Their architecture comprised elaborately carved temples and places, and they possessed a superior calendar, and a developed system of hieroglyphic writing, with records said to go back to about 700 a
Designating, or pertaining to, an American Indian linguistic stock occupying the Mexican States of Veracruz, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, and Yucatan, together with a part of Guatemala and a part of Salvador
a member of an American Indian people of Yucatan and Belize and Guatemala who had a culture (which reached its peak between AD 300 and 900) characterized by outstanding architecture and pottery and astronomy; "Mayans had a system of writing and an accurate calendar"
They cultivated a variety of crops, were expert in the manufacture and dyeing of cotton fabrics, used cacao as a medium of exchange, and were workers of gold, silver, and copper
{s} of or pertaining to the Maya, of or pertaining to the people or culture of the Mayas, of or pertaining to the languages spoken by the Mayas
The Mayan peoples are dark, short, and brachycephallic, and at the time of the discovery had attained a higher grade of culture than any other American people
System of writing used by people of the Maya civilization from about the 3rd century AD to the 17th century. Of the various scripts developed in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, Mayan writing is by far the most elaborate and abundantly attested: about 800 signs have been inventoried in more than 5,000 instances (see Maya Codices). Signs some representational, some quite abstract are either logographic, representing words, or syllabic, representing consonant-vowel sequences. Typically, up to five signs are fit into tight square or rectangular clusters, which are further arranged into rows or grids. The language of Classic Period writing ( AD 250-900) is generally thought to be Cholan, ancestral to several modern Maya languages; later inscriptions were in Yucatec. By the 1990s scholars had an accurate grasp of 60-70% of Mayan inscriptions, with some texts almost completely readable and some still quite opaque. Most inscriptions record significant events and dates in the lives of Mayan rulers