Religion:

The Mayans followed a Polytheistic Religion . They had a God for each element or important activity in their lives. They also believed in life after death and of the underwoorld. Religion was the center of their lives, influencing in all of the other aspects such as: Arquitecture, social structure, education, etc.

In the religious symbolism , the Ceiba is considered a sacred tree since it was a station of passing to the thirteen skies and the underworld, and the serpent, among others, was related to the Gods of the water and the fertility of the earth.

They honored their Gods and spoke with them through ritual ceremonies . Sometimes, human sacrifices where included to these ceremonies. Next to the person which would be sacrificed, objects where places such as jade, gold, ceramics, etc. as an offering to the Gods.

Astronomy:

The Mayans where great students of the stars , and where able to predict precisely when there would be a sun or moon eclipses and the equinox of spring and summer. As well, they could calculate that the synodic revolution of Venus was made in an average of 584 days. Now a days it is established to be at 583,92 days.

Their lives where related continuously with the position of the planets. The interest for astronomy is subject to the astrology and the Mayans studied the stars and the planets to know when they should offer the Gods sacrifices or pleadings.

With the knowledge of astronomy that they had, they built their temples on special dates, therefore spectacular solar alienation were made, for example, rays of sun which where exactly found in the center of opposing windows or a God's mask illuminated by the sun.

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The two principal discoveries in mathematics were the value of the position to express the quantities and zero. The Mayan system is vegisimal, it means, that it counts form 0 to 19 before starting again in the same order. This system was used like that, because they used their hand and feet fingers to count. With these two discoveries, they calculated great quantities very quickly. This amazed to the first Spaniards.

Handwriting:

The Mayan handwriting is ideographic and is made by glyphs that adorn the steles and temples in entire Mayan world. The Mayas built their steles to commemorate their historic events. However, many Mayan documents have been lost for several reasons: in some documents the material that they used become deteriorated (for example: deer skin, amate (Mexican fig tree) paper, bark tree), other documents were destroyed by order of the Spanish priests in the XVI Century.

Escalera de los jeroglíficos : Is a document that commemorates the achievements of the real dynasty. It is in Copan (Honduras) and probably constitutes the greatest written story about the history of the Mayan civilization.

Códice Dresden : It has information about the eclipses and the movements of Venus. Studying this and other manuscripts, we can know more about Mayas and through their mythological passages of history, religion, astrology and sciences.

Libro de Consejos : Is a written manuscript in Mayan language of the Quiche region (Guatemala). In this antique book, also called "Popol Vuh", is found the Mayan history of the creation, where they believed that gods created the earth after the chaos; then they created light and life; and at last from the corn they created man to be the guardian of the universe. A Spanish cleric discovered, protected, and translated this manuscript to Spanish in the XVII century this valuable book.

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Architecture:

In the desolated jungles of Central America, thousands years ago, a respectful village, convinced nature so that it allows them built in its leafy heart great cities with monumental stone temples that, centuries after, without population, still communicates with nature as old friends.

The city was built carefully. At the middle, roads had, in its sides, houses with rubbish ceilings and chalk or sun-dried clay bricks walls. In the middle there were palaces and temples. These were tall pyramids up to 70 meters of height that proudly stand out of having connections with gods. In their important buildings they used the arc Korbel , also called Mayan arc, and they engrave the important dates on the walls.

Do not forget the famous "stadiums", in the middle, for the known ball game.

You have to bring little imagination, take a walk by the ruins of any of these old Mayan cities and speak to the stones and trees, which know a lot of histories of epochs full of other lives.

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