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Maya warfare was not so much aimed at destruction of the enemy as the seizure of captives and plunder. [152] There is some evidence from the Classic period that women provided supporting roles in war, but they did not act as military officers with the exception of those rare ruling queens. [153]
The Maya (/ ˈ m aɪ ə /) are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical region. Today they inhabit southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and westernmost El Salvador and ...
The city of Tikal, later to be one of the most important of the Classic Period Maya cities, was already a significant city by around 350 BC, although it did not match El Mirador. [21] The Late Preclassic cultural florescence collapsed in the 1st century AD and many of the great Maya cities of the epoch were abandoned; the cause of this collapse ...
The peoples and cultures which comprised the Maya civilization spanned more than 2,500 years of Mesoamerican history, in the Maya Region of southern Mesoamerica, which incorporates the present-day nations of Guatemala and Belize, much of Honduras and El Salvador, and the southeastern states of Mexico from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec eastwards, including the entire Yucatán Peninsula.
Map of the Maya region showing locations of some of the principal cities. Click to enlarge. Until the 1960s, scholarly opinion was that the ruins of Maya centres were not true cities but were rather empty ceremonial centres where the priesthood performed religious rituals for the peasant farmers, who lived dispersed in the middle of the jungle. [11]
The Maya Region is traditionally divided into three cultural and geographic, first order subdivisions, namely, the Maya Lowlands, Maya Highlands, and the Maya Pacific. [6] [note 5] The Region's internal borders, like some of its external ones, are not usually precisely fixed, as they are rather demarcated by 'subtle environmental changes or transitions from one zone to another.' [7] [8 ...
Tikal (/ t i ˈ k ɑː l /; Tik'al in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, [2] found in a rainforest in Guatemala. [3]
After this, Copán became one of the more powerful Maya city states and was a regional power in the southern Maya region. [3] However, it suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of its former vassal state Quirigua in 738, when the long-ruling king Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil was captured and beheaded by Quirigua's ruler K'ak' Tiliw Chan ...