Jürg Widmer Probst with six fascinating facts you might not know about the Mayan civilisation in Guatemala, including rituals, Mayan writing, extreme sports and why the cities were abandoned.

1. Did you know these 6 facts about the Mayan civilisation in Guatemala?
The centre of the Maya Empire’s was the tropical lowlands that make up today’s
Guatemala. Its peak in terms of influence and power hit at around the 6th
century AD.
By 900AD most of the giant cities were abandoned. Mayan civilisation has left
behind artwork, architecture and plenty of evidence showing their excellence in
pottery, writing, maths, calendar making and more.
Here are 6 facts you may not know about the Mayan civilisation in Guatemala
1. Mayans loved chocolate
Easter with its usual bounty of chocolate eggs has been and gone. And it might
surprise chocolate lovers today that more than 2,600 years ago Mayans were
enjoying a form of chocolate. While it was the Olmecs that began processing cacao
around 3,500 years ago, there is archaeological evidence that Guatemalan Mayans
were doing it too.
You could say that it was Mayans that turned chocolate into an art form. Ceramic
vessels dating back to 600 BCE have been discovered in Guatemala that hold the

2. chemical signatures of cacao. However, it wasn’t the same as the chocolate we
enjoy today.
Mayans mixed cacao with chili peppers, cornmeal, honey and water to make a spicy,
foamy hot ‘chocolate’ drink. Hieroglyphs and art from the time appear to show that
cacao was important in rituals and celebrations. For example, the Dresden Codex
shows a clear image of K’awil, the god of sustenance, holding a cup filled with cacao
beans.
2. An architect not an archaeologist cracked the code to Mayan writing
An American architect born in Siberia, Tatiana Proskoyriakoff, began a part time job
at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia when she couldn’t find one in her own sector.
And in the 1930s, she went along on an expedition with the curator to the
Guatemalan Maya site at Piedras Negras.
She had no formal training as an archaeologist but became an expert in Mayan
antiquity. Her 1960 paper: “Historical Implication of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras
Negras, Guatemala” was a major breakthrough in deciphering Mayan glyphs. She
was the very first person to work out that the ‘upended frog’ glyph in the Mayan
alphabet means birth, and the ‘toothache’ glyph means the date the king came to the
throne. This in turn led to a way of identifying birth and death announcements and
allowed future scholars to identify the Mayan rulers.
3. They wrote lots of books
The Mayan people wrote elaborate books on long strips of paper that they made
from fig tree bark. But today, only three Maya codices still survive. These are called
the Paris Codex, the Madrid Codex and the Dresden Codex. So where did the books
go? While it’s thought some succumbed to the damp conditions across the region,
many others were purposely destroyed by European invaders.

3. We have evidence directly from the source too. Diego de Landa was a Spanish friar
who travelled to the Yucatan sometime in the 1540s. He said: “We found a large
number of books in their letters… we burned them all, which… caused them sorrow.”
4. Maya people took their beauty regimes seriously
The Mayans went way beyond using make up and fancy clothes to change their
outward appearance. During young childhood, men and women had their heads
bound to purposefully shape their skulls into an elongated cone shape. This was
probably considered to signify differences in social status. They also liked to drill
holes into their teeth and inlay them with jewels made from hematite, turquoise, jade
and pyrite.
5. They loved extreme sports
All across the Mayan region there are ballcourts where they played a game called
pitz. It involved passing a heavy ball to each other without using their hands. They
were equipped with protection on their arms, knees and ribs and the aim was to
score a goal of sorts through a high stone hoop. However, rather than a fun game,
pitz was an important ritual and there is evidence that the losers could be victims of
human sacrifice.

4. 6. Debate still rages as to why Mayans began to decline
The peak of the Mayan civilisation was during the Classic Maya period between 300
and 600 BCE. Sometime in the 9th
century it started to go wrong. Cities that were
home to around 70,000 people appear to have been abruptly abandoned. There are
various theories as to why this happened, including overpopulation, drought, warfare
between city states or a mass migration to the coast. While many cities were
deserted, Mayans never disappeared, and their descendants are still living in
Guatemala and other regions. In Guatemala, the Maya still form the majority of the
population.