The Maya Civilization

The Maya civilization developed across the Yucatan Peninsula and the highlands of what are now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, reaching its greatest architectural and intellectual achievement during the Classic Period, roughly 250 to 900 CE, when cities such as Tikal, Calakmul, Copan and Palenque built monumental stone temples and palaces under rival royal dynasties that never unified into a single Maya empire. The Maya developed the only fully developed writing system known from the pre-Columbian Americas, a hieroglyphic script recording history, astronomy and ritual that stayed largely undeciphered until breakthroughs from the 1950s through the 1980s, and a mathematics that independently invented the concept of zero. Their astronomers tracked the cycles of the sun, moon and Venus with great precision and built an interlocking system of calendars, including the 260 day Tzolkin and the 365 day Haab, combined into the Long Count used to date historical events across centuries. Most of the great Classic Period cities of the southern lowlands were abandoned between roughly 800 and 900 CE, an event known as the Classic Maya collapse whose causes, including prolonged drought, warfare between rival city states, and overpopulation straining agricultural land, remain actively debated among archaeologists, while Maya civilization continued, and in some northern Yucatan cities such as Chichen Itza and Mayapan flourished for centuries afterward, and Maya peoples and languages survive today across the same region.