Название: The Ancient Maya
Автор(ы): Sylvanus G. Morley
Издательство: Stanford University Press; Third Edition
Год: 1956
Страниц: 519
Язык: English
Формат: DJVU
Размер: 31 MB

THE STORY of the Maya has been “in the writing” for more than sixteen hundred years j in fact, ever since the early part of the fourth century of the Christian Era, when the ancient Maya themselves began to carve their earliest known records on stone monuments. This purely Maya contribution to their history covers about twelve centuries (a.d. 320-1541), and while very little of historical detail as we understand it has survived, the Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, nevertheless, furnish us with a more accurate chronological background than that found anywhere else in aboriginal America. During the century (1550-1650) following the Spanish conquest, a number of native as well as Spanish writers carry on the story for us. Educated Maya who had been taught by the early Catholic missionaries to write their language in the characters of the Spanish alphabet in order to facilitate their instruction in the Catholic faith set down brief summaries of their own ancient history, probably copied directly from their then still surviving historical manuscripts in the Maya hieroglyphic writing. In addition to the foregoing native sources, several of the early Franciscan Fathers have left admirable accounts of the Maya as they were in the middle-sixteenth century, by far the most important being the contemporary narrative by Fray Diego de Landa, the second Bishop of Yucatan. His Relación de las cosas de Yucatán,f written in 1566 and extensively quoted in the following pages, is unquestionably our leading authority on the ancient Maya.