Day 15 June 6
Part 4










Here are some more pictures of the ruins in Seibal.

The circular structure is somewhat fancifully called the "Temple of the Jaguar" by archaeologists. What scenes and sacrifices of barbaric splendor must have taken place here!




Considering their inhospitable environment and isolation from the cultural centers of the Old World, the intellectual achievements of the ancient Maya are truly astonishing. The positional system of numeration with the number zero was invented by only two civilizations in history: the Maya, and the Hindu, from which the Arabs learned the mathematics that they were eventually to transmit to Europe. The Maya employed the vigesimal system and counted in groups of twenty, whereas nowadays we use the decimal system and count in groups of ten. (In contrast, the classical Greeks and Romans struggled with an arithmetic so cumbersome that only very bright people could multiply, say, two-digit numbers.)

Using this powerful conceptual tool, the Maya contemplated time periods of geologic scope-- in the billions of years. They developed a calendar and a tradition of observational astronomy unsurpassed until modern times. Their calendar, which was more exact than the Gregorian one commonly used today, made possible not only a highly efficient agricultural cycle of sowing and reaping, but also impressive predictions of astronomical events, e.g., eclipses, that enhanced the prestige of the priest-kings who announced them.

The Maya's monumental architecture could not have been realized without a good grasp of applied geometry. There is strong evidence that the ancient Maya knew of the 3-4-5 right triangle-- a triangle with sides of length 3, 4, and 5 must have a right angle. Indeed, some structures in Tikal were built as the third vertex of such a triangle to honor two earlier buildings, which formed the other two vertices.

Another great Maya invention was a written language. Maya writing or "glyphs" (as shown in the stela above and the writing sample below) employed a syllabry and a system of characters, just as Japanese writing does. This was the only complete writing system invented in the New World. Fully literate, the ancient Maya scribe could record in stone or bark paper royal dynastic events, an elaborate cosmogony, complex mathematical symbols and calendrical calculations, or whatever else he wished to express. But with the Spanish destruction of most of the articles of indigenous culture, the meaning of the glyphs was lost until this century, when the efforts of researchers from around the world finally bore fruit.




By this time, we were tired of the heat and humidity and yearned for some civilization! We would be flying back the next day to the eternal spring of the capital, but for the meantime the provincial capital would have to do. We drove the jeep back north for the bright lights of Flores.

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