam Balam is a transcription of Mayan oral tradition crushed together with bizarre fragments of Catholic morality and dogma, made around the year 1540 by one or more enslaved native priests at the behest of their new Spanish masters. It was written in Yucatec Maya, but using a phonetic transliteration of that language into Spanish script, rather than the native pictographs (because the Franciscan friars who forcibly converted them to Christianity had declared all native art or written language the work of the devil). The Jaguar Priest seems to claim the Spanish god and the precepts of their religion as inevitable products of the natural evolution of Maya belief and prophecy.

Colonial cliches

The history of the ancient Maya civilisation is usually classified into three broad periods: the Preclassic, the Classic and the Postclassic. The middle of these three eras, lasting from about 250-900CE is the one that has most caught the imagination of the rest of the world, with its connotations of magnificent temple structures rising out of the rainforests of Central America and cities populated by astronomers and priests living in an enlightened ecological balance with the surrounding environment. 

The other trope associated with the Maya is that their civilisation mysteriously declined to the point of virtual extinction at the end of the Classic phase. This notion was the product of the North American explorers of the early nineteenth century, such as John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who were the first Westerners to encounter the remains of the Mayan cities such as Palenque and Tikal and created vivid descriptions and images of what they saw: The former wrote in his journal of 1841:

‘We lived in the ruined place of their kings; we went up to their desolate temples and fallen altars; and whenever we moved we saw evidence of their taste, their skill in arts, their wealth and power. In the midst of desolations and ruin we looked back to the past, cleared away the gloomy forest and fancied every building perfect, with its terraces and pyramids.’

The scale of the Mayan architectural and urban achievement even led some observers from outside the region to doubt that non-white people could construct such impressive monuments. Distorted with neo-colonial and racist assumptions, this prejudice culminated in the still common idea in certain quarters, and propagated in books and films from the lunatic fringe, that the great achievements of the Maya must have been made with extraterrestrial assistance.

Complex and sophisticated

Historians’ understanding of the true nature of Mayan society has been transformed, however, over recent decades due to breakthroughs in the decipherment of the written hieroglyphs left behind from the Classic era, culminating in the current state of knowledge where it is estimated that 90% of the corpus of the surviving Maya scripts have been decoded. The resulting picture of this great pre-Columbian civilisation, ravaged, like its neighbours the Aztecs and Incas, by the Spanish Conquistadors from the sixteenth century onwards, confirms the long-held view of the Maya as a complex and sophisticated social formation but also makes it comprehensible as a hierarchical society characterised by class conflict and militarism not entirely dissimilar to the contemporary feudal societies of medieval Europe.

At the apex of the Mayan social system was the k’uhul ajaw or divine king. The renowned architectural, artistic and intellectual achievements of the Classic Maya in many respects revolved around the evolution of the kingship which was regarded as controlling the natural and supernatural environment on which the society depended. The Mayan kings did not preside over anything resembling an empire; instead they were the rulers of a network of city-states such as Tikal and Palenque, comparable to those of ancient Greece, united by trade links and tribute payments in the form of food, crafted goods and slaves. Mayanist scholars, David Friedel and Eleanor Harrison-Buck note the centrality of kinship to the political economy of the Classic Maya:

‘Prestige goods in the Maya political economy, including jade and shell, functioned not as inert material wealth or abstract symbols of cosmological phenomena, but as animate and personified ancestral sources of power. Kingly control of such currency demonstrated intimate relations with the ancestral spirits—the source of metahuman power (magic) necessary for conferring political authority in ancient Maya society.’

Monarchs and maths

The k’uhul ajaw was as much a shaman as a monarch and was entrusted with safeguarding the essential cycles of fertility and growth. The names of some of these monarchs, such as Eighteen-Rabbit, First Crocodile and Shield Jaguar are now known to us thanks to the decipherment of the Mayan code. The lives of these monarchs could be as precarious as those of their counterparts in early feudal Europe; the first of these, for example, was ritually executed having been overthrown by one of his former vassals in 738 CE.

The famed Mayan calendrical and mathematical systems were intrinsically linked to the status of the kings and posited on their crucial role in maintaining the stability of the status quo. The Long Count, as the calendar of the Maya was known, was premised on a 360-day year that commenced on 14 August 3114 BCE, the beginning of this world according to Mayan tradition. The vigesimal nature of their number system (probably based on counting twenty fingers and toes, in contrast to our decimal system based on ten fingers) generated a historical cycle of thirteen four-hundred-year epochs, in which the transitions from one to another marked major turning points. The need to track the path of these transitions, via observations of the stars, was the basis of the hugely impressive achievements of Mayan astronomy, such as a correct calculation of the orbit of Venus around the sun, the ability to predict lunar eclipses, and a calendar that was more accurate than the one been used in Europe at the time.It was a misinterpretation of these calculations that led to the false rumour at the end of 2012 that the Maya had predicted the end of the world for that year. They did no such thing. The astronomical and calendrical achievements utilised the brilliantly simple Mayan numeral system based on twenty digits (0–19) which could be combined to write any numeral. Digits were written using combinations of three easy-to-use symbols: dots, bars, and a shell, representing zero.

Clash of kings

As Matthew Westall observes, the cultural achievements of the Maya were founded on its class system with the k’uhul ajaw at the apex:

‘The purpose of all these buildings, monuments, carved dates, written texts, and painted walls was to glorify the capital city and its ruling dynasty – above all the personification of state and dynasty in the form of the ruling divine king. City-state and dynasty were intertwined, defining each other. ’

The consequence of such a top-heavy monarchical political arrangement, however, was that conflict between kings could have a mutually destructive effect on the wider region. Contrary to the traditional notion of Myan rulers as stargazing pacifists presiding over a jungle utopia, the accepted view among recent scholars is that warfare among the city-states of Mesoamerica in the Classic era was an intrinsic aspect of the period, and furthermore that intensification of it around the turn of the ninth century CE could be the principal reason for the slide downwards from the zenith of the Maya. The need for Mayan monarchs to assert their status by smashing rivals is elaborately recorded in the magnificent pictorial glyphs which adorn many of the temples of the region.

Two of the most powerful kingdoms, Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras, in what is now the border between Mexico and Guatemala, engaged in a bitter battle for hegemony that climaxed with the destruction of the latter in 808 CE. Significantly, the two kings who were the focal points of this conflict were the last ones to be portrayed as k’uhul awaw in their respective cities. Arthur Demarest from Vanderbilt University persuasively posits that the contradictions of this role, as both protector against internal strife and aggressor against external foes, was the cause of the ecological and political exhaustion that led to the desertion of the great cities of Tikal, Copan and others. The elaborate superstructure of Classic Mayan society still makes it one of the wonders of the pre-industrial world, but was also the root cause of its demise:

‘The eighth century left a legacy of sublime architecture, monuments, and art … However, these were also symptoms and exacerbations of a deepening and fatal political disease. As political stability began to disintegrate in most areas, rulers only worsened the situation by intensifying their expensive rituals, status rivalry, and warfare leading to the death of the river route, most clearly manifested by the ritualized destruction of the controlling head of navigation at Cancuén, after their failed premature experiment in a transition to the Postclassic economy.’

The real warning

Of course, it is not the case that the Maya disappeared after the apogee of their civilisation in the Classic era. Despite the best efforts of the Conquistadors to eradicate them culturally and physically, the countries of Central America are still home to eight million Mayans, the descendants of the inhabitants of monumental cities such as Chechen Itza and Tikal. Tens of thousands of them have been the victims of CIA-funded death squads in the twentieth century, but they have also fought back heroically against tyranny, most notably during the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in the 1990s. 

The jungle ruins of their great civilisation are a sober reminder of the price to be paid when the territorial ambitions of militarised elites spiral out of control. The Classic Maya did not predict the end of the world in the twenty-first century but the stupidity of our rulers could still make it happen unless we stop them. Their sacred book, The Popol Vuh, includes a graphic depiction of a previous global catastrophe, provoked by the hubris of beings that took for granted the gifts of nature:‘Because they had not thought on Hurakan, therefore the face of the earth grew dark, and a pouring rain commenced, raining by day and by night. Then all sorts of beings, great and small, gathered together to abuse the men to their faces. They climbed to the roofs of the houses, but the houses crumbled under their feet; they tried to mount to the tops of the trees, but the trees hurled them from them; they sought refuge in the caverns, but the caverns closed before them. Thus was accomplished the ruin of this race, destined to be overthrown.‘