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History, The Mayan Collapse - Ruins Among the Trees

The Mayan Collapse - Ruins Among the Trees

In the year 1695, right at the end of the 17th century, a Spanish monk fled barefoot

and starving through the tropical forests of Central America.

His name was Andres de Avendano y Loyola, and along with his men he was dying of thirst

and hunger.

Their faces had been torn by thorns and his feet cut open by pieces of flint scattering

the swampy ground.

Avendano and his men had been part of a mission to the city of Tayasal, an island stronghold

that was the last independent holdout of a once mighty civilization, the Maya.

Avendano's mission had been to convince the Mayan king of Tayasal to convert to Christianity

and to accept the dominion of Spanish control, which had now spread to cover most of Central

and South America.

But Avendano's mission had failed.

The Mayan people of Tayasal had rejected him, and now Avendano and his men fled through

the jungle back to Spanish lands.

Their journey was hard and treacherous.

They climbed over hill after hill through thick forest cover, desperate for food and

water, their legs almost giving out from under them.

But then they came over the crest of one hill and saw something that stopped them in their

tracks.

It was an enormous pyramid of stone jutting out of the forest canopy, tangled with roots

and vines.

And although Avendano was weak from hunger and thirst, he still found strength enough

to approach the ruins.

There was a great variety of old buildings, and though they were very high and my strength

was little, I climbed up them, although with some trouble.

They were in the form of a convent, with the small cloisters and many living rooms all

roofed over, and arched like a wagon, and whitened inside with plaster.

It seemed to us that these buildings must stand near a settlement.

But we found ourselves, as we saw afterwards, very far from a settlement.

At the time that Avendano stumbled across this ruined city, the Mayan civilization was

a shadow of its former glory.

The invasion of the Spanish in the 16th century had spread diseases like smallpox that harrowed

the Mayan population, long before the Spanish conquistadors arrived with guns, steel blades

and war dogs to subjugate the remaining population.

Avendano had seen Mayan people living relatively simple lives on the northern coast of the

Yucatan peninsula, but what he encountered here was something different.

These were the ruins of a city that rivaled the ancient capitals of the old world in size,

magnificence and grandeur.

Avendano couldn't have known it then, but he had stumbled across the ruins of the great

Mayan capital of Tikal.

For seven centuries, Tikal had ruled a vast empire, conquered its enemies and raised monuments

of astonishing size and quality.

And Tikal wasn't alone.

It was just one of at least 40 Mayan cities that had flourished in this region, giving

birth to a thriving and colourful culture of arts and literature.

And then, over 500 years before any European first set foot on the American continent,

this complex society had collapsed.

The great city of Tikal was abandoned, along with every single other city in the area.

After this catastrophe, the forest swept in to reclaim the stones of Tikal.

Its imposing pyramids were left to crumble one by one into the earth.

And the story of exactly what happened is still one of humanity's greatest mysteries.

My name is Paul Cooper and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Every episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed

into the ashes of history.

I want to ask, what did they have in common?

What led to their fall?

What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their

world?

In this episode, I want to look at that great romantic mystery, the fall of the classic

Maya civilization.

I want to show how this great civilization grew up among environmental conditions that

no other society has ever contended with.

I want to explore the fatal flaws that lay beneath the surface of this civilization and

describe what happened after its final and cataclysmic collapse.

Despite Avendano's encounter with the ruins of Tikal, the legacy of the Mayan civilization

didn't really capture the world's attention until the early decades of the 19th century.

This is down to the work of the American writer and explorer John Lloyd Stevens and

his artist companion Frank Catherwood.

The pair had traveled together for two weeks through the deep Guatemalan interior, following

rumors that the ruins of an ancient city lay somewhere in the jungle.

They traveled in greater comfort than Avendano, but their journey was still difficult.

They were beset by mosquitoes and the constant mud of the seasonal rains.

As they rounded a bend in the river, they came across a sight that Avendano would have

recognized.

It was the top of a towering pyramid, just visible above the trees.

We ascended by large stone steps, in some places perfect and in others thrown down by

trees which had grown up between the crevices.

We followed our guide through the thick forest among half-buried fragments to fourteen monuments,

one displaced from its pedestal by enormous roots, another locked in the close embrace

of branches of trees and almost lifted out of the earth, another hurled to the ground

and bound down by huge vines and creepers.

The only sounds that disturbed the quiet of this buried city were the noise of the monkeys.

Stevens and Catherwood would go on to explore over forty Mayan sites around the Yucatan

Peninsula.

And the books Stevens wrote, illustrated with Catherwood's detailed lithographs, created

a sensation around the world.

Until then, it was thought that only old world civilizations like Egypt or Babylon had built

cities of such magnitude and elegance.

People of the time simply refused to believe that such enormous constructions had been

built by the people who now lived a relatively simple existence in Central America and called

themselves the Maya.

Nineteenth-century experts flocked to the news, proclaiming that ancient Egyptians,

Indians, Chinese or Norse explorers must have crossed the ocean from the old world and built

these towering pyramids here in the forest.

Some even suggested that they had been built by the mythical Lost Tribes of Israel or even

the inhabitants of Atlantis.

But at the time, Stevens caused something of a stir.

He was the person who had most extensively explored these ruined places, and he claimed

that these cities were indeed the product of the Mayan people.

Working our way through the thick woods, we came upon a square stone column, about fourteen

feet high and three feet wide on each side, sculptured in bold relief.

These were works of art, proving that the people who once occupied the continent of

America were not savages.

Stevens insisted that these vast ancient cities had been built up over centuries by an advanced

society indigenous to the New World.

To him, these ruins told that story clearly enough.

But of course, they also told another story.

It was the story of a catastrophe that had few precedents in human history, the dramatic

and wholesale collapse of an entire advanced society.

In the romance of the world's history, nothing ever impressed me more forcibly than the spectacle

of this once great and lovely city, overturned, desolate and lost, discovered by accident,

overgrown with trees.

It did not even have a name to distinguish it.

Today, we do know the original Mayan names of some of these cities, and that's due to

the tireless work of archaeologists who painstakingly decoded the Maya's written language.

But before we dive into describing the collapse of the classic Maya civilization, I think

it's worth pausing for a moment over how much of a miracle it is that any of this writing

still survives.

The Maya were a literate culture.

They wrote on books made of bark paper or deer skin, using reed pens and conch shells

as inkwells.

They used a rich and complex system of hieroglyphics similar to those used in Egypt, and it's the

only true writing system thought to have ever developed in the Americas.

The Maya used their writing in a sophisticated and often playful way.

I'll post some images of these hieroglyphs on Twitter and Patreon for you to see.

But after the arrival of the Europeans, the written language of the Maya was nearly eradicated.

We can place the blame for that tragedy at the feet of one particular villain, a sadistic

and fanatical Spanish bishop called Diego de Landa.

The span of de Landa's life neatly matches up to the Spanish conquest of Central America.

In 1521, three years before he was born, the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had fallen

to the Spanish.

By the time the baby de Landa arrived screaming into the world, the Spanish had already conquered

a large part of Mexico, enveloping it into a vast colonial territory that they called

New Spain.

From there, the Spanish conquistadors or conquerors moved south into the densely forested lands

of Yucatan, the lands of the Maya.

In the lands they conquered, the Spanish colonialists ruthlessly exploited the indigenous populations.

One surviving Mayan text, the Chilam Balam, records how the Mayan people felt at the time.

It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife with

guns, the beginning of strife by trampling on people with horses, the beginning of robbery

with violence, the beginning of forced deaths.

But the Mayan people, without steel or gunpowder, fought fiercely against their colonizers.

So fiercely in fact, that it took the Spanish 200 years to conquer them completely.

As the conquistadors advanced into the Yucatan, the Maya fought guerrilla campaigns in the

forests.

The fighters were protected only by padded cotton armor, armed only with stone weapons

and flint spears.

But they ambushed Spanish soldiers with great effectiveness and laid spike traps for the

Spanish horsemen.

It was into this atmosphere of insurgency that Diego de Landa walked, a young man at

the age of 25 when he first set foot in the New World.

The year was 1549.

De Landa was meticulous in his work.

He kept detailed notes about everything he saw, about the Mayan culture, language and

society, and he did so in order to better identify its weaknesses.

As a missionary, he soon earned a reputation for being fearless.

He would often venture deep into the jungle, into areas that had only recently been conquered

by the Spanish, where hatred of the Europeans was bitter.

Perhaps it was this fearlessness that meant he was eventually put in charge of bringing

the Roman Catholic faith to the Maya people.

Until then, the Spanish had exempted the Mayans from the notorious cruelty of the Spanish

Inquisitions.

But the sight of Mayan people continuing to honor their old gods disgusted the new bishop,

and De Landa soon announced the beginning of an Inquisition, the first of its kind in

the New World.

De Landa was brutal in his methods.

He tortured countless Mayan people, hanging them from their necks as a form of interrogation.

In the midst of it all, he built a great bonfire in the center of one of the last Mayan cities.

He gathered together all of the ancient books he could find, centuries of accumulated knowledge,

writings on the history of the Mayan people, their study of mathematics, astronomy, poetry

and literature, and De Landa threw these into the fire and watched as they burned.

He later wrote about this event in his memoirs.

We found a great number of books containing these letters, and as they contained but superstition

and the lies of the devil, we burned them all, which dismayed and distressed these people

greatly.

Only three Maya books are known to have survived this act.

This ancient language was nearly lost completely.

But history, as always, has something of a sense of sarcasm.

De Landa's meticulous notes about the Mayan people have survived, and in those books he

wrote down something that he called the Mayan alphabet.

It's not a complete dictionary of Mayan symbols because De Landa only asked for the letters

that already existed in Spanish.

These notes were actually crucial to the later effort to decipher the ancient writings of

the Maya.

I'll put an image from De Landa's book up on Patreon for you to see.

So this is one of the first ironies that gather around the story of the classic Maya collapse,

that much of what we know about their written language is down to the very man who tried

his hardest to eradicate it.

As more of this language is gradually decoded, we've learned a huge amount from the inscriptions

that the Maya wrote on pottery, on their plastered walls, that they carved into bone and shell,

or chipped onto the walls of their temples and palaces.

These inscriptions have transformed our understanding of the society that once ruled the Yucatan

Peninsula.

We now know that Avendano and Stevens were right, that when the Spanish arrived in the

New World, the Maya were already an ancient culture.

They had built vast cities and monuments to rival any in the Old World.

And then, like so many civilizations, their golden age had passed.

Over 500 years before the first European ever set foot on the American continent, the whole

of Mayan civilization, over 40 large cities and countless people, had collapsed.

Tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, simply disappeared from the region

and the forests crept back to cover its ruins forever.

Before we dive into discussing exactly how this collapse occurred, I think it's worth

asking, who were the Maya?

It's important to understand that they were not one people, one empire.

They were a loose collection of city-states and kingdoms clustered around the Yucatan,

right where the continents of North and South America meet.

In modern terms, that's the area of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and the very south of Mexico.

I'll put a map on Twitter and Patreon so you can see the true extent of their territory.

The Maya spoke a family of related languages and shared a cohesive culture that built stepped

pyramids, drank hot chocolate from ornately patterned vases and made headdresses of emerald

green quetzal feathers.

They were a people of contradictions, who developed a mathematics capable of calculating

dates in the millions of years, but who never invented the wheel, the arch or the pulley.

They gave themselves colorful names that drew from the natural world around them, like Lady

Sharkfin, True Magician Jaguar, Double Bird or Smoke Serpent.

Early Spanish accounts of the Maya's appearance describe the jade plugs they wore in their

ears, how they tattooed their skin with green ink and painted themselves with red and black

paint.

The Maya believed that time was circular, that history really did repeat itself and

that the future could literally be foretold by learning about the past.

They worshipped a complex pantheon of gods, including the sun god, the god of corn and

rain, the gods of the sky and the gods of the underworld who lived in deep caves and

sinkholes.

Perhaps you already have an idea of the Maya as having an insatiable appetite for human

sacrifice.

Even films like Apocalypto might have given you that idea.

But we should be cautious about how we approach that subject.

For centuries, garish stories of human sacrifice formed the cornerstone of European propaganda

and their justification for the theft of Mayan land.

Evidence shows that ritual killings did feature in Mayan society, but it was usually limited

and small-scale.

And as we've already seen, the Europeans could be just as brutal in the application of their

faith.

The Mayans famously played ball sports.

One Spanish writer called Herrera wrote one account of this sport in the New World.

The king took much delight in seeing sports at ball, which the Spaniards have since prohibited.

The ball was made of the gum of a tree that grows in hot countries.

Though hard and heavy to the hand, they did bound and fly as well as our footballs.

And if we knew nothing else about the Maya, the colossal ruins they left behind would

be enough to prove their ingenuity.

But when you acknowledge the environmental challenges the Maya faced in the forests of

Guatemala, you really appreciate the monumental achievement that their cities represent.

The Yucatan Peninsula is a shelf of limestone of a sort called karst.

It acts a little like a sponge and over millions of years, rainwater has bored deep channels

into this soft rock and filled it with holes like Swiss cheese.

There are barely any rivers here, since any rainwater that falls is immediately drained

away into the twisting warren of deep underground caves.

Instead, the water gathers in vast underground sinkholes called cenotes.

These are pools of still water surrounded by echoey cave walls, often overgrown with

vines and creepers.

These were sacred places to the Maya, places where you could access the underworld and

its gods.

But they were also crucial to this civilization's survival.

The Maya were constantly battling to preserve water and to do this, they dug vast tanks,

plastering the bottoms of the cenotes to make them watertight.

They built complex systems of water control that allowed water to flow from higher tanks

to lower and to irrigate their raised fields.

In all of this, the Maya couldn't rely on four-legged help.

In Europe and Asia, domestication of animals like the horse and ox was one great driver

of civilizational progress.

Even in the Andes, in Peru, Chile or Bolivia, the presence of the llama allowed peoples

like the Inca to carry heavy weights across long distances.

But in the Maya lowlands, the only large animal was the shy and reclusive tapir, which they

sometimes hunted for food.

All transportation was done simply on human backs, using the simple technology of a strap

that tied around the forehead.

Another challenge was the inefficiency of Maya farming.

Their staple foods like corn were very low in protein and the harsh landscape meant that

agriculture was a constant battle against the forces of tropical nature.

The soil in Yucatan is very thin, sometimes only a few centimeters deep before you reach

stone.

It easily loses its fertility or becomes washed away.

The Maya largely relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, hacking and burning the forest

away in patches in order to grow a few rounds of crops, before letting the tropical forests

rush back in to reclaim the land.

The storage of food was a problem too.

In a humid environment of Guatemala and southern Mexico, it was difficult to store corn for

more than a year before it started going moldy.

One final point before we move on is that for most of their history, the Maya were essentially

a stone-age society.

Copper working began in Mexico in the 7th century, long before contact with Europeans,

but it took several centuries to work its way down to the Mayan lowlands.

The Maya never worked iron or mixed copper with tin to make bronze.

To cut and carve stone, they used blades made of obsidian, a kind of volcanic glass that

forms an incredibly sharp cutting edge when properly worked.

So every one of the great pyramids and temples you can see today was not only constructed

without animals and pulleys, but also carved in all their ornate intricacy without metal

tools.

But despite these challenges, the Maya flourished, the only great civilization to ever arise

in the midst of such harsh conditions.

The earliest signs of the Mayan civilization began around the year 1800 BC, nearly 2000

years before the beginning of the Christian calendar.

From this time, Mayan people domesticated maize, beans, squashes and chili peppers,

as well as the cacao bean, which they used to make a rich drinking chocolate.

The inscription on one ornately patterned vase from the city of Masham, called the vase

of the seven gods, shows that chocolate was often drunk in celebration, and new groves

of trees were planted on special occasions like the birth of a young prince.

This drinking vessel for the fruit of a new grove of cacao trees.

It belongs to the smooth-skinned sprout, the young boy who listened, sun-eyed Lord Jaguar,

the owner of the trees.

The Mayan world was essentially divided into two zones, the highlands and the lowlands.

The highlands were of crucial importance to the Maya, a spine of rocky mountains covered

with pine forest that follow the line of the continental shelf.

In those cool hills, the Maya found obsidian and the greenish precious stone jade, which

they carved into marvellous trinkets.

The highlands were also home to the quetzal, a bird with bright emerald green feathers

that the Maya used to create headdresses for their kings and priests.

If you stood in these highlands with your back to the Pacific Ocean, you would see ahead

of you a flat, undulating plain stretching out into the distance.

Four hundred kilometres away, the peninsula ends at the curving Atlantic coast, broken

with bays and lagoons.

It's within this basin that all the great wealth of Mayan cities rose.

This was a network of societies that looked a little like the classical Greece of Sparta

and Athens, or Renaissance Italy.

Think of the Pope ruling in Rome, the Medici family in Florence, the Doge in Venice, different

centres of power all sharing a common culture but in constant opposition for power.

In Mayan conceptions of the universe, the gods created three worlds previous to the

current one, each of them resulting in failure.

They believed themselves to live in the fourth world.

It's true that when the Mayan cities of the classic period began to grow and thrive, there

had already been a number of rises and falls.

But through the third and fourth centuries, Mayan cities began to grow with astounding

speed.

For much of the Mayan classic period, the largest and most powerful of these was the

city of Tikal.

When the fugitive monk Avondáño stumbled across the ruins of Tikal, it's clear why

they had such an effect on him.

That's because Tikal is home to some of the most spectacular ruins in the Mayan world.

Its limestone temples tower up to a height of 64 meters or 22 stories, almost as high

as the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.

These temples were topped with enormous masks of the Jaguar sun god and originally painted

a brilliant deep red.

When making the first Star Wars film, George Lucas used Tikal as the setting of his rebel

base on a moon of the planet Yavin.

It's not hard to see why.

Today, the ruins do look otherworldly, the tips of those ancient pyramids just peeking

above the trees.

But Tikal is also one of the Mayan cities whose history we understand the best.

A long list of its rulers has been discovered and excavations have uncovered the tombs of

those same rulers.

Archaeologists now believe that this city may have held as many as 90,000 people during

its height.

But to understand the history of Tikal, we also have to introduce another huge player

in this region.

This player stands as a shadowy force behind much of what occurred in the Mayan world.

This was the city of Teotihuacan.

Teotihuacan lay over 1500 kilometers away in the Valley of Mexico.

It was a vast city of stone pyramids.

Today, much of it buried beneath the urban sprawl of Mexico City.

But in its time, it was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas.

Teotihuacan commanded a powerful military and controlled all the crucial trade networks

across the continent.

It had a monopoly over a particular kind of green obsidian that was of exceptional hardness

and quality.

In this era, it wouldn't be too far off to think of Teotihuacan as something like an

early version of the United States.

It was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, with a population estimated at 125,000 or more,

which would have made it at least the sixth largest city in the world at the time.

Like the United States in modern times, it was also fond of intervening in the politics

of its southern neighbors.

In the early centuries of the first millennium, Teotihuacan began aggressively expanding

its sphere of influence, extending trade routes far south into the Mayan lands, establishing

embassies in faraway cities, and spreading that shining green obsidian far into the forests

of Central America.

The Mayan city of Tikal came under the influence of Teotihuacan in the 4th century AD.

It's not clear if this was a military conquest, a palace coup, or a diplomatic intervention,

but we do know that a young ruler, Yash-nun-ahin, which means curl-nose, rose to power in Tikal

with the apparent help of this distant superpower.

One stone carving in Tikal shows King Curl-nose being crowned, while Mexican soldiers look

on carrying distinctive dart throwers.

In the burial tomb of Curl-nose, artifacts have also been found carved out of that tell-tale

green obsidian that everywhere gives away the influence of Teotihuacan.

One remarkable image, carved on a pot from Tikal, shows just how this cultural exchange

happened.

On the left of the scene, we see a stepped pyramid in the Mayan style.

This is Tikal, and on the right is a temple of Mexican design, with a great fanned crown

at its top.

This is Teotihuacan.

From this Mexican temple, four foreign soldiers come, carrying those dart throwers, along

with vases of boxes full of gifts.

In the center, they build a temple together that has stepped sides like the Mayan temples,

but a fanned crown on top like the Mexican.

It's a clear image of collaboration and partnership, and might even show the construction of an

embassy in Tikal.

Is this harmonious image an accurate portrayal of the situation?

We don't know, but under the influence of Teotihuacan, Tikal grew in wealth and power

until it was the most powerful city in the Mayan world.

Its empire at its greatest height contained a population of half a million people.

One useful hieroglyphic in the Mayan system is one called Yahau.

It means his lord, and when we see it in the inscriptions of one city talking about another,

we know that this city has been subjugated.

The other city has become their ahau, or lord.

Around the time that Tikal started its partnership with Teotihuacan, its neighbors began using

this phrase to describe its kings.

Tikal's soldiers fanned out across the Mayan world, armed with weapons made of that green

Teotihuacan obsidian, and city after city fell under its banner.

It was the beginnings of a true empire, and for a while it looked like Tikal's plan to

rule the Mayan lowlands might have worked.

That is, were it not for one very important thing in their way.

It was their great rival, the city of Calakmul.

Calakmul was a city with a very distinctive character.

Like Tikal, it too was building an empire.

In every dominion it conquered, Calakmul's people marked the site with its emblem, a

snakehead, which in the Mayan script makes the sound khan.

Its lords called themselves Kul Khan Ahau, or the Lords of the Snake, and I'll put an

image of this glyph on Patreon for you to see.

Another interesting feature of Calakmul is the emphasis it put on the female line of

its royalty.

Whereas the inscriptions in Tikal only speak about kings, those in Calakmul mention the

joint rule of a king and a queen.

Calakmul was proud of its roots, which it traced back to the ancient Maya of the pre-classic

period.

So while Tikal had a kind of international outlook, allied with the distant superpower

Teotihuacan, it seems the people of Calakmul saw themselves as the true inheritors of the

Maya legacy.

And Calakmul was a powerful city too.

It was surrounded by a complex system of canals and its many buildings are tightly packed,

clustered like the skyscrapers of a modern city.

But in the early centuries of the classic period, Calakmul was outmatched by the might

of Tikal, swollen as it was by the riches of Teotihuacan.

The rulers of Calakmul, the so-called Lords of the Snake, must have calculated that the

only way to challenge the supremacy of Tikal was to outplay them in the game of strategy.

Calakmul set out on a centuries-long game of chess with their rivals.

They slowly gathered the small states that surrounded Tikal into a network of allies,

threatening Tikal's trade routes and supply lines, slowly suffocating it.

It was a kind of cold war and for this reason, the snake stones carved by Calakmul are by

far the most numerous of all the Mayan city-states.

They appear right across the Mayan world and often in places that for Tikal would have

proven pretty inconvenient, threatening their trade routes and menacing their farmland.

The strategy, although slow, was a success.

From the second half of the 6th century AD, Calakmul gained the upper hand.

The distant power of Teotihuacan fell under mysterious circumstances and now Tikal was

left all alone, surrounded by its enemies.

But it wasn't until the rule of one particular king, a man known as Double Bird, that Tikal's

fortunes would really take a turn for the worse.

Double Bird seems to have been particularly bad at the game of politics and we know this

because his actions would lose the city of Tikal, one of its key allies in the region,

a city known today as Caracol.

Caracol was once one of Tikal's underlings.

As part of its service, it would have paid tribute in the form of food and valuables,

it would have sent soldiers to fight for Tikal in its wars and workers to build its temples.

At least in the year 553, that's what Caracol still was, but it's possible that the forked

tongue of Calakmul was already beginning to erode this alliance.

In any case, the king of Tikal, Double Bird, wouldn't help matters.

I have to stop here for a moment and point out that we understand very little about warfare

in the Mayan world.

The Maya often undertook low-level skirmishes and their wars seem to have served a largely

ceremonial and symbolic function.

These wars, known as axe wars, would have involved perhaps only a few hundred fighters

and their main purpose seems to have been to capture prisoners for sacrifice to the

gods, to decapitate an important noble, hence axe war, and presumably to bring back plunder

and glory to the capital.

The Mayans in general were not interested in wars of conquest but just occasionally,

a different kind of war was undertaken which had a more brutal and all-encompassing nature.

These wars are referred to in the Mayan inscriptions as star wars.

As far as I can tell, the previous connection to George Lucas is a coincidence.

The name star war comes from a specific type of glyph used in the Maya script which depicts

a star showering the earth with fire.

This war seems to have been something quite rare in the Maya world, a war of total conquest

and destruction.

The inscriptions, as always, are hard to decipher but it seems that in the year 556, the king

of Tikal, Double Bird, embarked on an axe war, a low-level attack against his former

ally, the city of Caracol.

His soldiers would have swept into its territory wearing padded cotton armor, wielding flint

spears and clubs studded with blades of green obsidian.

They would have burned villages inside Caracol's sphere of influence, robbed anything they

could get away with and kidnapped a number of its citizens who they would later have

sacrificed at one of Tikal's temples.

Double Bird's reasons for ordering this attack are unclear.

It could have been a way of punishing some kind of insult from Caracol.

Perhaps Caracol hadn't been fulfilling the duties expected of it as an underling, or

Tikal feared that it was falling under the influence of its great enemy, Calakmul.

Whatever the reason, the rulers of Caracol didn't take this axe war in good humor.

In retaliation, they announced the beginning of a true war, a star war, against their former

masters in Tikal.

We can assume that Calakmul gave every help it could to Tikal's enemies.

It lived up to its reputation as the kingdom of the snake, putting its pieces into place

for centuries, building a network of allies that surrounded Tikal and cut off its supply

routes, wrapping itself around Tikal and choking the life from the once great city.

And now it seems that crushing grip tightened.

In the year 562, the once great city of Tikal was surrounded and besieged.

Its defenses were overwhelmed and its enemies swept into the city, smashing shrines and

temples.

Tikal's enemies uprooted the stone monuments proclaiming the achievements of its rulers,

broke them and buried their pieces.

They vandalized carvings of its kings, lopping off the heads of its sculptures, chipping

at their faces with stone tools.

And the destruction was devastating.

For the next century, Tikal's population stopped growing.

For a hundred years, no stone carvings or great public monuments were erected.

Its people were buried with only meager possessions and production of painted pottery ground to

a halt.

The fate of Tikal's king, Double Bird, is unknown.

He was probably taken back to Karakol or Calakmul and executed at the top of a pyramid.

A new king was put in place in Tikal, a man named Animal Skull.

And although we know almost nothing about him, inscriptions in his tomb show that he

was not the son of Double Bird.

For the next century, Kalakmul and not Tikal would rule the Yucatan.

But this great Mayan rivalry would go on.

Tikal would regain the upper hand and then lose it.

Conflicts between the two cities' allies would blaze on for generations.

But it wasn't war that caused the collapse of the Mayan world, at least not entirely.

To get to the root cause of this collapse, we will have to look at how Mayan society

structured itself, the fatal flaws built into its civilization, and the tensions and conflicts

that would ultimately tear it apart.

One way that we can track the progress of the Mayan collapse is by looking at the number

of inscriptions they left.

When times were good, the Maya erected new temples, palaces, and carved monuments.

So we can see that around the year 500, as the classic Mayan period just got started,

the number of dated monuments was quite low.

In the city of Copan, for instance, there were only 10 built in the year 514.

But as the years went by and Mayan society grew, the number of monuments in Copan skyrockets.

It increased to 20 per year just a century later.

By the year 750, over 40 monuments were being constructed each year.

But then the collapse set in.

After this, the number of dated monuments begins to falter.

Only 50 years later, in the year 800, only 10 monuments were built.

In the year 900, the construction of new monuments had ended.

From the year 800 onwards, all across the Mayan lowland, these inscriptions start to

die out, faltering like a failing radio signal and then crackling out into silence.

Each of these cities goes out one by one like lights blinking out in the dark.

The process began in the southwest, along the Uzamasinta River.

At the city of Bonampak, the last date of an inscription is the year 792.

The city of Yashilan fell silent in the year 808.

From there, this wave of doom washed over the whole of the Maya lowlands.

The great snake city of Calakmul went silent after the year 810 and Copan followed in 822,

Tikal held out another 70 years after the fall of its great rival, but it too finally

fell into the darkness in the year 889.

The last Maya inscription of all, in the remote city of Tonina, comes in the year 909.

And the strange thing is, none of these inscriptions give any sense that anything is wrong.

There are no prophecies of doom or accounts of terrible events.

Maya art doesn't decline either, but remains elaborate and highly skilled to the end.

So what happened?

How could this vibrant and powerful culture collapse so suddenly and so completely, leaving

not a single warning behind?

As with the fall of any civilization, the collapse of the Maya wasn't a simple event.

It's hard to point to any one cause and form a simple, one thing leads to another narrative.

All of the environmental stresses we discussed earlier meant that to succeed in such a harsh

landscape, Mayan society, like any society, had to accumulate a number of stresses and

imbalances.

Under extreme stress, these would form into fractures and with sufficient pressure, they

would splinter along the whole length of their world.

Of these stresses, surely the most pressing was the capacity of the Maya to feed their

booming population.

In order for any society to work, farmers need to produce enough food to feed themselves

and also enough to feed all the people in the society who aren't farmers.

The soldiers and carpenters and masons and of course, the king and all his nobles.

In a hyper-efficient modern economy like the United States, less than 2% of the population

work on farms.

Each farmer in America feeds over 150 people as well as themselves, freeing up a huge proportion

of the population to do other things.

But for the Maya, who used slash and burn agriculture and grew low-protein crops, each

farmer could feed perhaps five other people.

As the end of the 8th century neared, the Mayan population was booming.

In Tikal, for instance, the population in the city centre was 65,000, with a further

30,000 in the outskirts.

There were perhaps as many as 800 people living per square kilometre and they began living

in hastily constructed wooden buildings piled on top of one another.

Today, when we walk through the spacious plazas and temples of the Mayan cities, it's hard

to imagine that those empty overgrown terraces were once teeming with dense residential populations.

And as the population of the Maya lowlands exploded, the demands on its agriculture only

increased.

Another huge problem was deforestation.

Because of what we've seen of the overgrown ruins of Mayan temples, we have a romantic

idea of the Maya as a people who lived out their lives beneath the jungle canopy.

But by the end of the Classic Period, the Maya lowlands had been more or less completely

deforested.

Studies of pollen samples found in lake beds and swamps in the region show that by the

end of the 8th century, hardly any forest remained in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The Maya had cut down the trees not only in their cities, but between them as well.

So if you stood on top of one of the great temples of Tikal or Calakmul around the year

800, you wouldn't see the thick forest canopy you see today.

You would have seen houses and streets stretching out in every direction and beyond that, people

toiling in the fields.

The Maya used some trees for construction, especially the extremely hard wood sapodilla,

which is naturally resistant to termites.

But most of the trees would have been used for burning.

In order to create lime and mortar for the construction of their great temples and the

plaster that lavishly coated them, the Maya burned limestone in great pits.

This intensive industrial process would have used up a great deal of the forests and the

forest land would then have been given over to agriculture.

But you can't grow crops on a patch of soil endlessly.

The nutrients and minerals that plants depend on soon get depleted unless the soil is given

time to rest.

The Maya, just like slash and burn farmers today, must have understood that the soil

needs to be given long fallow periods between growing.

The ground needs to return to nature to regain its nutrition.

But as the demand for food from the population increased, it's easy to imagine that the farmers

were placed under increasing pressure.

With the population growing, the rulers of these cities may have ordered their farmers

to grow crops on the same soil again and again, with no fallow periods allowed.

It would have been a short-sighted strategy that courted disaster in exchange for short-term

gains.

But at this point, the Maya may have had little choice.

Another huge factor is the role of drought.

As we've discussed, one of the greatest challenges the Maya faced was the collection and storage

of water.

And the climate of the Yucatan is such that variations in annual rainfall can be enormous.

Droughts were a common fact of life, and in fact a large part of Mayan infrastructure

was designed around planning for them and mitigating their effects.

But every system has its limits.

Archaeologists who've looked at sediment in the region estimate that in the year 760,

the Yucatan Peninsula suffered its worst drought in 7,000 years.

This was caused, it seems, by something the Maya would have appreciated all too well,

the awesome power of the sun.

As the Maya knew, the sun is a fickle god.

The radiation it gives out is not constant.

It's subject to variation going through peaks and troughs.

Geographic scores taken in Greenland confirm that levels of solar radiation around this

time reached lows that hadn't been seen for millennia.

This caused a harsh, dry cold to descend over the northern hemisphere and global weather

systems shifted northwards.

All the rain that arrives on the Mayan lowlands comes from the Atlantic on the trade winds,

bands of air that move in predictable patterns across the Atlantic Ocean.

With a northward shift of these winds, a brutal drought would descend on the Maya, and this

event coincides neatly with the Great Collapse.

Archaeologist Betty Meggers has combined physics and anthropology to propose a fascinating

theory.

She asks us to think about human societies as simple thermodynamic systems.

For Meggers, our societies are like machines or organisms.

They require a strong, stable form of energy to flow through them.

She argues that this energy is what allows the system to organize itself into increasingly

complex forms.

Increased complexity allows greater collection of energy, and so the society grows.

But if the strong flow of energy is cut off to a system, that system then collapses to

a level of organization that can be supported with the energy that remains.

She puts this theory in simple terms.

If an increase in energy resources or their control results in increased cultural complexity,

a decline in energy resources should result in a decline in cultural complexity.

And if the solar radiation theory is correct, it might be worth us putting Meggers' theories

to work.

Human society was suddenly unable to maintain its complexity as a result of the sun's sudden

drop in radiation, and it imploded.

In some places, the collapse was so drastic that the entire area was abandoned.

In the Chilam Balam, a surviving Mayan text from the post-contact era, you can almost

hear the echoes of some recognition, some authentic memory of what might have happened

during this time.

When our rulers increased in numbers, then they introduced a drought.

The hooves of the animals burnt, the seashore burnt, a sea of misery.

So it was said, so it was said on high.

Then the face of the sun was eaten.

Then the face of the sun was darkened.

Then its face was extinguished.

One site where we have a detailed understanding of exactly what happened during the collapse

is the city of Copan, now in western Honduras.

Copan was a small but densely populated city, built in a narrow and steep-sided river valley

lined with pine forests.

Its people loved sports, it had the largest ball court of any classical Maya city, and

it used the symbol of the leaf-nosed bat as its emblem on inscriptions.

For much of its history, it was a close ally of Tikal and fought wars on its behalf.

Copan was a trading outpost, perfectly positioned to profit from the trade in obsidian, jade

and quetzal feathers coming down from the hills.

In the fertile alluvial silt of the valley floor, the Mayans could feed themselves on

a thriving agriculture, growing their staples of corn, beans and chili peppers.

But the soil on the hills around Copan is less fertile.

It's more acidic and prone to erosion if cultivated for long periods.

Even today, modern farmers can grow barely a third of the amount of corn in the hills

when compared to the valley floor.

From the 5th century onwards, fueled by this fertile soil and trade, the population of

Copan boomed.

By the year 800, it may have reached as much as 30,000 people, living in this small area

of only about 10 square miles.

Between the years 650 and 750, construction of royal palaces and monuments was especially

frenzied, and nobles other than the king even began erecting their own palaces.

This all points to a period of thriving economic success, but the opulent life of the nobles

had to be supported by the hard work of Copan's farmers.

As Copan grew through the 5th and 6th centuries, it expanded to fill the bottom of the river

valley.

But as the year 650 came around, space was beginning to run out.

After that, people began to build their homes on the valley sides.

It must have looked a little like a Brazilian favela today, houses climbing on top of each

other on the slopes, but these dwellings were inhabited only for about a century.

The reason for that can be seen in the layer of sediment that today covers their floors.

As the people built up the mountainsides, the ground was eroding.

Some samples taken around this time show that the pine forests that once covered these

hills had been gradually cut down.

As these trees disappeared, their roots no longer held together the fragile soils on

the valley sides and the earth would now be swept away by the rains.

This acidic, low-nutrient soil would have leached down into the valley bottom, reducing

its fertility as well.

As the hills were slowly abandoned, the burden of feeding all of Copan's people would have

fallen increasingly on the valley bottom.

The fields would now need to be worked harder than ever in order to avoid famine and this

would have reduced their fertility even further.

Farmers would have likely fought over the last remaining pockets of land.

Analysis of skeletal remains from Copan paints a chilling picture.

From the year 650 onwards, signs of disease and malnutrition among its residents increased.

Their bones became porous and weak, their teeth showed increased stress lines.

These signs of ill health showed up in the graves of rich nobles and kings too, although

of course the health of the commoners was much worse.

When times were hard in Copan, it's likely that the common people would have blamed their

rulers.

In the Chilam Balam, one of the few surviving Maya texts, we can see this connection between

the king and the natural world explicitly.

This is the first question which will be asked of the chiefs.

He shall ask them for his food.

Bring the sun, thus it is said to the chiefs.

Bring the sun, my son.

Bear it on the palm of your hand to my plate.

The Mayan system of rulership was based on an implicit promise.

You support the king's lifestyle and he will protect you.

He will keep the gods happy, the sun shining and the crops growing.

If the king was seen to break that promise, the people may have decided that he had to go.

The last we hear from a king of Copan is in the year 822 with a single inscription.

It was carved when Copan's last known king, a man called Ukit Tuk, came to the throne,

apparently during a period of violence and chaos.

He began the carving of a four-sided monument just like his predecessors, but it was never

finished.

One side shows him being crowned, the next is half-carved, but the remaining two sides

are blank.

It's as if the carver just got up one day in the middle of his job and left.

Whoever Ukit Tuk was, he couldn't muster enough support to keep the idea of royalty alive.

Three decades later, in the year 850, the royal palace of Copan was burned and history

in that city came to an end.

With the collapse of royal authority, a time of chaos followed in Copan.

But the population didn't leave all at once.

In the year 950, a full century after the burning of the royal palace, there were still

roughly 15,000 people living in the valley bottom, about half the number at its height.

But the population continued to dwindle and by the 12th century, there is no sign of any

inhabitation in the valley.

Some samples show that past this point, the forests crept back to recover the ruins of

Copan.

At Tikal, we don't have the same level of detail, but we can trace the collapse of this

great city by looking at its monuments and inscriptions.

During the mid-8th century, Tikal had once again gained the upper hand over its enemy

Calakmul.

With its return to glory, Tikal boomed to an impressive height.

As it consolidated its power over the region and gathered all its wayward allies back under

its protective umbrella, Tikal also embarked on a burst of construction the likes of which

it had never seen.

Almost all of Tikal's great temples and pyramids date from the second half of this century.

But as the year 800 rolled around, all of that would come to an end.

By the mid-800s, it's clear Tikal was coming apart.

Its vital allies were now putting up monuments of their own, proclaiming themselves kings

of smaller provinces rather than sworn servants of the great king in Tikal.

Monuments began going up in Washakhtun first, asserting their independence from Tikal, and

in Ishlu and Jimbal in the north, the same thing was happening.

Tikal's dominion was fracturing into a mass of small kingdoms.

What's worse, the kings of these kingdoms often referred to themselves on their carvings

as the Holy Lord of Tikal.

By the year 900, there was no longer a king in Tikal.

There were no longer any people either.

The city seems to have fallen into chaos and the population drifted away.

While the palaces and temples of Tikal were abandoned, there's evidence that poor people

in the city's outer districts moved in to occupy them.

It must have been a strange feeling for these Maya peasants, entering the royal palace for

the first time and finding it abandoned.

They must have walked its halls in awe and run their hands along its richly painted walls

and carved stones.

These common people seem to have squatted in the abandoned royal palaces for a century

or more after the fall of Tikal.

We can see their traces in a layer of what's called midden, scraps of broken pottery, piles

of rubbish now piling high in the corridors of the once opulent halls.

These common people also scratched graffiti into the plastered walls of these palaces,

images of temples and animals, caricatures of people they knew.

I'll post some of these images on Patreon for you to see.

But the people who stayed here seem to have continued to revere the great temples and

holy palaces of the city.

They continued to worship the stone monuments of bygone kings and even moved them at times

to more convenient places.

But it seems they weren't able to read what the inscriptions said.

Some of the monuments they moved contained writing and the people who moved them put

them back into place upside down.

This pattern was repeated around the Mayan lowlands where common people made journeys

into the abandoned cities to pay respects to the slumbering gods.

But one by one, all of the cities in the Mayan lowlands were abandoned.

It may give you a sense of the scale of the catastrophe and the depth of the damage done

to the environment, that no attempt was made at a single one of these cities to ever re-occupy

them.

The forests of the Maya lowlands grew back and it's thought that when the Spanish arrived

at the end of the 15th century, the trees they saw covering the land had only just recovered

from that time.

In all of this, a picture does begin to emerge of what happened during the classic Maya collapse.

Damage to the environment and a period of climate change combined to cause a failure

of agriculture, which led to strains that the Maya political system simply couldn't

manage.

People finally turned against their rulers and the hierarchy of society collapsed, reverting

to chaotic and simple forms of life.

Collapsing cities would have sent refugees fleeing to other cities nearby, exacerbating

their own problems and causing a chain reaction of collapse that spread like a fire across

the whole region.

Perhaps if the Maya had ever formed a unified government, some of these crises could have

been averted.

But as the large empires of Tikal and Calakmul atomized and came apart, each city became

its own small kingdom.

With agriculture failing everywhere, the only way for some of these kingdoms to survive

was to take what they needed from their neighbors.

Against a backdrop of drought and famine, a hundred bitter wars over scarce resources

began.

At the site of Piedras Negras, archaeologists have found evidence of buildings being burned

during this time and monuments vandalized.

At Yaxchilan, the central part of the city was hastily fortified with rough stone walls,

built using stones taken from the surrounding temples and palaces.

It was a last, desperate defense.

Spear and javelin heads have also been found here, littering the ground in great numbers,

pointing to a violent and bloody battle.

It seems that as the fabric of Mayan society came apart, its people turned against one

another and a violent struggle for survival turned the Mayan lowlands into a bloodbath.

Today, the crumbling pyramids and cities of the Maya are still being uncovered.

In 2015, a geographical feature in Tonina that was thought to be a hill turned out to

be a Mayan pyramid and recent measurements have shown it to be one of the largest ever

built.

At 75 meters tall, it rivals the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan to be the tallest pre-Columbian

building in the Americas.

The ongoing battle to decipher the Mayan inscriptions continues.

Today, we understand a great deal of what we read on the stones of the Mayan temples,

but so much more remains untranslated.

One thing I find particularly moving is to read the texts of the post-contact Maya, who

had been invaded and ravaged by European settlers, whose lands were taken away, whose language

and history had been erased.

In the time after the Spanish arrival, Mayan people tried to hold together some vestiges

of their great tradition.

They passed it down by word of mouth from generation to generation, sometimes in secret,

and some of these texts survive to this day.

But it's a strange kind of survival.

The complex webs of reference, mythology and symbolism no longer point to anything.

All the associations and stories they once referred to are forgotten.

All the meanings they would have once carried have been lost.

And so, these texts remain, much as the crumbling stone pyramids do.

They stand as a silent testament to the loss of a whole world that will never again return.

I want to end the episode by listening to an extract from one of those texts called

The Ritual of the Bacchabs.

It's an incantation written down by a Mayan shaman after being passed down through the

ages, from the golden age of his civilization.

Today, although we know the meaning of most of the words, we can barely understand any

of what the text means.

As you listen, I want you to think about what it must have felt like to watch this great

civilization fall, to watch its great monuments, its palaces and ball courts crumble into the

earth.

Imagine the feeling of doom that must have crept over the whole world, over the wide

plains stripped of their trees and scorched with the smoke of burning lime, over the hills

and mountains where the quetzal birds still called, and over the empty pyramids, slowly

but unstoppably crumbling into the earth.

Can-a-hao, they say, is the creator.

Can-a-hao, they say, is the darkness.

Coming from the fifth level of the sky, the head of the dragonfly, the head covering its

worms, it bit the hand of the unfettered creator.

The unfettered darkness, it licked the blood in the sweat bath, it licked the blood in

the stone hut.

Now then, throw it to the demented creator, to the demented darkness.

Thank you for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

I've been Paul Cooper.

I'd like to thank all my voice actors for this episode.

Jake Barrett-Mills, Helena Bacon, Brian Chiobe, and Peter Preciado.

And special thanks to Kevin McCloyd for all other music played on this episode.

Do check out the rest of his work on incompetech.com.

I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what

you thought.

You can follow me at PaulMMCooper.

And if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well

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You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you also let me dedicate more time

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today.

For now, all the best, and thanks for listening.

The Mayan Collapse - Ruins Among the Trees El|Maya|Colapso|Ruinas|Entre|los|Árboles Der Zusammenbruch der Maya - Ruinen unter den Bäumen Il crollo dei Maya - Rovine tra gli alberi マヤの崩壊 - 木立の中の遺跡 O colapso dos maias - Ruínas entre as árvores Коллапс майя - руины среди деревьев 玛雅文明的衰落——树林中的遗迹瑪雅崩潰——樹林中的廢墟 El Colapso Maya - Ruinas Entre los Árboles

In the year 1695, right at the end of the 17th century, a Spanish monk fled barefoot En|el|año|justo|en|el|final|de|el|17|siglo|un|español|monje|huyó|descalzo 在1695年，就在17世纪末，一位西班牙修士赤脚逃离 En el año 1695, justo al final del siglo XVII, un monje español huyó descalzo

His name was Andres de Avendano y Loyola, and along with his men he was dying of thirst |||||Авендано|||||||||||| su|nombre|fue|Andrés|de|Avendano|y|Loyola|y|junto|con|sus|hombres|él|estaba|muriendo|de|sed 他的名字是安德烈斯·德·阿文达诺·伊·洛约拉，他和他的人口渴而快要死了 Su nombre era Andrés de Avendano y Loyola, y junto con sus hombres estaba muriendo de sed.

and hunger. y|hambre 和饥饿。 y hambre.

the swampy ground. el|pantanoso|suelo por el terreno pantanoso.

Avendano and his men had been part of a mission to the city of Tayasal, an island stronghold Авендано||||||||||||||||| Avendano|y|sus|hombres|habían|estado|parte|de|una|misión|a|la|ciudad|de|Tayasal|un|isla|bastión Avendano y sus hombres habían sido parte de una misión a la ciudad de Tayasal, un bastión insular.

and South America. y|Sur|América y Sudamérica.

But Avendano's mission had failed. pero|de Avendano|misión|había|fracasado Pero la misión de Avendano había fracasado.

But then they came over the crest of one hill and saw something that stopped them in their Pero|entonces|ellos|llegaron|sobre|la|cima|de|una|colina|y|vieron|algo|que|detuvo|ellos|| Pero luego llegaron a la cima de una colina y vieron algo que los detuvo en sus

tracks. huellas pasos.

and vines. y|vides y vides.

to approach the ruins. para|acercarse|las|ruinas para acercarse a las ruinas.

They were in the form of a convent, with the small cloisters and many living rooms all ellos|estaban|en|la|forma|de|un|convento|con|los|pequeños|claustros|y|muchas|habitaciones|salas|todas Tenían la forma de un convento, con los pequeños claustros y muchas salas de estar, todas

roofed over, and arched like a wagon, and whitened inside with plaster. cubiertas, y arqueadas como una carreta, y blanqueadas por dentro con yeso.

These were the ruins of a city that rivaled the ancient capitals of the old world in size, estas|eran|las|ruinas|de|una|ciudad|que|rivalizaba|las|antiguas|capitales|de|el|viejo|mundo|en|tamaño Estas eran las ruinas de una ciudad que rivalizaba en tamaño,

magnificence and grandeur. magnificencia|y|grandeza magnificencia y grandeza con las antiguas capitales del viejo mundo.

Mayan capital of Tikal. maya|capital|de|Tikal La capital maya de Tikal.

of astonishing size and quality. de|asombroso|tamaño|y|calidad de asombrosa tamaño y calidad.

And Tikal wasn't alone. y|Tikal|no estaba|solo Y Tikal no estaba sola.

birth to a thriving and colourful culture of arts and literature. nacimiento|a|una|próspera|y|colorida|cultura|de|artes|y|literatura nacimiento a una cultura vibrante y colorida de artes y literatura.

this complex society had collapsed. esta|compleja|sociedad|había|colapsado esta compleja sociedad había colapsado.

Its imposing pyramids were left to crumble one by one into the earth. sus|imponentes|pirámides|fueron|dejadas|a|desmoronarse|una|por|una|en|la|tierra Sus imponentes pirámides fueron dejadas para desmoronarse una por una en la tierra.

And the story of exactly what happened is still one of humanity's greatest mysteries. y|la|historia|de|exactamente|qué|sucedió|es|todavía|una|de|la humanidad|más grandes|misterios Y la historia de lo que exactamente sucedió sigue siendo uno de los mayores misterios de la humanidad.

Every episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed cada|episodio|yo|miro|a|una|civilización|de|el|pasado|que|ascendió|a|gloria|y|luego|colapsó En cada episodio, examino una civilización del pasado que alcanzó la gloria y luego colapsó

into the ashes of history. en|las|cenizas|de|historia en las cenizas de la historia.

What led to their fall? qué|llevó|a|su|caída ¿Qué llevó a su caída?

What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their qué|verbo auxiliar|eso|sintió|como|a|ser|un|persona|viva|en|el|tiempo|que|presenció|el|fin|de|su ¿Cómo se sintió ser una persona viva en ese momento que presenció el fin de su

world? mundo?

In this episode, I want to look at that great romantic mystery, the fall of the classic En este episodio, quiero analizar ese gran misterio romántico, la caída de lo clásico.

Maya civilization. Maya|civilización Civilización maya.

Despite Avendano's encounter with the ruins of Tikal, the legacy of the Mayan civilization a pesar de|Avendano|encuentro|con|las|ruinas|de|Tikal|el|legado|de|la|maya|civilización A pesar del encuentro de Avendano con las ruinas de Tikal, el legado de la civilización maya

his artist companion Frank Catherwood. su|artista|compañero|Frank|Catherwood su compañero artista Frank Catherwood.

The pair had traveled together for two weeks through the deep Guatemalan interior, following el||había|viajado|juntos|por|dos|semanas|por|el|profundo|guatemalteco|interior|siguiendo La pareja había viajado junta durante dos semanas a través del profundo interior de Guatemala, siguiendo

rumors that the ruins of an ancient city lay somewhere in the jungle. rumores|que|las|ruinas|de|una|antigua|ciudad|yacía|en algún lugar|en|la|jungla rumores de que las ruinas de una ciudad antigua se encontraban en algún lugar de la jungla.

As they rounded a bend in the river, they came across a sight that Avendano would have Al|ellos|doblaron|una|curva|en|el|río|ellos|llegaron|a|un|vista|que|Avendano|habría|tenido Al doblar una curva en el río, se encontraron con una vista que Avendano habría

recognized. reconocido.

It was the top of a towering pyramid, just visible above the trees. Era la cima de una pirámide imponente, apenas visible sobre los árboles.

We followed our guide through the thick forest among half-buried fragments to fourteen monuments, nosotros|seguimos|nuestro|guía|a través de|el|denso|bosque|entre|||fragmentos|a|catorce|monumentos Seguimos a nuestro guía a través del denso bosque entre fragmentos medio enterrados hasta catorce monumentos,

Peninsula. Peninsula Península.

a sensation around the world. una|sensación|alrededor|del|mundo una sensación en todo el mundo.

cities of such magnitude and elegance. ciudades|de|tal|magnitud|y|elegancia ciudades de tal magnitud y elegancia.

themselves the Maya. a sí mismos|los|mayas a sí mismos los mayas.

the inhabitants of Atlantis. los|habitantes|de|Atlántida los habitantes de Atlántida.

feet high and three feet wide on each side, sculptured in bold relief. pies de altura y tres pies de ancho en cada lado, esculpida en alto relieve.

These were works of art, proving that the people who once occupied the continent of Estas eran obras de arte, que demostraban que las personas que una vez ocuparon el continente de

America were not savages. |||salvajes América no eran salvajes.

society indigenous to the New World. ||a||| indígena del Nuevo Mundo.

To him, these ruins told that story clearly enough. ||||contaron||historia|| Para él, estas ruinas contaban esa historia con suficiente claridad.

But of course, they also told another story. Pero, por supuesto, también contaban otra historia.

It was the story of a catastrophe that had few precedents in human history, the dramatic Eso|fue|la|historia|de|una|catástrofe|que|tuvo|pocos|precedentes|en|la humanidad|historia|el|dramático Era la historia de una catástrofe que tuvo pocos precedentes en la historia humana, el dramático

In the romance of the world's history, nothing ever impressed me more forcibly than the spectacle en|la|romance|de|la|mundo|historia|nada|jamás|impresionó|me|más|fuertemente|que|el|espectáculo En el romance de la historia del mundo, nada me impresionó jamás más fuertemente que el espectáculo

overgrown with trees. cubierto|con|árboles cubierto de árboles.

it's worth pausing for a moment over how much of a miracle it is that any of this writing es|vale|pausar|por|un|momento|sobre|cuán|mucho|de|un|milagro|eso|es|que|cualquiera|de|esta|escritura que vale la pena detenerse un momento a pensar en cuánto es un milagro que cualquiera de esta escritura

still survives. todavía|sobrevive siga sobreviviendo.

as inkwells. como|tinteros como tinteros.

only true writing system thought to have ever developed in the Americas. único sistema de escritura verdadero que se cree que se ha desarrollado en las Américas.

But after the arrival of the Europeans, the written language of the Maya was nearly eradicated. pero|después|la|llegada|de|los|europeos|el|escrito|lenguaje|de|los|mayas|fue|casi|erradicado Pero después de la llegada de los europeos, el lenguaje escrito de los mayas fue casi erradicado.

We can place the blame for that tragedy at the feet of one particular villain, a sadistic nosotros|podemos|poner|la|culpa|por|esa|tragedia|a|los|pies|de|un|particular|villano|un|sádico Podemos culpar de esa tragedia a un villano en particular, un sádico.

to the Spanish. a|los|españoles ante los españoles.

By the time the baby de Landa arrived screaming into the world, the Spanish had already conquered para|el|tiempo|el|bebé|de|Landa|llegó|gritando|al|el|mundo|los|españoles|habían|ya|conquistado Cuando el bebé de Landa llegó gritando al mundo, los españoles ya habían conquistado

New Spain. Nueva|España Nueva España.

of Yucatan, the lands of the Maya. de|Yucatán|las|tierras|de|los|mayas de Yucatán, las tierras de los mayas.

It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife with eso|fue|el|comienzo|de|tributo|el|comienzo|de|iglesia|cuotas|el|comienzo|de|conflicto|con Era el comienzo del tributo, el comienzo de las contribuciones a la iglesia, el comienzo de la discordia con

forests. bosque.

The fighters were protected only by padded cotton armor, armed only with stone weapons Los combatientes estaban protegidos solo por armaduras de algodón acolchado, armados solo con armas de piedra

and flint spears. y|sílex|lanzas y lanzas de sílex.

Spanish horsemen. españoles|jinetes caballeros españoles.

the age of 25 when he first set foot in the New World. 25 años cuando puso un pie por primera vez en el Nuevo Mundo.

The year was 1549. El|año|fue El año era 1549.

De Landa was meticulous in his work. De|Landa|fue|meticuloso|en|su|trabajo De Landa fue meticuloso en su trabajo.

society, and he did so in order to better identify its weaknesses. sociedad|y|él|hizo|eso|en|orden|para|mejor|identificar|sus|debilidades la sociedad maya, y lo hizo para identificar mejor sus debilidades.

As a missionary, he soon earned a reputation for being fearless. como|un|misionero|él|pronto|ganó|una|reputación|por|ser|valiente Como misionero, pronto ganó una reputación por ser intrépido.

Perhaps it was this fearlessness that meant he was eventually put in charge of bringing quizás|eso|fue|este|valentía|que|significó|él|fue|eventualmente|puesto|en|cargo|de|traer Quizás fue esta valentía la que significó que eventualmente se le pusiera a cargo de llevar

Inquisitions. inquisiciones inquisiciones españolas.

and De Landa soon announced the beginning of an Inquisition, the first of its kind in y|de|Landa|pronto|anunció|el|comienzo|de|una|Inquisición|la|primera|de|su|tipo|en y De Landa pronto anunció el comienzo de una Inquisición, la primera de su tipo en

the New World. el|Nuevo|Mundo el Nuevo Mundo.

De Landa was brutal in his methods. de|Landa|fue|brutal|en|sus|métodos De Landa fue brutal en sus métodos.

In the midst of it all, he built a great bonfire in the center of one of the last Mayan cities. en|el|medio|de|eso|todo|él|construyó|una|gran|fogata|en|el|centro|de|una|de|las|últimas|mayas|ciudades En medio de todo, construyó una gran hoguera en el centro de una de las últimas ciudades mayas.

greatly. grandemente en gran medida.

that already existed in Spanish. que|ya|existían|en|español que ya existían en español.

the Maya. los|mayas los mayas.

So this is one of the first ironies that gather around the story of the classic Maya collapse, así|esto|es|una|de|las|primeras|ironías|que|se reúnen|alrededor|la|historia|de|los|clásicos|mayas|colapso Así que esta es una de las primeras ironías que rodean la historia del colapso clásico maya,

his hardest to eradicate it. su|más difícil|para|erradicar|eso su mayor esfuerzo para erradicarlo.

that the Maya wrote on pottery, on their plastered walls, that they carved into bone and shell, que|los|mayas|escribieron|en|cerámica|en|sus|enyesadas|paredes|que|ellos|tallaron|en|hueso|y|concha que los mayas escribieron en cerámica, en sus paredes enyesadas, que tallaron en hueso y concha,

or chipped onto the walls of their temples and palaces. o|picaron|en|las|paredes|de|sus|templos|y|palacios o que grabaron en las paredes de sus templos y palacios.

Peninsula. península Península.

New World, the Maya were already an ancient culture. Nuevo Mundo, los mayas ya eran una cultura antigua.

asking, who were the Maya? preguntar, ¿quiénes eran los mayas?

It's important to understand that they were not one people, one empire. es|importante|a|entender|que|ellos|eran|no|un|pueblo|un|imperio Es importante entender que no eran un solo pueblo, un solo imperio.

They were a loose collection of city-states and kingdoms clustered around the Yucatan, ellos|eran|una|suelta|colección|de|||y|reinos|agrupados|alrededor|el|Yucatán Eran una colección suelta de ciudades-estado y reinos agrupados alrededor de Yucatán,

In modern terms, that's the area of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and the very south of Mexico. en|términos|modernos|eso es|el|área|de|Guatemala|Belice|Honduras|y|el|muy|sur|de|México En términos modernos, esa es el área de Guatemala, Belice, Honduras y el sur de México.

I'll put a map on Twitter and Patreon so you can see the true extent of their territory. yo|pondré|un|mapa|en|Twitter|y|Patreon|para que|tú|puedas|ver|el|verdadero|alcance|de|su|territorio Pondré un mapa en Twitter y Patreon para que puedas ver la verdadera extensión de su territorio.

pyramids, drank hot chocolate from ornately patterned vases and made headdresses of emerald pirámides|bebieron|caliente|chocolate|de|ornadamente|||y|hicieron|tocados|de|esmeralda bebía chocolate caliente de jarrones decorados con patrones elaborados y hacía tocados de plumas de quetzal verde esmeralda.

green quetzal feathers. verde|quetzal|plumas

dates in the millions of years, but who never invented the wheel, the arch or the pulley. fechas|en|los|millones|de|años|pero|que|nunca|inventaron|la|rueda|el|arco|o|la|polea fechas en millones de años, pero que nunca inventó la rueda, el arco o la polea.

Sharkfin, True Magician Jaguar, Double Bird or Smoke Serpent. Aleta de Tiburón, Verdadero Mago Jaguar, Doble Pájaro o Serpiente de Humo.

paint.

The Maya believed that time was circular, that history really did repeat itself and Los mayas creían que el tiempo era circular, que la historia realmente se repetía y

rain, the gods of the sky and the gods of the underworld who lived in deep caves and lluvia|los|dioses|del|los||y||||||||||| la lluvia, los dioses del cielo y los dioses del inframundo que vivían en profundas cuevas y

sinkholes. hundimientos sumideros.

Perhaps you already have an idea of the Maya as having an insatiable appetite for human quizás|tú|ya|tienes|una|idea|de|los|mayas|como|teniendo|un|insaciable|apetito|por|humano Quizás ya tengas una idea de los mayas como personas con un apetito insaciable por el

sacrifice. sacrificio humano.

Even films like Apocalypto might have given you that idea. ||||||||ese| Incluso películas como Apocalypto podrían haberte dado esa idea.

But we should be cautious about how we approach that subject. Pero debemos ser cautelosos sobre cómo abordamos ese tema.

and small-scale. y|| y a pequeña escala.

And as we've already seen, the Europeans could be just as brutal in the application of their y|como|hemos|ya|visto|los|europeos|podrían|ser|igual|tan|brutal|en|la|aplicación|de|su Y como ya hemos visto, los europeos podían ser tan brutales en la aplicación de su

faith. fe fe.

The king took much delight in seeing sports at ball, which the Spaniards have since prohibited. El|rey|tomó|mucho|placer|en|ver|deportes|a|la pelota|que|los|españoles|han|desde entonces|prohibido El rey se deleitaba mucho al ver deportes de pelota, que los españoles han prohibido desde entonces.

The ball was made of the gum of a tree that grows in hot countries. la|pelota|fue|hecha|de|la|goma|de|un|árbol|que|crece|en|cálidas|países La pelota estaba hecha de la goma de un árbol que crece en países cálidos.

vines and creepers. enredaderas|y|plantas trepadoras vinas y enredaderas.

its gods. sus|dioses sus dioses.

In all of this, the Maya couldn't rely on four-legged help. en|todo|de|esto|los|mayas|no podían|confiar|en|||ayuda En todo esto, los mayas no podían contar con la ayuda de animales de cuatro patas.

of civilizational progress. de|civilizacional|progreso del progreso de la civilización.

Even in the Andes, in Peru, Chile or Bolivia, the presence of the llama allowed peoples incluso|en|los|Andes|en|Perú|Chile|o|Bolivia|la|presencia|de|la|llama|permitió|a los pueblos Incluso en los Andes, en Perú, Chile o Bolivia, la presencia de la llama permitió a los pueblos

sometimes hunted for food. a veces|cazaba|para|comida a veces cazados por comida.

that tied around the forehead. que|ataba|alrededor|la|frente que se ataba alrededor de la frente.

stone. piedra la piedra.

The Maya largely relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, hacking and burning the forest los|mayas|en gran medida|dependían|en||y|||||quemando|el|bosque Los mayas dependían en gran medida de la agricultura de roza y quema, talando y quemando el bosque

In a humid environment of Guatemala and southern Mexico, it was difficult to store corn for en|un|húmedo|ambiente|de|Guatemala|y|sur|México|eso|fue|difícil|a|almacenar|maíz|por En un ambiente húmedo de Guatemala y el sur de México, era difícil almacenar maíz por

more than a year before it started going moldy. más|de|un|año|antes|eso|comenzó|a|mohoso más de un año antes de que comenzara a enmohecerse.

a stone-age society. una|||sociedad una sociedad de la edad de piedra.

So every one of the great pyramids and temples you can see today was not only constructed así que|cada|uno|de|los|grandes|pirámides|y|templos|tú|puedes|ver|hoy|fue|no|solo|construido Así que cada una de las grandes pirámides y templos que puedes ver hoy no solo fue construida

tools. herramientas herramientas.

It belongs to the smooth-skinned sprout, the young boy who listened, sun-eyed Lord Jaguar, eso|pertenece|a|el|||brote|el|joven|niño|que|escuchó|||Señor|Jaguar Pertenece al brote de piel suave, el joven que escuchaba, el Señor Jaguar de ojos de sol,

the owner of the trees. el|dueño|de|los|árboles el dueño de los árboles.

The Mayan world was essentially divided into two zones, the highlands and the lowlands. el|maya|mundo|fue|esencialmente|dividido|en|dos|zonas|las|tierras altas|y|las|tierras bajas El mundo maya estaba esencialmente dividido en dos zonas, las tierras altas y las tierras bajas.

they carved into marvellous trinkets. ellos|tallaron|en|maravillosos|objetos decorativos tallaron en maravillosos adornos.

If you stood in these highlands with your back to the Pacific Ocean, you would see ahead si|tú|estuvieras|en|estas|tierras altas|con|tu|espalda|al|el|Pacífico|Océano|tú|verbo auxiliar condicional|verías|adelante Si estuvieras en estas tierras altas con la espalda al Océano Pacífico, verías delante de ti

with bays and lagoons. con bahías y lagunas.

This was a network of societies that looked a little like the classical Greece of Sparta esto|fue|una|red|de|sociedades|que|parecía|a|poco|como|la|clásica|Grecia|de|Esparta Esta era una red de sociedades que se parecía un poco a la Grecia clásica de Esparta

and Athens, or Renaissance Italy. y|Atenas|o|Renacimiento|Italia y Atenas, o a la Italia del Renacimiento.

Think of the Pope ruling in Rome, the Medici family in Florence, the Doge in Venice, different piensa|en|el|Papa|gobernando|en|Roma|la|Medici|familia|en|Florencia|el|Dogo|en|Venecia|diferentes Piensa en el Papa gobernando en Roma, la familia Medici en Florencia, el Dogo en Venecia, diferentes

had already been a number of rises and falls. había|ya|habido|un|número|de|ascensos|y|caídas había habido una serie de altibajos.

speed. velocidad velocidad.

For much of the Mayan classic period, the largest and most powerful of these was the durante|gran|de|el|maya|clásico|periodo|la|más grande|y|más|poderoso|de|estos|fue|la Durante gran parte del período clásico maya, el más grande y poderoso de estos fue el

city of Tikal. ciudad|de|Tikal la ciudad de Tikal.

they had such an effect on him. ellos|tuvieron|tal|un|efecto|en|él tuvieron tal efecto en él.

That's because Tikal is home to some of the most spectacular ruins in the Mayan world. eso|porque|Tikal|es|hogar|a|algunos|de|las|más|espectaculares|ruinas|en|el|maya|mundo Eso es porque Tikal alberga algunas de las ruinas más espectaculares del mundo maya.

as the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. como|las|torres|de|el|Brooklyn|Puente como las torres del Puente de Brooklyn.

a brilliant deep red. un|brillante|profundo|rojo un brillante rojo profundo.

base on a moon of the planet Yavin. base|en|una|luna|del|el|planeta|Yavin base en una luna del planeta Yavin.

above the trees. sobre|los|árboles por encima de los árboles.

those same rulers. esos|mismos|gobernantes esos mismos gobernantes.

its height. su|apogeo su apogeo.

in this region. en|esta|región en esta región.

This was the city of Teotihuacan. esta|fue|la|ciudad|de|Teotihuacan Esta fue la ciudad de Teotihuacan.

But in its time, it was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas. pero|en|su|tiempo|fue||la|más grande|ciudad|en|las|||Américas Pero en su tiempo, fue la ciudad más grande de las Américas precolombinas.

across the continent. a través|el|continente a través del continente.

and quality. y|calidad y calidad.

It was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, with a population estimated at 125,000 or more, Eso|fue|cosmopolita|y|||con|una|población|estimada|en|o|más Era cosmopolita y multiétnica, con una población estimada en 125,000 o más,

which would have made it at least the sixth largest city in the world at the time. lo que|habría|tenido|hecho|eso|al|menos|la|sexta|más grande|ciudad|en|el|mundo|en|el|tiempo lo que la habría convertido en al menos la sexta ciudad más grande del mundo en ese momento.

Like the United States in modern times, it was also fond of intervening in the politics Al igual que los Estados Unidos en tiempos modernos, también le gustaba intervenir en la política

of its southern neighbors. de|sus|del sur|vecinos de sus vecinos del sur.

of Central America. de|América| de América Central.

It's not clear if this was a military conquest, a palace coup, or a diplomatic intervention, no es|no|claro|si|esto|fue|una|militar|conquista|un|palacio|golpe|o|una|diplomática|intervención No está claro si fue una conquista militar, un golpe de estado palaciego o una intervención diplomática,

but we do know that a young ruler, Yash-nun-ahin, which means curl-nose, rose to power in Tikal pero|nosotros|sí|sabemos|que|un|joven|gobernante||||que|significa|||ascendió|a|poder|en|Tikal pero sabemos que un joven gobernante, Yash-nun-ahin, que significa nariz rizada, ascendió al poder en Tikal.

One stone carving in Tikal shows King Curl-nose being crowned, while Mexican soldiers look una|piedra|talla|en|Tikal|muestra|rey|||siendo|coronado|mientras|mexicanos|soldados|miran Eine Steinskulptur in Tikal zeigt die Krönung von König Krummnase, während mexikanische Soldaten ihn beobachten. Una talla de piedra en Tikal muestra al Rey Nariz-rizada siendo coronado, mientras los soldados mexicanos miran

on carrying distinctive dart throwers. hacia|llevando|distintivos|dardos|lanzadores auf das Tragen von markanten Dart-Werfern. llevando lanzadores de dardos distintivos.

In the burial tomb of Curl-nose, artifacts have also been found carved out of that tell-tale en|la|sepulcral|tumba|de|||artefactos|han|también|sido|encontrados|tallados|fuera|de|esa|| En la tumba de entierro de Nariz-rizada, también se han encontrado artefactos tallados de ese indicativo

green obsidian that everywhere gives away the influence of Teotihuacan. verde|obsidiana|que|en todas partes|da|a|la|influencia|de|Teotihuacan obsidiana verde que en todas partes revela la influencia de Teotihuacan.

happened. ocurrió sucedió.

This is Tikal, and on the right is a temple of Mexican design, with a great fanned crown esto|es|Tikal|y|a|el|derecha|está|un|templo|de|diseño|mexicano|con|una|gran|expandida|corona Este es Tikal, y a la derecha hay un templo de diseño mexicano, con una gran corona en forma de abanico

at its top. en|su|cima en su parte superior.

This is Teotihuacan. esto|es|Teotihuacan Este es Teotihuacan.

embassy in Tikal. embajada|en|Tikal embajada en Tikal.

until it was the most powerful city in the Mayan world. hasta que|se|fue|la|más|poderosa|ciudad|en|el|maya|mundo hasta convertirse en la ciudad más poderosa del mundo maya.

It was the beginnings of a true empire, and for a while it looked like Tikal's plan to Eso|fue|los|comienzos|de|un|verdadero|imperio|y|por|un|tiempo|eso|parecía|como|Tikal|plan|para Eran los comienzos de un verdadero imperio, y por un tiempo pareció que el plan de Tikal para

That is, were it not for one very important thing in their way. eso|es|estuvieran|eso|no|por|una|muy|importante|cosa|en|su|camino Das heißt, wenn sich ihnen nicht eine sehr wichtige Sache in den Weg stellen würde. Es decir, si no fuera por una cosa muy importante en su camino.

It was their great rival, the city of Calakmul. Eso|fue|su|gran|rival|la|ciudad|de|Calakmul Era su gran rival, la ciudad de Calakmul.

Calakmul was a city with a very distinctive character. Calakmul|fue|una|ciudad|con|un|muy|distintivo|carácter Calakmul era una ciudad con un carácter muy distintivo.

Its lords called themselves Kul Khan Ahau, or the Lords of the Snake, and I'll put an sus|señores|llamaron|a sí mismos|Kul|Khan|Ahau|o|los|señores|de|la|serpiente|y|yo|pondré|una Sus señores se llamaban Kul Khan Ahau, o los Señores de la Serpiente, y pondré una

image of this glyph on Patreon for you to see. |de|||en||||| imagen de este glifo en Patreon para que la veas.

Another interesting feature of Calakmul is the emphasis it put on the female line of Otra característica interesante de Calakmul es el énfasis que puso en la línea femenina de

its royalty. su|realeza su realeza.

joint rule of a king and a queen. conjunto|gobierno|de|un|rey|y|una|reina gobierno conjunto de un rey y una reina.

Calakmul was proud of its roots, which it traced back to the ancient Maya of the pre-classic Calakmul|estaba|orgulloso|de|sus|raíces|las cuales|las|rastreó|atrás|a|los|antiguos|mayas|de|la|| Calakmul estaba orgulloso de sus raíces, que remontaba a los antiguos mayas del periodo preclásico.

period. período período.

Maya legacy. legado maya.

But in the early centuries of the classic period, Calakmul was outmatched by the might pero|en|los|primeros|siglos|de|el|clásico|periodo|Calakmul|fue|superado|por|el|poder Pero en los primeros siglos del período clásico, Calakmul fue superada por la fuerza

The rulers of Calakmul, the so-called Lords of the Snake, must have calculated that the los|gobernantes|de|Calakmul|los|||Señores|de|la|Serpiente|deben|haber|calculado|que|la Los gobernantes de Calakmul, los llamados Señores de la Serpiente, debieron haber calculado que la

only way to challenge the supremacy of Tikal was to outplay them in the game of strategy. única|manera|de|desafiar|la|supremacía|de|Tikal|fue|a|superar|a ellos|en|el|juego|de|estrategia única forma de desafiar la supremacía de Tikal era superarlos en el juego de la estrategia.

Calakmul set out on a centuries-long game of chess with their rivals. Calakmul|estableció|fuera|en|un|||juego|de|ajedrez|con|sus|rivales Calakmul se embarcó en un juego de ajedrez que duraría siglos con sus rivales.

They slowly gathered the small states that surrounded Tikal into a network of allies, Ellos|lentamente|reunieron|los|pequeños|estados|que|rodeaban|Tikal|en|una|red|de|aliados Poco a poco reunieron los pequeños estados que rodeaban Tikal en una red de aliados,

It was a kind of cold war and for this reason, the snake stones carved by Calakmul are by Eso|fue|un|tipo|de|fría|guerra|y|por|esta|razón|las|serpiente|piedras|talladas|por|Calakmul|son|por Era una especie de guerra fría y por esta razón, las piedras de serpiente talladas por Calakmul son de

far the most numerous of all the Mayan city-states. lejos las más numerosas de todos los estados de la ciudad maya.

fortunes would really take a turn for the worse. fortunas de Tikal realmente tomarían un giro hacia lo peor.

because his actions would lose the city of Tikal, one of its key allies in the region, porque|sus|acciones|verbo auxiliar condicional|perder|la|ciudad|de|Tikal|uno|de|sus|clave|aliados|en|la|región porque sus acciones harían perder a la ciudad de Tikal, uno de sus aliados clave en la región,

Caracol was once one of Tikal's underlings. Caracol|fue|una vez|uno|de|Tikal|subordinados Caracol fue una vez uno de los subordinados de Tikal.

As part of its service, it would have paid tribute in the form of food and valuables, como|parte|de|su|servicio|eso|verbo auxiliar condicional|habría|pagado|tributo|en|la|forma|de|comida|y|valiosos Como parte de su servicio, habría rendido tributo en forma de alimentos y objetos de valor,

tongue of Calakmul was already beginning to erode this alliance. |de|||||||| de Calakmul ya estuviera comenzando a erosionar esta alianza.

in the Mayan world. en|el|maya|mundo en el mundo maya.

The Maya often undertook low-level skirmishes and their wars seem to have served a largely los|mayas|a menudo|emprendieron|||escaramuzas|y|sus|guerras|parecen|a|haber|servido|un|en gran medida Los mayas a menudo llevaban a cabo escaramuzas de bajo nivel y sus guerras parecen haber servido en gran medida a un

ceremonial and symbolic function. ceremonial|y|simbólica|función función ceremonial y simbólica.

and glory to the capital. y|gloria|a|el|capital y gloria a la capital.

a different kind of war was undertaken which had a more brutal and all-encompassing nature. un|diferente|tipo|de|guerra|fue|emprendida|la cual|tenía|una|más|brutal|y|||naturaleza se emprendía un tipo diferente de guerra que tenía una naturaleza más brutal y abarcadora.

and destruction. y|destrucción y destrucción.

The inscriptions, as always, are hard to decipher but it seems that in the year 556, the king las|inscripciones|como|siempre|son|difíciles|de|descifrar|pero|eso|parece|que|en|el|año|el|rey Las inscripciones, como siempre, son difíciles de descifrar, pero parece que en el año 556, el rey

of Tikal, Double Bird, embarked on an axe war, a low-level attack against his former de|Tikal|Doble|Pájaro|embarcó|en|una|hacha|guerra|un|||ataque|contra|su|antiguo de Tikal, Doble Pájaro, emprendió una guerra de hachas, un ataque de bajo nivel contra su antiguo

ally, the city of Caracol. aliado, la ciudad de Caracol.

could get away with and kidnapped a number of its citizens who they would later have llevarse y secuestrado a varios de sus ciudadanos que más tarde habrían

sacrificed at one of Tikal's temples. sacrificado|en|uno|de|Tikal|templos sacrificado en uno de los templos de Tikal.

masters in Tikal. amos|en|Tikal amos en Tikal.

It lived up to its reputation as the kingdom of the snake, putting its pieces into place Eso|vivió|hasta|a|su|reputación|como|el|reino|de|la|serpiente|poniendo|sus|piezas|en|lugar Estuvo a la altura de su reputación como el reino de la serpiente, colocando sus piezas en su lugar

In the year 562, the once great city of Tikal was surrounded and besieged. en|el|año|la|una vez|gran|ciudad|de|Tikal|fue|rodeada|y|sitiada En el año 562, la una vez gran ciudad de Tikal fue rodeada y sitiada.

temples. templos templos.

They vandalized carvings of its kings, lopping off the heads of its sculptures, chipping ellos|vandalizaron|tallados|de|sus|reyes|cortando|de|las|cabezas|de|sus|esculturas|astillando Vandalizaron las tallas de sus reyes, decapitando las cabezas de sus esculturas, picando

And the destruction was devastating. y|la|destrucción|fue|devastadora Y la destrucción fue devastadora.

a halt. un|alto una parada.

He was probably taken back to Karakol or Calakmul and executed at the top of a pyramid. él|fue|probablemente|llevado|de regreso|a|Karakol|o|Calakmul|y|ejecutado|en|la|cima|de|una|pirámide Probablemente fue llevado de regreso a Karakol o Calakmul y ejecutado en la cima de una pirámide.

was not the son of Double Bird. fue|no|el|hijo|de|Doble|Pájaro no era el hijo de Doble Pájaro.

But it wasn't war that caused the collapse of the Mayan world, at least not entirely. pero|eso|no fue|guerra|que|causó|el|colapso|de|el|maya|mundo|al|menos|no|enteramente Pero no fue la guerra lo que causó el colapso del mundo maya, al menos no por completo.

structured itself, the fatal flaws built into its civilization, and the tensions and conflicts estructuró|sí mismo|los|fatales|defectos|construidos|en|su|civilización|y|las|tensiones|y|conflictos se estructuró, los defectos fatales incorporados en su civilización, y las tensiones y conflictos

One way that we can track the progress of the Mayan collapse is by looking at the number una|manera|que|nosotros|podemos|rastrear|el|progreso|del|el|maya|colapso|es|por|mirando|a|las|cantidad Una forma en que podemos rastrear el progreso del colapso maya es observando el número

of inscriptions they left. de inscripciones que dejaron.

It increased to 20 per year just a century later. eso|aumentó|a|por|año|justo|un|siglo|después Aumentó a 20 por año solo un siglo después.

Each of these cities goes out one by one like lights blinking out in the dark. cada|de|estas|ciudades|va|afuera|uno|por|uno|como|luces|parpadeando|afuera|en|la|oscuridad Cada una de estas ciudades se apaga una por una como luces que parpadean en la oscuridad.

At the city of Bonampak, the last date of an inscription is the year 792. en|la|ciudad|de|Bonampak|la|última|fecha|de|una|inscripción|es|el|año En la ciudad de Bonampak, la última fecha de una inscripción es el año 792.

fell into the darkness in the year 889. cayó|en|la|oscuridad|en|el|año cayó en la oscuridad en el año 889.

There are no prophecies of doom or accounts of terrible events. allí|hay|no|profecías|de|perdición|o|relatos|de|terribles|eventos No hay profecías de desastre ni relatos de eventos terribles.

So what happened? entonces|qué|sucedió ¿Qué pasó?

not a single warning behind? no|un|solo|aviso|atrás no una sola advertencia detrás?

As with the fall of any civilization, the collapse of the Maya wasn't a simple event. como|con|la|caída|de|cualquier|civilización|el|colapso|de|los|mayas|no fue|un|simple|evento Al igual que con la caída de cualquier civilización, el colapso de los mayas no fue un evento simple.

landscape, Mayan society, like any society, had to accumulate a number of stresses and la sociedad maya, como cualquier sociedad, tenía que acumular una serie de presiones y

imbalances. desequilibrios desequilibrios.

booming population. en crecimiento|población población en auge.

The soldiers and carpenters and masons and of course, the king and all his nobles. los|soldados|y|carpinteros|y|masones|y|de|curso|el|rey|y|todos|sus|nobles Los soldados, carpinteros, masones y, por supuesto, el rey y todos sus nobles.

In a hyper-efficient modern economy like the United States, less than 2% of the population en|una|||moderna|economía|como|los|Unidos|Estados|menos|que|de|la|población En una economía moderna hipereficiente como la de Estados Unidos, menos del 2% de la población

work on farms. trabaja|en|granjas trabaja en granjas.

But for the Maya, who used slash and burn agriculture and grew low-protein crops, each pero|para|los|mayas|que|usaron|tala|y|quema|agricultura|y|cultivaron|||cultivos|cada Pero para los mayas, que utilizaban la agricultura de roza y quema y cultivaban cultivos de bajo contenido proteico, cada

In Tikal, for instance, the population in the city centre was 65,000, with a further en|Tikal|por|ejemplo|la|población|en|el|ciudad|centro|era|con|un|adicional En Tikal, por ejemplo, la población en el centro de la ciudad era de 65,000, con un adicional

30,000 in the outskirts. en|los|alrededores 30,000 en las afueras.

increased. aumentaron aumentaban.

Another huge problem was deforestation. otro|enorme|problema|fue|deforestación Otro gran problema era la deforestación.

But by the end of the Classic Period, the Maya lowlands had been more or less completely pero|por|el|final|de|el|Clásico|Período|los|mayas|tierras bajas|habían|sido|más|o|menos|completamente Pero para el final del Período Clásico, las tierras bajas mayas habían sido más o menos completamente

deforested. deforestadas deforestadas.

end of the 8th century, hardly any forest remained in the Yucatan Peninsula. ||los|||||||en||| final del siglo VIII, apenas quedaba bosque en la Península de Yucatán.

The Maya had cut down the trees not only in their cities, but between them as well. los|||||del||||||||||| Los mayas habían talado los árboles no solo en sus ciudades, sino también entre ellas.

So if you stood on top of one of the great temples of Tikal or Calakmul around the year Así que si te parabas en la cima de uno de los grandes templos de Tikal o Calakmul alrededor del año

toiling in the fields. trabajando|en|los|campos trabajando en los campos.

time to rest. tiempo|a|descansar tiempo de descansar.

The ground needs to return to nature to regain its nutrition. el|suelo|necesita|a|regresar|a|la naturaleza|para|recuperar|| La tierra necesita volver a la naturaleza para recuperar su nutrición.

But as the demand for food from the population increased, it's easy to imagine that the farmers pero|a medida que|la|demanda|por|comida|de|la|población|aumentó|es|fácil|a|imaginar|que|los|agricultores Pero a medida que la demanda de alimentos de la población aumentaba, es fácil imaginar que los agricultores

were placed under increasing pressure. fueron|puestos|bajo|creciente|presión estaban bajo una presión creciente.

It would have been a short-sighted strategy that courted disaster in exchange for short-term Eso|habría|tenido|sido|una|||estrategia|que|cortejó|desastre|en|cambio|por|| Habría sido una estrategia miope que buscaba el desastre a cambio de ganancias a corto plazo.

gains. ganancias .

As we've discussed, one of the greatest challenges the Maya faced was the collection and storage como|hemos|discutido|uno|de|los|mayores|desafíos|los|mayas|enfrentaron|fue|la|recolección|y|almacenamiento Como hemos discutido, uno de los mayores desafíos que enfrentaron los mayas fue la recolección y almacenamiento

of water. de|agua de agua.

And the climate of the Yucatan is such that variations in annual rainfall can be enormous. y|el|clima|de|la|península de Yucatán|es|tal|que|variaciones|en|anual|lluvia|pueden|ser|enormes Y el clima de Yucatán es tal que las variaciones en la lluvia anual pueden ser enormes.

Archaeologists who've looked at sediment in the region estimate that in the year 760, arqueólogos|que han|mirado|en|sedimento|en|la|región|estiman|que|en|el|año Los arqueólogos que han estudiado los sedimentos en la región estiman que en el año 760,

As the Maya knew, the sun is a fickle god. como|los|mayas|sabían|el|sol|es|un|caprichoso|dios Como sabían los mayas, el sol es un dios caprichoso.

The radiation it gives out is not constant. la|radiación|eso|da|afuera|es|no|constante La radiación que emite no es constante.

time reached lows that hadn't been seen for millennia. tiempo alcanzaron mínimos que no se habían visto en milenios.

This caused a harsh, dry cold to descend over the northern hemisphere and global weather Esto causó que un frío seco y severo descendiera sobre el hemisferio norte y el clima global.

systems shifted northwards. sistemas|se desplazaron|hacia el norte los sistemas se desplazaron hacia el norte.

All the rain that arrives on the Mayan lowlands comes from the Atlantic on the trade winds, toda|la|lluvia|que|llega|a|las|mayas|tierras bajas|viene|de|el|Atlántico|en|los|vientos|comerciales Toda la lluvia que llega a las tierras bajas mayas proviene del Atlántico a través de los vientos alisios,

theory. teoría teoría.

complex forms. complejas|formas complejas.

a level of organization that can be supported with the energy that remains. un|nivel|de|organización|que|puede|ser|soportado|con|la|energía|que|queda un nivel de organización que puede ser sostenido con la energía que queda.

to work. a|trabajar en práctica.

drop in radiation, and it imploded. |en|||| caída en la radiación del sol, y se implosionó.

In some places, the collapse was so drastic that the entire area was abandoned. en|||el||||||la|||| En algunos lugares, el colapso fue tan drástico que toda el área fue abandonada.

In the Chilam Balam, a surviving Mayan text from the post-contact era, you can almost En el Chilam Balam, un texto maya sobreviviente de la era post-contacto, casi puedes

during this time. durante|este|tiempo durante este tiempo.

The hooves of the animals burnt, the seashore burnt, a sea of misery. los|cascos|de|los|animales|quemaron|la|orilla del mar|quemó|un|mar|de|miseria Las pezuñas de los animales se quemaron, la orilla del mar se quemó, un mar de miseria.

So it was said, so it was said on high. así|eso|fue|dicho|||||en|alto So wurde es gesagt, so wurde es in der Höhe gesagt. Así se dijo, así se dijo en lo alto.

Then the face of the sun was eaten. entonces|la|cara|de|el|sol|fue|comido Entonces se comió la cara del sol.

Then the face of the sun was darkened. entonces|la|cara|de|el|sol|fue|oscurecida Entonces se oscureció la cara del sol.

Then its face was extinguished. entonces|su|cara|fue|extinguida Entonces su cara fue extinguida.

Copan was a small but densely populated city, built in a narrow and steep-sided river valley Copán|fue|una|pequeña|pero|densamente|poblada|ciudad|construida|en|un|estrecho|y|||río|valle Copán era una ciudad pequeña pero densamente poblada, construida en un valle fluvial estrecho y de lados empinados

lined with pine forests. bordeado|con|pinos|bosques rodeado de bosques de pinos.

it used the symbol of the leaf-nosed bat as its emblem on inscriptions. eso|usó|el|símbolo|de|el|||murciélago|como|su|emblema|en|inscripciones usaba el símbolo del murciélago de nariz de hoja como su emblema en las inscripciones.

For much of its history, it was a close ally of Tikal and fought wars on its behalf. por|mucho|de|su|historia|eso|fue|un|cercano|aliado|de|Tikal|y|luchó|guerras|en|su|nombre Durante gran parte de su historia, fue un aliado cercano de Tikal y luchó guerras en su nombre.

It's more acidic and prone to erosion if cultivated for long periods. es|más|ácido|y|propenso|a|erosión|si|cultivado|por|largos|períodos Es más ácido y propenso a la erosión si se cultiva durante largos períodos.

Even today, modern farmers can grow barely a third of the amount of corn in the hills incluso|hoy|modernos|agricultores|pueden|cultivar|apenas|un|tercio|de|la|cantidad|de|maíz|en|las|colinas Incluso hoy en día, los agricultores modernos pueden cultivar apenas un tercio de la cantidad de maíz en las colinas

Copan boomed. Copan|prosperó Copán prosperó.

of only about 10 square miles. de|solo|alrededor|millas|cuadradas de solo aproximadamente 10 millas cuadradas.

Between the years 650 and 750, construction of royal palaces and monuments was especially entre|los|años|y|construcción|de|reales|palacios|y|monumentos|fue|especialmente Entre los años 650 y 750, la construcción de palacios reales y monumentos fue especialmente

had to be supported by the hard work of Copan's farmers. tuvo|que|ser|sostenida|por|el|duro|trabajo|de|Copán|agricultores tenía que ser sostenida por el arduo trabajo de los agricultores de Copán.

valley. valle valle.

After that, people began to build their homes on the valley sides. después|eso|la gente|comenzaron|a|construir|sus|casas|en|los|valle|lados Después de eso, la gente comenzó a construir sus hogares en los lados del valle.

The reason for that can be seen in the layer of sediment that today covers their floors. la|razón|por|eso|puede|ser|visto|en|la|capa|de|sedimento|que|hoy|cubre|sus|pisos La razón de eso se puede ver en la capa de sedimento que hoy cubre sus pisos.

As the people built up the mountainsides, the ground was eroding. |los||||||||| A medida que la gente construía en las laderas de las montañas, el suelo se estaba erosionando.

Some samples taken around this time show that the pine forests that once covered these Algunas muestras tomadas alrededor de este tiempo muestran que los bosques de pinos que alguna vez cubrieron estos

This acidic, low-nutrient soil would have leached down into the valley bottom, reducing este|ácido|||suelo|verbo auxiliar condicional|habría|filtrado|abajo|en|el|valle|fondo|reduciendo Este suelo ácido y de bajo contenido de nutrientes habría filtrado hacia el fondo del valle, reduciendo

its fertility as well. su|fertilidad|como|también su fertilidad también.

fallen increasingly on the valley bottom. |||los|| caído cada vez más en el fondo del valle.

The fields would now need to be worked harder than ever in order to avoid famine and this Los campos ahora tendrían que ser trabajados más duro que nunca para evitar la hambruna y esto

would have reduced their fertility even further. habría reducido aún más su fertilidad.

Farmers would have likely fought over the last remaining pockets of land. Los agricultores probablemente habrían luchado por los últimos bolsillos de tierra que quedaban.

Analysis of skeletal remains from Copan paints a chilling picture. El análisis de restos esqueléticos de Copan pinta un cuadro escalofriante.

From the year 650 onwards, signs of disease and malnutrition among its residents increased. A partir del año 650, aumentaron los signos de enfermedad y desnutrición entre sus residentes.

rulers. gobernantes reglas.

the king and the natural world explicitly. el|rey|y|el|natural|mundo|explícitamente el rey y el mundo natural de manera explícita.

This is the first question which will be asked of the chiefs. esta|es|la|primera|pregunta|que|verbo auxiliar futuro|será|preguntada|de|los|jefes Esta es la primera pregunta que se les hará a los jefes.

Bring the sun, thus it is said to the chiefs. trae|el|sol|así|eso|es|dicho|a|los|jefes Trae el sol, así se dice a los jefes.

Bring the sun, my son. trae|el|sol|mi|hijo Trae el sol, hijo mío.

Bear it on the palm of your hand to my plate. lleva|eso|en|la|palma|de|tu|mano|a|mi|plato Llévalo en la palma de tu mano a mi plato.

If the king was seen to break that promise, the people may have decided that he had to go. si|el|rey|fue|visto|a|romper|esa|promesa|la|gente|puede|haber|decidido|que|él|tuvo|que|ir Si se veía que el rey rompía esa promesa, la gente podría haber decidido que tenía que irse.

The last we hear from a king of Copan is in the year 822 with a single inscription. El|último|nosotros|escuchamos|de|un|rey|de|Copán|es|en|el|año|con|una|sola|inscripción Lo último que sabemos de un rey de Copán es en el año 822 con una única inscripción.

He began the carving of a four-sided monument just like his predecessors, but it was never él|comenzó|la|talla|de|un|||monumento|justo|como|sus|predecesores|pero|eso|fue|nunca Comenzó la talla de un monumento de cuatro lados al igual que sus predecesores, pero nunca fue

finished. terminado terminado.

One side shows him being crowned, the next is half-carved, but the remaining two sides un|lado|muestra|lo|siendo|coronado|el|siguiente|está|||pero|los|restantes|dos|lados Un lado lo muestra siendo coronado, el siguiente está medio tallado, pero los otros dos lados

are blank. están|en blanco están en blanco.

It's as if the carver just got up one day in the middle of his job and left. es|como|si|el|tallador|simplemente|se levantó|arriba|un|día|en|el|medio|de|su|trabajo|y|se fue Es como si el tallador simplemente se levantara un día en medio de su trabajo y se fuera.

Three decades later, in the year 850, the royal palace of Copan was burned and history tres|décadas|después|en|el|año|el|real|palacio|de|Copán|fue|quemado|y|historia Tres décadas después, en el año 850, el palacio real de Copán fue incendiado y la historia

in that city came to an end. en|esa|ciudad|llegó|a|un|fin en esa ciudad llegó a su fin.

inhabitation in the valley. habitacion|en|el|valle habitación en el valle.

Copan. Copán Copán.

great city by looking at its monuments and inscriptions. gran|ciudad|al|mirar|a|sus|monumentos|y|inscripciones gran ciudad al observar sus monumentos e inscripciones.

During the mid-8th century, Tikal had once again gained the upper hand over its enemy Durante|el|||siglo|Tikal|había|una|vez|ganado|la|superior|mano|sobre|su|enemigo Durante mediados del siglo VIII, Tikal había recuperado la ventaja sobre su enemigo

Calakmul. Calakmul Calakmul.

its protective umbrella, Tikal also embarked on a burst of construction the likes of which |||Tikal|también|emprendió|en|una|explosión|de|construcción|la|semejantes|de|las cuales su paraguas protector, Tikal también emprendió un estallido de construcción como el que

it had never seen. Tikal|había|nunca|visto nunca había visto.

But as the year 800 rolled around, all of that would come to an end. pero|a medida que|el|año|rodó|alrededor|todo|de|eso|verbo auxiliar condicional|venir|a|un|fin Pero a medida que el año 800 se acercaba, todo eso llegaría a su fin.

By the mid-800s, it's clear Tikal was coming apart. por|la|||es|claro|Tikal|estaba|viniendo|a pedazos A mediados de los años 800, está claro que Tikal se estaba desmoronando.

By the year 900, there was no longer a king in Tikal. para|el|año|allí|había|no|más|un|rey|en|Tikal Para el año 900, ya no había un rey en Tikal.

the first time and finding it abandoned. primera vez y encontrarlo abandonado.

and carved stones. y|talladas|piedras y piedras talladas.

or more after the fall of Tikal. o|más|después|la|caída|de|Tikal o más después de la caída de Tikal.

holy palaces of the city. sagrados|palacios|de|la|ciudad los sagrados palacios de la ciudad.

They continued to worship the stone monuments of bygone kings and even moved them at times ellos|continuaron|a|adorar|los|de piedra|monumentos|de|pasados|reyes|y|||ellos|a|veces Continuaron adorando los monumentos de piedra de reyes pasados e incluso los movieron en ocasiones.

to more convenient places. a|lugares|convenientes|lugares a lugares más convenientes.

But one by one, all of the cities in the Mayan lowlands were abandoned. pero|uno|por|uno|todas|de|las|ciudades|en|los|mayas|llanuras|fueron|abandonadas Pero una por una, todas las ciudades en las tierras bajas mayas fueron abandonadas.

It may give you a sense of the scale of the catastrophe and the depth of the damage done eso|puede|dar|te|un|sentido|de|la|escala|de|la|catástrofe|y|la|profundidad|de|el|daño|hecho Puede darte una idea de la magnitud de la catástrofe y la profundidad del daño causado.

to the environment, that no attempt was made at a single one of these cities to ever re-occupy al|el|medio ambiente|que|ningún|intento|fue|hecho|en|una|sola|uno|de|estas|ciudades|a|alguna vez|| al medio ambiente, que no se hizo ningún intento en ninguna de estas ciudades para volver a ocuparlas.

them. ellos .

from that time. de|ese|tiempo desde ese momento.

manage. manejar gestionar.

the whole region. la|toda|región toda la región.

been averted. sido evitadas.

its own small kingdom. su|propio|pequeño|reino su propio pequeño reino.

began. comenzaron .

pointing to a violent and bloody battle. señalando|a|una|violenta|y|sangrienta|batalla señalando una batalla violenta y sangrienta.

another and a violent struggle for survival turned the Mayan lowlands into a bloodbath. otro|y|una|violenta|lucha|por|supervivencia|convirtió|los|mayas|llanos|en|un|baño de sangre otro y una lucha violenta por la supervivencia convirtió las tierras bajas mayas en un baño de sangre.

In 2015, a geographical feature in Tonina that was thought to be a hill turned out to en|un|geográfico|rasgo|en|Tonina|que|fue|pensado|a|ser|una|colina|resultó|fuera|a En 2015, una característica geográfica en Tonina que se pensaba que era una colina resultó ser

be a Mayan pyramid and recent measurements have shown it to be one of the largest ever ser|una|maya|pirámide|y|recientes|mediciones|han|mostrado|eso|a|ser|una|de|las|más grandes|jamás una pirámide maya y mediciones recientes han demostrado que es una de las más grandes jamás

built. construidas construidas.

At 75 meters tall, it rivals the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan to be the tallest pre-Columbian a|metros|de altura|eso|rivaliza|la|pirámide|del|sol|sol|en|Teotihuacan|para|ser|la|más alta|| Con 75 metros de altura, rivaliza con la Pirámide del Sol en Teotihuacan para ser la más alta precolombina.

building in the Americas. edificio|en|los|América edificio en las Américas.

One thing I find particularly moving is to read the texts of the post-contact Maya, who una|cosa|yo|encuentro|particularmente|conmovedor|es|a|leer|los|textos|de|los|||mayas|quienes Una cosa que encuentro particularmente conmovedora es leer los textos de los mayas post-contacto, que

and history had been erased. y|historia|había|sido|borrada y historia habían sido borrados.

of their great tradition. de|su|gran|tradición de su gran tradición.

But it's a strange kind of survival. pero|es|un|extraño|tipo|de|supervivencia Pero es un tipo extraño de supervivencia.

I want to end the episode by listening to an extract from one of those texts called yo|quiero|a|terminar|el|episodio|por|escuchando|a|un|extracto|de|uno|de|esos|textos|llamado Quiero terminar el episodio escuchando un extracto de uno de esos textos llamado

The Ritual of the Bacchabs. el|Ritual|de|los|Bacchabs El Ritual de los Bacchabs.

ages, from the golden age of his civilization. edades|de|la|dorada|edad|de|su|civilización edades, desde la edad dorada de su civilización.

of what the text means. de|lo que|el|texto|significa de lo que significa el texto.

As you listen, I want you to think about what it must have felt like to watch this great mientras|tú|escuchas|yo|quiero|tú|a|pensar|en|lo que|eso|debe|haber|sentido|como|a|ver|este|gran Mientras escuchas, quiero que pienses en cómo debió sentirse ver a este gran

civilization fall, to watch its great monuments, its palaces and ball courts crumble into the civilización|caer|para|ver|sus|grandes|monumentos||palacios|y|pelota|canchas|desmoronarse|en|la la caída de la civilización, ver cómo sus grandes monumentos, sus palacios y canchas de juego se desmoronan en el

earth. tierra tierra.

plains stripped of their trees and scorched with the smoke of burning lime, over the hills llanuras despojadas de sus árboles y quemadas con el humo de la cal ardiente, sobre las colinas

Can-a-hao, they say, is the creator. |||ellos|dicen|es|el|creador Can-a-hao, dicen, es el creador.

Can-a-hao, they say, is the darkness. |||ellos|dicen|es|la|oscuridad Can-a-hao, dicen, es la oscuridad.

Coming from the fifth level of the sky, the head of the dragonfly, the head covering its viniendo|de|el|quinto|nivel|de|el|cielo|la|cabeza|de|la|libélula|la|cabeza|cubriendo|su Viniendo del quinto nivel del cielo, la cabeza de la libélula, la cabeza cubriendo sus

worms, it bit the hand of the unfettered creator. gusanos|él|mordió|la|mano|de|el|desenfrenado|creador gusanos, mordió la mano del creador desenfrenado.

the stone hut. la|piedra|cabaña la cabaña de piedra.

Now then, throw it to the demented creator, to the demented darkness. ahora|entonces|lanza|eso|a|el|demente|creador||||oscuridad Ahora bien, tíralo al creador demente, a la oscuridad demente.

Thank you for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. gracias|tú|por|escuchar|a|el|caída|de|Civilizaciones|podcast Gracias por escuchar el podcast Caída de Civilizaciones.

I've been Paul Cooper. he|estado|Paul|Cooper He sido Paul Cooper.

Jake Barrett-Mills, Helena Bacon, Brian Chiobe, and Peter Preciado. Jake|||Helena|Bacon|Brian|Chiobe|y|Peter|Preciado Jake Barrett-Mills, Helena Bacon, Brian Chiobe y Peter Preciado.

Do check out the rest of his work on incompetech.com. verbo auxiliar|revisa|fuera|el|resto|de|su|trabajo|en|| No dejes de revisar el resto de su trabajo en incompetech.com.

I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what yo|amo|a|escuchar|tus|pensamientos|y|respuestas|en|Twitter|así que|por favor|ven|y|dime|me|qué Me encantaría escuchar tus pensamientos y respuestas en Twitter, así que por favor ven y cuéntame qué

you thought. tú|pensaste pensaste.

with underscores separating the words. con|guiones bajos|separando|las|palabras con guiones bajos separando las palabras.

You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you also let me dedicate more time tú|mantienes|me|funcionando|tú|ayudas|me|cubrir|mis|costos|y|tú|también|dejas|me|dedicar|más|tiempo Ustedes me mantienen en marcha, me ayudan a cubrir mis costos, y también me permiten dedicar más tiempo

If you think you can spare anything, please do head over to Patreon and support the podcast si|tú|piensas|tú|puedes|dar|algo|por favor|haz|dirígete|allá|a|Patreon|y|apoya|el|podcast Si crees que puedes aportar algo, por favor dirígete a Patreon y apoya el podcast

today. hoy hoy.

PAR_TRANS:gpt-4o-mini=8.11 PAR_CWT:AuedvEAa=12.29 es:AuedvEAa openai.2025-02-07 ai_request(all=432 err=0.23%) translation(all=861 err=0.23%) cwt(all=9849 err=6.52%)