Was Classic Mayan civilization really so gruesome?
score:15
Their civilization did in fact engage in all those things. If anything, its been underplayed.
One important thing to note here is that things appeared to get particularly bloody (at least in terms of the inter-city warfare) towards the end when their Civilization was collapsing. Jared Diamond goes over this in his book Collapse, which has a whole chapter dealing with the Maya.
They had horrible erosion problems, and food and freshwater storage issues due to their climate and terrain. This left them incredibly vulnerable to droughts. Droughts of course happened periodically, but it appears that a particularly long one (along with soil erosion issues) may be what finally took them out.
Anyway, whenever a drought happened, once they went through the stores, there were just not enough resources to go around. In a densely populated farming society that meant that one way or another, lots of people were gonna die. Its tough to blame desperate people for preferring it to be the folks in the next town over rather than themselves via starvation.
Upvote:4
All of these things happened, and worse. You did not mention the flaying of living people, the drugging of participants, and more.
But, it is unfair to ascribe this only to the Maya. They, like other non-Aztec cultures in Mesoamerica, performed these practices less than the Aztecs[1].
The Aztec orchestrated this kind of imperialistic ritual (in hopes of advancing the practices of the semi-mythical Toltecs).
The question could be changed in order to not perjure the Maya in-absentia of their context.
[1] Bancroft, Hubert Howe (1882). The Native Races, Volume 2, Civilized Nations. p704
More post
- 📝 Did ancient miners have ways of predicting ore/stone deposits?
- 📝 How many warriors (troops) did feudal vassals have to provide to the king?
- 📝 When was the idea of a unified India conceived?
- 📝 Would Jewish Ukranians historically have worn vyshyvankas and integrated Slavic embroidary into their lives?
- 📝 Was there a US state where video games were banned by accident?
- 📝 How to find the image of a 17th century music instruments manufacture?
- 📝 Do most historians consider the enlightenment belief about human reason a precondition for democracy to emerge?
- 📝 What's the significance of "Sprinkler" (bottle)
- 📝 Why was Hesse south of the Main left out of the North German Confederation?
- 📝 Was the Social War the only war fought to integrate into an empire?
- 📝 Did loot from the 4th Crusade turn up in interesting places?
- 📝 Did people practice multiphasic sleep in the Middle Ages?
- 📝 Is there any historical evidence for a co-regency of Tiberius and Augustus?
- 📝 Is there an example of a civil rights movement supporter with a record of being against it?
- 📝 Who were the nine founding railroad members of the Chicago union stock yard?
- 📝 How significant was the US military role during the NATO campaign in Libya?
- 📝 Were boycotts, divestment, and sanctions effective against apartheid?
- 📝 Why are cereal grains so important to agriculture and civilization?
- 📝 What were the technological differences between Japan and the USA in World War 2?
- 📝 Were iconic structures intentionally destroyed in 20th century wars?
- 📝 Is it true that Adolf Hitler foresaw a surrender on the Western front in the last week of April 1945?
- 📝 What date format was used at Pompeii around the Mt Vesuvius eruption
- 📝 Was the Kerensky Offensive doomed from the start?
- 📝 Is the "youth bulge" hypothesis an evident explanation for imperialistic/rebellious historic movements and genocides?
- 📝 Why did Mussolini say that people are not really free if they don't have access to the ocean?
- 📝 Is there a historical source that might explain why so many countries use 35 as a minimum age for the president / the highest office person?
- 📝 Did Gavrilo Princip Try To Drown Himself?
- 📝 How did Jean Parisot de Valette, 49th Grand Master of the Order of Malta, die?
- 📝 When were the most reigning monarchs related to each other?
- 📝 Why was a convicted Nazi war criminal buried with military honours?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Was Classic Mayan civilization really so gruesome?
- 📝 Was race really unimportant in the 1660's?
- 📝 Was Switzerland really impossible to invade during WW2?
- 📝 Was slavery really on the way out in the antebellum USA?
- 📝 Was there really a navy officer named Picard at the Battle of Trafalgar?
- 📝 Which was the first civilization to ban slavery?
- 📝 Was early Sumerian civilization wiped out by a flood?
- 📝 Did Truman really believe that Hiroshima was a military base?
- 📝 Was Islam really responsible for the Italian Renaissance?
- 📝 Was FDR right that a garden hose was really $15 in 1940 (c.a. $300 today)?
- 📝 Was the Battle of Tours really the turning point for the Umayyad expansion into Europe?
- 📝 Was PepsiCo really sixth largest military force?
- 📝 Why was Africa never really colonized?
- 📝 Was the Minoan civilization warlike?
- 📝 Was Frederick II of Hohenstaufen really a medieval Dr. Mengele?
- 📝 Was 18th century Prussia really so militarily obsessed?
- 📝 Was Japan really part of the Axis?
- 📝 Was Sofia really demolished by Bulgarians after 1878 and why?
- 📝 Was the house of representatives really as rowdy a place as it is portrayed in the 2012 film Lincoln?
- 📝 Was classical Alexandria really this brutal and class-segregated?
- 📝 Was Operation Kugelblitz really a success for the partisans?
- 📝 When was it first noticed that airplane passengers really seemed to like tomato juice?
- 📝 Was the mortality rate among Irish emigrants to Canada really ten times those to America? If so, why?
- 📝 Did Averroes really try to bury light in an attempt to create gold, or was that invented by Victor Hugo?
- 📝 Was the Volga really Russia's last line of defense before the Urals?
- 📝 Was there really a whale skeleton in Jaffa?
- 📝 Was Eumenes really a non Greek by birth?
- 📝 Was there really a labor shortage in the USA until 1970?
- 📝 Was *Green Eggs and Ham* really banned in China from 1965–1991?
- 📝 Did West Russia really have a rock shortage in WW2? And if so, what was the cause?