In October 1839, the American traveler John Stephen and the English traveler Frederick Caterwood arrived by ship from New York to Belize. This tiny outpost of the British Empire was located on the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. Stephen and Caterwood headed for the forest maze in search of mysterious ancient cities, noticed by Spanish conquistadors XVI century in the depths of the rain forest. Only recently have historians discovered their memories, long moldy in Spanish archives, and began to talk about the civilizations lost in the jungles of Central America. Some short reports from local researchers, especially Captain Del Rio's account of his visit to the ruins of Palenque in 1787, published in England in 1822, seemed to support the testimony of Spanish chroniclers. Instead of discussing the validity of these stories in the safe silence of the libraries, Stevens and Caterwood were filled with a desire to learn firsthand.
After a dangerous journey through the open countryside, swarming with bandits, they entered the dense rainforests of Honduras and came to the ruins of the ancient city of Copan. They were struck by the scale and grandeur of houses, statues, squares and pyramids. Although Stephen and Caterwood, who had studied the Spanish chronicles, knew that all this was the work of the Mayans, strange as it may seem, they were unable to learn anything new about the ancient builders from the locals. Steven confessed to his complete confusion:
"The city was abandoned. No representatives of the ancient race, just ruins. It was lying in front of us like a broken bark (ship) in the middle of the ocean, with broken masts, erased letters of the name, missing crew and unknown fate ... Was this place where we sat, a citadel of unknown people, announced by the singing of military trumpets? Or the temple where the one merciful God was praised? Or did his people honor idols made with their own hands and put sacrifices on the stones before them? Everything around was shrouded in dark, impenetrable cover, the 180-foot high pyramid of the Tigris, which is about 13,000,000 cubic feet high. "
These monuments clearly show that the Mayans have succeeded in building civilization in the wilderness of the rainforest, but who ruled the cities? The first researchers considered the Mayan cities to be purely ritual centers where only peace-loving priests with their retinue lived, and only on the big holidays did the residents of the surrounding villages gather here. Sir Eric Thompson, a British Mayan historian who worked at the Field Museum in Chicago, believed that the central place in the Mayan code was the admiration for religious power: "Loyalty, discipline and respect for power contributed to the emergence of theocracy.
However, this epoch was not a period of peace under the control of ascetic priests who lived alone among the great temples. Several breakthroughs in the study of the Mayan language over the past 25 years have allowed us to grasp the meaning of their hieroglyphic writing. Although Thompson and others suggested that the inscriptions outside the temples belonged to the abstract questions of astronomy and calendar dates, which were interesting only for priests, modern translations without a shadow of a doubt prove that the cities were ruled by secular aristocracy with very belligerent views. The hieroglyphic inscriptions on the monuments were mainly used to record the achievements of Mayan rulers, especially the perpetuation of military victories. Outside the temples were erected "triumphal stones" with the names of famous prisoners. Huge monuments were literally covered with the names and images of the rulers at which the construction was carried out. "The "peace-loving priests" disappeared from the historical scene, but it is also clear that the aristocracy had many prejudices, especially with regard to happy days and calendar dates (see the Mayan Calendar appendix in this section).
Professor Michael Coe of Yale University, a leading scholar in the field of ancient Mayan culture, summarizes the dramatic shift in our understanding of this civilization:
"Instead of a peaceful theocracy led by astronomical priests living in relatively desolate "ritual centers", we now have belligerent city-states run by dark dictators obsessed with human sacrifices and ritual bloodshed.
Excavations have also played an important role in the coup d'état of Mayan cities. Evidence that the cities were not just ritual centers, now found in many places of archaeological work on the low plains. In the vicinity of cities such as El Mirador, clusters of low rectangular earth mounds were found, which for a long time remained without attention. But now archeological research has shown that there were small wooden houses raised above the level of summer floods. These modest dwellings were inhabited by ordinary people who served the aristocrats, who lived in the luxury of the palaces of the central part of the city.