Mayan Empire Quotes

offers numerous cautionary tales of kingdoms, cultures, and empires that squandered their soil and found themselves with nothing left to live on. From the earliest farmers in the Fertile Crescent to the Mayans, Romans, and Easter Islanders,

Maya were largely farmers, growing domesticated crops, such as maize, all kinds of exotic fruits, cacao, and root crops. But their diet (one of the healthiest diets you could have in the ancient world) still depended largely on hunting and fishing in the lush fields and waters that surrounded them.

if you were born with a very small organism in the Olmec or the later Maya culture, you’d be seen as a magical being, touched by the gods. You’d be enjoying all kinds of luxuries, often appearing in the king’s court. This may be something to do with their belief that the sky was held up by four dwarves, and so they gave them special treatment.

in 7000 BC a new shift began—the hunter-gatherers who lived in Mesoamerica discovered something that would change their region forever. They began planting crops.

The Maya saw life as a continuum—a series of birth and death cycles.

Much of the drive for Roman conquests, Montgomery argues, was fueled by poor agricultural practices that were whittling away the productivity of the empire’s cultivated areas. Montgomery hypothesizes that exhaustion and erosion of the soil was a major factor in the fall of most once great civilizations, including the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Mayans.

CIVILIZATIONS OVER THE PAST SIX thousand years have the habit of eventually squandering their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Mayan, and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear, and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. These ruling elites, consumed by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles. They hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery, hunger, and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront

You see, the ancestral horse died out here—well, in the ‘here’ that is my real-life home, but not in the world of Temilún. When the great empires of the Americas arose in the real world—the Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, our own Muisca—they had several handicaps the civilizations of the Tigris Valley or the Mediterranean did not have—slower communications, no large wagons or sledges since there were no animals capable of hauling them, less need for broad flat roads, hence less pressure to develop the wheel, and so on.” He began pacing again, but this time with an air of happy energy. “In the real world, the Spanish came to the Americas and discovered them ripe for plucking. Only a few hundred men with guns and horses subjugated two continents. Think of that! So I built America again. But this time the horse did not die out.” He took off his feathered crown and set

The Maya found that these three plants, when grown together, would help each other develop. Tall and viny, beans climbed up the maize stalks. The squash, in turn, helped to reduce soil erosion.

Maya were early scientists, for they discovered quickly that a trio of vegetables that later became known as “the three sisters” grew very well together.

This ballgame is extremely important in the Mayan tradition, and forms of it are found to the north, in the territories of the Aztec empire and in the Caribbean, as well as into North America even as far as Canada, in different forms, but with a similar sacred significance. A form of it known as chunkey was important in what is called the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex in North America, while the modern sport of lacrosse descends from a form of sacred ballgame existing among the Eastern Woodlands and Plains nations.