'Greece' of the Americas
SUNDEL, ALFRED
'Greece' of the Americas Maya Art and Civilization. By Herbert J. Spinden. Falcon's Wing. 432 pp. $10.00. Prior to the fall of Rome, there arose in the jungles of Central America a civilization...
...The recurrence of the serpent is almost obsessive...
...Maya religion approximated monotheism...
...Absolute monarchy was increasingly being modified, and the superb art of their laic period was terrifying and macabre...
...The First Empire roughly extended 600 years into the Christian era...
...If the Maya were the Greeks of America, the Aztecs were the Romans...
...it offers rich ground to the student of comparative religions...
...When Cortez arrived, a ten-mile dam, great aqueducts and bridges, schools, markets, street lamps, surgery, and a "Venice-like" capital of 200,000 people attested to their might...
...Tikal had the highest and steepest pyramids, and Palenque was noted for its four-storeyed stone observatory...
...Succeeding an older culture—as evidenced by clay figurines wearing turbans of every kind—the Maya are first found in Guatemala and Honduras about the 8th century b.c...
...But while pyramid construction advanced, the Maya never equaled the sheer mass of the great Toltec pyramid at Cholula, which, "compared with the Pyramid of Cheops, . . . covers nearly twice as much ground and has a much greater volume...
...the earth itself must have trembled: Eight Deer, Itzcouatl...
...He broke the code of Maya chronology, and his correlation of the Maya and Christian year dates is one of two systems in general use...
...Since Spinden's area is so limited, we have the briefest mention of historic individuals...
...fn a new section devoted exclusively to the dynamics of the Mava "achievement of space-time science, Spinden has high praise for their "idea that time is movement in a living universe," proved by "synchronization with natural phenomena of the universe...
...Named after their language, the Maya flourished in a scattering of city-states for more than a thousand recorded years...
...hand in hand with Aztec religion...
...In time, a "protective Second Theocracy" was set up, which failed to prevent a culture clash between the Maya and a far-flung element of the cruder Toltecs...
...Eventually, they "calculated an almost exact correlation for the excess of the true year over the vague 365-day year...
...The Maya survived in a number of separate rural autonomies, a few of which still exist today...
...But by the time American history began (with Columbus), not only these cities but those of the Maya renaissance were already being overrun by the jungle...
...Compared with other civilizations...
...Early in the 14th century, the Aztecs migrated into the Valley of Mexico...
...On the heels of their conquering armies, their far-extending empire grew...
...War between the leading cities of Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan, followed by pestilence and a flurry of civil wars, caused the major sites to be deserted some fifty years before Columbus...
...They practiced flattening of the forehead for beauty, accentuating their Semitic noses...
...However, with the coming of the Spaniards and the ensuing destruction of their illuminated manuscripts as heretical, contact with their cultural heritage was virtually lost...
...Soil exhaustion and yellow fever head a list of possible causes, although a war over their astronomical rivalry may have seen Copan and Palenque destroy each other...
...Together with Morley and Vaillant I both deceased), Spinden has long ranked as one of the world's great authorities on Central American antiquities...
...The astronomical center of Copan could boast a hieroglyphic stairway...
...They soon became great warriors, political organizers and engineers...
...perfecting a 19-month calendar more accurate than the Gregorian we use today...
...Montezuma I and Tezcatlipoca are but a few...
...Poor maps and fleeting references that are never fully explained detract from it...
...In the jungles of Central America, we can take note, there lie buried more Kubla Khans than Coleridge ever dreamed of...
...The First Empire mysteriously collapsed with an "abandonment of all the sites within something like fifty years...
...While "the mass of material preserved is probably greater than that which has survived from the great art of Greece,"' much of it is generally unknown and in need of interpretation...
...This lost civilization has been reclaimed for us today largely through the efforts of archaeologists and the enduring nature of Maya art...
...Memorials of conquest and sculptures of adoration are portrayed on their stelae, lintels and altars, as well as mythological themes that grotesquely combine human and animal forms in a manner Spindel well calls "totemic...
...The Olmec heads are bound with what is probably the last evidence of the turban in pre-Columbian America...
...While theories have ranged far and wide—including a providential transplantation of the ten lost tribes of Israel—support has been growing for a trans-Pacific route diffusing cultural elements from Asia...
...Governed by theocratic rule, the common people lived in framework huts, tilled the soil for maize, and worshipped a confusing array of merging god-forms in temples atop their pyramids...
...Maya art upon technological grounds may be placed in advance of the art of Assyria and Egypt and only below that of Greece...
...The concept of zero was an original Maya invention long before the Arabs hit on it...
...Their synchronizations were noted "in terms of named and numbered days" that allowed the Mava, through their perfected calendar, to feel in harmony with the universe...
...Though it is badly organized and at times repetitious, it is in a class by itself for its interpretation of the technical aspects of Maya art and calendric computation...
...After a period in which primitive democracy came to the fore, migrations led the Maja to Chichen Itza in Yucatan, which was soon made the capital of the Second Empire...
...Priests and nobles wore wooden headframes massed with the long feathers of the quetzal bird, and time was spent frugally in intellectual pursuits, i.e., chronology, art, astronomy, mathematics and hieroglyphic writing...
...As he has avoided much material covered by Morley and Vaillant, this handsome volume is extremely limited in scope...
...Prior to the fall of Rome, there arose in the jungles of Central America a civilization cut off from the general course of human history...
...The Maya renaissance followed, ushering in prosperity and achievement...
...In a revised and enlarged edition of a work written earlier in his long career, Herbert J. Spinden here offers one of the best explanations to date of that art and civilization...
...On the origin of the American Indian, Spinden conservatively hews to the Alaskan-Siberian land-bridge theory alone...
...But with the aid of several of the oppressed and subjugated nations, Cortez cli-mactically brought an end to Indian civilization in Mexico, utterly demolishing the Aztec capital in ihe fierce course of the fight...
...while the Romans never had it...
...There appeared in Chichen Itza a Toltec ball court (for a popular basketball-like game), a greater glorification of the warrior, and human sacrifice in the form of hurling a beautiful maiden into a cavernous well...
...less remembered today than the artifacts of their forgotten civilizations...
...from where they began their count of time...
...Yet in the long ago there did live warlords before whom, in their day...
...The New York subway system, however, informs its millions of placard readers that these bound heads represent "ancient football heroes...
...According to Spinden, two Toltec leaders later deified in Aztec mythology, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzal-coatl, figured importantly in the Maya-Toltec fusion...
...Despite their multiplicity of gods...
...As obsessed with death as the Maya were with time, every war became a holy one for them that saw their captives religiously sacrificed on the altars of their pyramid temples...
...Calen-dric marvels, they early made an exact time correlation back to 3373 b.c...
...It Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Writer, critic, student of Maya civilization saw the "great cities of the south" spring up—Palenque, Tikal, Copan and Yaxchilan, to name a few...
...Other important cultures, such as the Zapotec or Mixteca-Puebla, or the Olmec who carved giant stone heads with Negroid features, are briefly noted by Spinden...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
