The Maya and the Aztecs

Civilisations of the New World

Long before Europeans crossed the ocean to the Americas, great civilisations were flourishing there. In the rainforests, highlands and valleys of Mesoamerica, the region we now call Mexico and Central America, peoples built towering pyramids, busy cities and rich kingdoms. Two of the most famous were the Maya and the Aztecs.

These civilisations had no contact at all with Egypt, China or Europe, yet they invented writing, studied the stars, built in stone and created beautiful art entirely on their own. In this book you will explore their cities, their calendars, their gods and their daily lives, and discover why their achievements still amaze us today.

The World of the Maya

The Maya civilisation grew up in the steamy rainforests and highlands of southern Mexico and Central America. The Maya were never a single empire ruled by one king. Instead, they lived in many separate city-states, each with its own ruler, rather like the city-states of ancient Greece. Famous Maya cities included Tikal, Palenque and Chichen Itza.

The height of Maya power, often called their Classic period, came over a thousand years ago, between about 250 and 900 CE. During this time the Maya built spectacular stone cities in the heart of the jungle, with tall stepped pyramids, grand palaces, ball courts and plazas. The ruins of these cities, slowly swallowed by the rainforest, are still being explored by archaeologists today.

Then, mysteriously, many of the great Maya cities of the lowlands were abandoned. Historians think a mix of drought, war and other troubles may have been to blame. But the Maya people themselves never vanished. Millions of their descendants live in the region to this day.

Maya Star-Gazers and Mathematicians

The Maya were among the greatest astronomers and mathematicians of the ancient world. Without telescopes, they watched the night sky carefully for generations, tracking the movements of the Sun, the Moon, the planet Venus and the stars. They could predict eclipses and the changing seasons with remarkable accuracy.

To do this, they used a clever system of mathematics. Astonishingly, the Maya understood and used the number zero, a brilliant idea that many other ancient peoples never developed. They wrote numbers using just three symbols: a dot for one, a bar for five, and a shell shape for zero.

The Maya combined their astronomy and mathematics to create extremely accurate calendars. They actually used several calendars at once, including a 365-day calendar of the year and a separate sacred calendar, weaving them together to mark festivals, farming seasons and important events. Their calendars were among the most precise in the entire ancient world.

Maya Writing and Books

The Maya also developed one of the only true writing systems in the ancient Americas. Their writing was made up of hundreds of small pictures and symbols called glyphs, which could stand for whole words or for sounds. Skilled scribes carved these glyphs into stone monuments and painted them in folding books.

These books, called codices, were made from bark paper and folded like a screen. Sadly, when Europeans arrived, most Maya books were destroyed, and only a handful survive today. For centuries, no one could read the mysterious glyphs at all.

Then, over the last hundred years or so, scholars slowly cracked the code, much as the Rosetta Stone helped unlock Egyptian hieroglyphs. Today we can read Maya writing again, and it tells us the names of their kings, the dates of their battles and the stories of their gods. To learn how writing systems developed around the world, see The Story of Writing and the Alphabet.

The Rise of the Aztecs

Centuries after the great Maya cities had faded, another mighty civilisation rose to the north, in central Mexico: the Aztecs. According to their own legends, the Aztecs were once wandering people who were told by their god to settle where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus, holding a snake. They found this sign on a swampy island in a lake, and there they built their city.

That city was Tenochtitlan, one of the largest and most magnificent cities in the world at the time. Built on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, it was crossed by canals and joined to the shore by long raised roads called causeways. To grow food on the lake, the Aztecs built floating garden plots called chinampas, rich and fertile islands of soil.

From this island capital, the Aztecs built a powerful empire, conquering neighbouring peoples and demanding tribute, such as food, cloth, gold and other goods, from the lands they ruled. By the early 1500s, their empire was vast, rich and feared across the region.

Gods, Temples and Sacrifice

Religion was at the very heart of both Maya and Aztec life. They worshipped many gods and goddesses who, they believed, controlled the Sun, the rain, the maize harvest, war and death. Great stepped pyramids rose in the centres of their cities, topped by temples where priests carried out ceremonies.

The Aztecs believed that the Sun and the whole world needed to be fed with human blood to keep on living. For this reason they practised human sacrifice, offering the lives of captured warriors and others to their gods, especially the sun and war god. To modern eyes this is shocking, but to the Aztecs it was a sacred and necessary duty to keep the universe alive.

Both peoples also held grand festivals, with music, dancing, feasting and processions. They played a serious ball game on special stone courts, using a heavy rubber ball that players struck with their hips. The game was fun, but it also had deep religious meaning.

Daily Life and Food

Most Maya and Aztecs were ordinary farmers, and the most important crop by far was maize, which we call corn. Maize was ground into flour and made into flatbreads and dough, much as it still is in Mexico today. People also grew beans, squash, chilli peppers, tomatoes and cacao, the bean used to make chocolate, which was so precious that cacao beans were even used as money.

Families lived in simple homes, and children helped their parents with farming, cooking and weaving. Markets were busy and colourful, full of food, cloth, pottery and crafts, where people bartered goods rather than using coins. Skilled craftworkers made jewellery, feathered headdresses, pottery and beautiful carvings.

Many of the foods these civilisations grew, including maize, tomatoes, chillies, chocolate and vanilla, were unknown in the rest of the world until Europeans arrived. These foods then spread across the globe and changed the way people everywhere eat. The story of how foods and goods spread is part of The Age of Exploration.

Conquest and Legacy

In the early 1500s, Spanish explorers and soldiers arrived in Mexico, led by Hernán Cortés. They were amazed by the wealth and size of Tenochtitlan. The Spanish wanted the empire's gold and land, and they made allies of peoples who resented Aztec rule.

In just a few years, the Aztec empire fell. The Spanish had steel weapons, cannons and horses, which the Aztecs had never seen, and crucially they brought European diseases such as smallpox. The Aztecs had no resistance to these illnesses, and they swept through the population, killing huge numbers of people. By 1521, Tenochtitlan had been conquered, and a new Spanish city, Mexico City, was built on its ruins.

Yet the story did not end there. The descendants of the Maya and the Aztecs still live across Mexico and Central America today, speaking their languages and keeping many of their traditions. Their foods, art, words and ruins are admired all over the world, and their astonishing pyramids and cities still rise out of the jungle and the highlands, reminding us of two of the great civilisations of the Americas.

What We Learned

We have explored the rainforests and highlands of ancient Mesoamerica and met two remarkable civilisations.

We learned that the Maya lived in jungle city-states and were brilliant astronomers and mathematicians who used the number zero and created their own writing. We discovered the Aztecs and their magnificent island capital, Tenochtitlan, the heart of a powerful empire. We saw how both peoples worshipped many gods, built towering pyramids and grew maize, chocolate and other foods that later spread around the world. Finally, we learned how the Spanish conquest brought the Aztec empire to an end, though the descendants of the Maya and Aztecs live on today.

The great cities may lie in ruins, but the genius of the Maya and the Aztecs still shines across the Americas.

Curious about other great civilisations? Compare these builders with the pyramid-makers of the Nile in The Ancient Egyptians.