The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection

Notes on a Curious People

The Maya and Their Doings

Fred Reed • January 28, 2019 • 2,500 Words

This is a greatly updated version of a column of some years back on an unusual

and intriguing people. Maya civilization was not 1850 Vienna, but neither was it
the primitive horror lovingly imagined by the ill-mannered and barely informed
of the web.

Inasmuch America has a large population of Latin Americans, it seems to me that

people, or some people, might want to know about them, and what they are, and
where they came from. Most Latinos of the south are either a mixture of Spanish
and Indian, or sometimes pure Indian. We have some idea of the Spaniards. They
were European. But what were the Indians? What is their contribution to the
great numbers of–whether you like it or not–new Americans? In particular, what
are their blood lines? Are they, as insisted by web louts hostile to Mexicans,
of very low IQ–83–and has their Asian blond enstupidated the Spanish? Were they
horrendously primitive?

Without thinking about it, I had the entrenched idea that they were just that. I
wasn’t conscious that it was either an idea or entrenched–just a fact. It didn’t
occur to me that I knew virtually nothing about these people, or that there was
anything to know.

What pulled me up short was their architecture. Throughout a large region, sort
of Yucatan through parts of Honduras, you find ruined cities of monumental
architecture that would match most of what is found in the ancient Near East. A
great deal of it is overgrown with jungle. To get to major sites like Palenque,
you walk along dim trails with unexplored walls and passageways. But the
existence of these ruins did not set well with the idea of primitive incapacity.
The architecture was entirely Indian since they had no contact with Europe.

Chiapas. Compares well with a lot of Roman monumental architecture. There are
lots of these: Palenque, Tikal, Piedras Negras, Copán, Yaxchilan, Teotihuacan,
Caracol, Uxmal, etc.

Chiapas. Time and the weather have not treated this building well, but it seems
to me that these things must take considerable engineering talent. Phredfoto

Pyramid at Chichén Itsá. For scale, note people at lower left.

Aha! I thought with the brilliance of one who has been hit over the head by the
obvious. Something screwy is going on here. How witless can you be and engineer
these things? I started poking around. And found interesting stuff. For example:

Writing

The invention of writing is among the major intellectual achievement of humanity

and one that occurred at most three or four times on the planet, and perhaps
fewer. Specialists argue, idiotically in my view, over whether Chinese was or
was not influenced by earlier writing. Specialists have to do something with
their time. What is not arguable:

Wikipedia: “It is generally agreed that true writing of language (not only
numbers) was invented independently in at least two places: Mesopotamia
(specifically,
ancient Sumer) around 3200 BC and Mesoamerica around 600 BC. Several
Mesoamerican scripts are known, the oldest being from the Olmec or Zapotec of
Mexico.”

The Maya script is logosyllabic and said to be functionally similar to Japanese,

to which it is utterly unrelated. It is not “proto-writing,” but actual real
writing. This was not immediately known because the script had not been
deciphered, but now about ninety percent can be read. This doesn’t help as much
as might be expected since the Spanish Christians, as destructive as the Muslims
of today, burned almost all Maya books–codices actually–and so almost everything
we know comes from inscriptions carved on buildings. Imagine how we would look
to Martians with the same problem. The book to read if interested is Breaking
the Maya Code.

Mesoamerican Mathematics

The Maya had a sophisticated base-20, positional-exponential number system,

including zero. The invention of zero is regarded as major advance in
mathematics. Until Fibonacci brought zero back from the Hindu-Arab world in 1202,
Europe used Roman numerals, which are horrible. I knew this, but had never
thought about it. Well, it’s worth a little pondering.

In a positional number system, a number–7, say–has an absolute value–in this

case unsurprisingly 7–as well as a different value depending on its position.
For example, in the number 100,007, seven means, well, 7. In 100,070, its value
is 70, and in 10,700, its value is 700.

“Exponential” means that each position in a number represents a different power

of the base, in our case 10. Thus we have ten to the zero power equals one, to
the first power, ten; squared, 100, cubed, 1000, and so on.

The Maya, using base twenty, had a similar progression, going 1, 20, 400, 8,000,
160,000 etc.. (Inevitably the choice of 20 as the base is attributed to our
number of fingers and toes, though I have trouble imagining anyone actually
counting on his toes.)

Neither of these ideas is obvious, or anywhere approaching obvious. Both eluded

Archimedes, for example. They seem natural to us because were are steeped in
them from the first grade and, since everyone has had high school algebra,
exponents seem routine. Using a thing and inventing it are very different
animals. Any bright freshman can sling definite integrals; it took a Newton to
invent them.

Imagine that you are a Mesoamerican Indian somewhere in Central America trying
to figure out how to deal with large numbers. The fact that you are interested
in large numbers suggests that you are not stupid. You have never had high-school
algebra or heard of exponentiation. I cannot imagine how you would get from here
to “Eureka!” (though as a Maya you probably didn’t know Greek either).

The idea, “Hey, what if I line up powers of 20, multiply them by sort of
coefficients, and add them….?”–is a huge intellectual leap. So far as I can
determine, it only happened twice. It never happened in Europe.

For the mathematically curious, the Maya system had a remarkable peculiarity.
Number systems, or anyway all I have heard of, require a number of symbols equal
to the base. For example, binary, base-2, has two symbols, 0 and 1; decimal,
base-10, ten symbols 0-9; and hexadecimal, base sixteen, 0-F. So I thought, Oh
help, I’m going to have to memorize twenty symbols of some weird sort. In fact,
the Maya ran a base-20 system with only three symbols representing 0, 1, and 5.
That is truly strange, but it works. If interested, the link above explains it
nicely.

For the record, from The Story of Mathematics: “The importance of astronomy and
calendar calculations in Mayan society required mathematics, and the Maya
constructed quite early a very sophisticated number system, possibly more
advanced than any other in the world at the time ….The Pre-classic Maya and
their neighbors had independently developed the concept of zero by at least as
early as 36 BCE, and we have evidence of their working with sums up to the
hundreds of millions, and with dates so large it took several lines just to
represent them. ”

Finally, the Mesoamericans invented a base-twenty abacus that would be difficult

to explain in a sentence but takes only about ten minutes to learn. It easily
and precisely expresses numbers into the hundreds of millions, though it is not
clear why the average Maya would want to do this.

The Meso Abacus, good for numbers to 20 to the 13th power.

Curious from a Stone Age people, which they essentially were.

Various sources assert that the Maya could perhaps add and subtract (they
certainly could) but could not multiply or divide. A problem with this theory is
that only four Maya documents remain, the rest having been burned by the Spanish
clergy, and societies do not carve grocery lists into monuments.

However, a densely populated, complex urban people engaged in trade with other
city-states and constructing elaborate buildings would almost have to be
administratively numerate. A Maya civil engineer building a wall twenty feet by
thirty would have little idea how many bricks he needed unless he could multiply
the number in a horizontal row by the number of rows necessary. Further, if he
needed two thousand bricks and porters brought them ten at a load, he would have
to divide two thousand by ten to order his material. Putting it simply, the said
engineer (a) needed a functioning number system, (b) had one and so (c) probably
used it.

The Wheel

It is often said that the Maya never invented the wheel. Actually they did.
Hundreds of these wheeled pull-toys for children have been found. Several
writers have commented that it is difficult to understand why the Maya were
unable to manage the mental leap to making full-sized carts. But of course they
could. Thing is, there were no animals to pull them, such as horses or donkeys.
Making a mental leap to horses does not get you a horse. Well, say some, why
didn’t they make wheeled carts and pull them?

Note that if men are used to pull a cart, they are pulling the weight of both
the cart and the load. In the absence of steel, a cart sturdy enough to bear
much weight would involve heavy wooden beams, heavy wooden axles, and heavy
wooden wheels that, being rimmed with wood, would wear out with extreme rapidity.
If the cart weighed five hundred pounds, and the cargo another five hundred,
then the human pushañullers would have to translate a thousand pounds per mile
to deliver five hundred. Dividing the load up and having the pushapullers carry
the weight individually would require much less work, and no maintenance of
wheels. Do you suppose they thought of this?

Metallurgy
Many lightly read and growly web louts assert that the Maya were a Stone Age
people. This lack of metals may explain why the Spanish so easily stole their
gold and silver.

In fact metallurgy appeared in Latin America–which of course was not then Latin–
quite
early. Iron did not appear at all.

From Pre-Colombian Ecuador

Wikipedia: “South American metal working seems to have developed in the Andean
region of modern Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina with gold and
copper being hammered and shaped into intricate objects, particularly ornaments.
Recent finds date the earliest gold work to 2155–1936 BCE. and the earliest
copper work to 1432–1132 BCE. Ice core studies in Bolivia however suggest copper
smelting may have begun as early as 2000 BCE.”

In South and Mesoamerica, gold, silver and copper in pure form or alloys were
made by lost-wax casting into intricate objects. In lost-wax casting, you make a
wax figure–a statue, bell, or ornament perhaps. You coat it with clay, leaving
small holes at top and bottom. You then pour molten metal into the top hole. The
wax melts and runs out the bottom hole, leaving the metal to harden in exactly
the shape of the original artifact. It is not three-D printing, but neither is
it primitive.

Maya Civilization Keeps Growing

The general public knows little of the Maya and, until recently, archaeologists
were not much better. This is changing. For example, some 60,000 Mayan
structures, previously unknown, were recently found in the Guatemalan rain
forest. A few snippets and link:

BBC: “Results from the research using Lidar technology, which is short for “light
detection and ranging,” suggest that Central America supported an advanced
civilization more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China….The
archaeologists were struck by the “incredible defensive features,”which included
walls, fortresses and moats….

“With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to
15 million people there,” said Mr Estrada-Belli,..Another discovery that
surprised archaeologists was the complex network of causeways linking all the
Maya cities in the area. The raised highways, allowing easy passage even during
rainy seasons, were wide enough to suggest they were heavily trafficked and used
for trade…..”

To call the Maya a Stone Age people is correct if you disregard gold and silver,
and deeply satisfying to web louts of twilit understanding, but a tad deceptive
to those who think. These were people who invented writing, hydraulic cement,
paper (as much paper-like as papyrus anyway), the wheel, the planet’s best
number system at the time, elaborate water-management systems, paved roads,
schools, astonishingly accurate astronomical observations, and densely populated
cities requiring the organized supply of food from outlying farms. This they did
as a small, almost totally isolated people in a rain forest. The Roman Empire (for
example) had the advantage of intellectual and cultural contact with many
contemporary and older civilizations–Greece, Persia, Phoenicians, and the
Hellenistic world among others, and yet did not invent a number system. In fact
Europe in its entirety did not invent one, or the wheel, or writing. Categories
more instructive for analogizing civilizations might be Pre-agricultural,
Agricultural, Pre-literate, and Literate.
Human Sacrifice

The Maya in the popular mind are thought to have been murdering, torturing
savages given to human sacrifice. This is probably because they were in fact
murdering, torturing savages given to human sacrifice. Why this is thought
especially reprehensible is a mystery. The Romans sacrificed large numbers in
the arena so that the public could enjoy watching them die, crucified large
numbers, and poured molten lead down the throats of criminals. In the European
witch hunts, sort of 1450-1750, some 500,000 were killed depending on whose
numbers you accept, mostly by burning alive. The Tudors hanged criminals, cut
them down still conscious, opened their abdomens and removed their bowels while
still alive, and had four horses attached to their arms and legs put them into
pieces. And of course everybody and his dog put entire cities to the sword, from
Joshua to Hiroshima. Despite their best efforts the Maya could not keep up with
the moderns.

The Arts

The aesthetic is a matter of taste but these to my eye appear artistically

respectable. The Maya of today do nothing in math and technology, but retain a
fine sense for design and color.

Astronomy

Again from The Story of Mathematics: The Maya “were able to measure the length
of the solar year to a far higher degree of accuracy than that used in Europe
(their
calculations produced 365.242 days, compared to the modern value of 365.242198),
as well as the length of the lunar month (their estimate was 29.5308 days,
compared to the modern value of 29.53059).”

Conclusion

It is well not to make more of a people than they were, but also not to make
less. In their Classic Period (200-900 A.D.) the Maya were far ahead of the
Nordic peoples of Europe, though they did not come close to the Greeks. (Who did?)
In the book of civilization, they belong perhaps on the same page with Egypt.
The Gauls, Huns, Hittites, and Europe outside of the Roman Empire would serve as
footnotes. Papua-New Guineans the Maya were not.