|
000088 Visit since
| TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY, a History
of The Mexican people (Chapter 1) |
by Prof. German Estrada
March, 2004 |
THE FOREFATHERS continues
part 4
Learning was a hallmark of
this Classic world. The Olmecs, perhaps, and surely
the Maya, had mastered the concept of the zero. Astronomy,
while not as advanced, did not lag far behind. The
pre-Hispanic calendar, more accurate than the European,
had 365 days. With a keen sense of history, the ancients
developed a system of hieroglyphics, setting down
their thoughts in picture books and codices. Cortés discovered in the
towns of Veracruz "books made of...paper, doubled in
folds, like the cloth of Castilla." Unfortunately,
in their fanatical rush to wipe out the old, the Spaniards
burned priceless manuscripts. Typical of them was Bishop
Diego de Landa of Yucatán, who destroyed countless
native chronicles because "they contained nothing but
superstition and lies of devils."
The arts, too thrived. Sculpture
set the pace, linked closely to religion and expressing,
in figures carved from stone, the mysteries of rites
and gods. Painting, especially murals, was popular,
as the splendid Maya drawings at Bonampak testify.
Mural art, like sculpture, complemented architecture,
its themes dealing mostly with religion and history.
Yet at Teotihuacan and at Maya shrines artists painted
scenes of daily life. Though lacking the potter's
wheel, artisans turned out elegant bowls and dishes.
The useful and the beautiful were once and the same,
though purely functional pottery, simple and crude,
was produced. In pre-Hispanic Mexico, pottery was
a major industry, the work of specialists, often
living in one village, where fathers passed on the
craft to their sons. Music, songs, and dance flourished.
There were flutes, rattles, and drums galore and, maybe,
trumpets of wood. Dances held in the town square could,
on occasion, prove erotic, with "phallic rites and
sexual orgies." The danza de los voladores, where
dancers hanging from ropes around a pole a hundred
feet high, started at this time.
Two dominant cultures flourished during the Classic
era. First was Teotihuacan, lord in the Valley of Mexico
by 200 B.C. With 100,000 in habitants,
the city of Teotihuacan, just outside
present-day Mexico City, was twelve miles square. A
ceremonial city, it sat astride an empire reaching
from Guanajuato to Oaxaca. At one end of its central
square rose the Pyramid of the Sun, 215 feet tall and
resting on a base over 700 feet long on all four sides;
facing it stood the Pyramid of the Moon. This place
of the gods, over which Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered
Serpent, presided, fell into ruins about A.D. 650.
Side by side with Teotihuacan were Cholula, a commercial
hub and holy city; Xochicalco, a cultural oasis in
the sierra of Morelos; and Monte Alban, a Zapotec sanctuary
in Oaxaca which, infiltrated by the Mixtecs, eventually
lost its dominance.
The greatest of the Classic
civilizations, the golden age of the pre-Hispanic
world, was that of the Maya, who occupied the lands
of Yucatán, Campeche,
Tabasco, eastern Chiapas, and Quintana Roo and northern
Guatemala. Of their ceremonial sites, Tikal, in the
Petén of Guatemala, served as the vanguard,
while Uaxactún, the older of the Maya centers,
lay just north of it. Palenque in Chiapas was small
by comparison but a cultural jewel, the "Athens of
the Maya world." These sites lay abandoned for centuries,
until Johm L. Stephens's marvelous account Incidents
of Travel in Central America and Chiapas and Yucatán ,
written in the 1840s, rescued them from oblivion. The
Maya, whom archaeologists dub the Greeks of the New
World, excelled in science and learning, their writing
verging on the phonetic. A sort of bible was the Popul
vuh , the book of the Cakchiquel Maya, rewritten
after the Conquest in Quiche by a Maya in Guatemala.
Source: From the book Triumphs
and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his
author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization.
(W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
We'll continue with this fascinating
book.
gestrada@pvnet.com.mx
Prof. Germán
Estrada is the author of the best selling book,
"México
Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know
About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto
Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books,
Books as well as directly from the author by internet.
Archives
by date |
Current
Weather Report
