The Order of Days: Unlocking the Secrets of the Ancient Maya - Softcover

Stuart, David

9780385527279: The Order of Days: Unlocking the Secrets of the Ancient Maya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385527276 ISBN 13: 9780385527279

Verlag: Crown, 2012

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The world's foremost expert on Maya culture looks at 2012 hysteria and explains the truth about what the Maya meant and what we want to believe.

Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilizations End. The World Cataclysm in 2012. 2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl. According to many of these alarmingly titled books, the ancient Maya not only had a keen insight into the mystical workings of our planet and the cosmos, but they were also able to predict that the world will end in the year 2012.

David Stuart, the foremost scholar of the Maya and recipient of numerous awards for his work, takes a hard look at the frenzy over 2012 and offers a fascination (and accurate) trip through Mayan culture and belief. Stuart shows how the idea that the "end of the Mayan calendar," which supposedly heralds the end of our own existence, says far more about our culture than about the ancient Maya. The Order of Days explores how the real intellectual achievement of ancient Maya timekeeping and worldview is far more impressive and remarkable than any of the popular, and often outrageous, claims about this advanced civilization.

As someone who has studied the Maya for nearly all of his life and who specializes in reading their ancient texts, Stuart sees the 2012 hubbub as the most recent in a long chain of related ideas about Mesoamericans, the Maya in particular, that depicts them as somehow oddball, not "of this world," or as having some strong mystical link to other realms.

Because the year 2012 has no prominent role in anything the ancient Maya ever actually wrote, Stuart takes a wider look at the Maya concepts of time and their underlying philosophy as we can best understand them. The ancient Maya, Stuart contends, were worthy of study and admiration not because they were strange but because they were altogether human, and they developed a compelling vision of time unlike any other civilization before or since.

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David Stuart is a Mayanist scholar and professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He began deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs at the age of eight, under the tutelage of Linda Schele. He has made major contributions in the field of epigraphy, particularly related to the decipherment of the Mayan script used by the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica.

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PREFACE

In the last half- century, modern scholars have made an astounding intellectual journey. Beginning in the 1950s and ’60s, archaeologists and historians finally began the rigorous process of understanding many key aspects of ancient Maya civilization, much of it by “cracking the code” of the elaborate Maya hieroglyphic script, left to us on hundreds of stone monuments and ceramic vessels. This work has enveloped me for most of my life, with my interest in the Maya beginning when I was a boy accompanying my parents on their expeditions to remote jungle ruins back in the 1970s. Over the years I’ve been incredibly fortunate to participate in this transformation of knowledge, working with many colleagues in diverse fields to bring the ancient Maya from the realm of prehistory into that of history. Now, after several exciting decades, their written record is mostly understood, and it has forever changed our view of Maya history, religion, and culture. I like to think that we’re now at a place in the study of the ancient Maya not unlike where Egyptologists were in the early nineteenth century, at which time an ancient civilization suddenly was ripe for study in grand detail, right on the heels of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean- Fran�ois Champollion.

With regard to the Maya, we are nowadays in a similar “heady” time, albeit with far more scientific methodology and context in hand than early Egyptology ever had. But has the popular understanding of ancient Mesoamerica and the Maya advanced so much? I have to wonder. Lately I find myself confused and even frustrated by what I see in the popular representation of the Maya in today’s media, whether it be in print or on- screen. Seldom can I roam through a large retail bookstore, sit in front of a television, or surf the Web without seeing some reference to the year 2012, now just a couple of years away as I write this. Many of the books on 2012 have evocative, even alarming titles, such as Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization’s End; or The World Cataclysm in 2012: The Maya Countdown to the End of Our World; or 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl; or Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End- Date. According to many of these strange- sounding books and TV shows— and none of them is ever consistent in its message— the ancient Maya, having some keen insight into the mystical workings of our planet and the cosmos, were able to predict that the world would end or in some way be radically transformed in the year 2012—on the winter solstice December 21, to be exact (although, again, some sources differ about the precise day).

This is all complete nonsense. As someone who has studied the Maya for nearly all of his life, and who specializes in reading their ancient texts in order to understand their history, religion, and culture, I have to lay down the line and assert that any such statements about the Maya predicting the world’s demise or, alternatively, some “transformation of consciousness” in 2012 is, to put it as simply and directly as possible, wrong. Not only wrong, but misleading. There’s something larger at work here, more than just the ideas of a few kooks who have little interest in real Maya history and culture. The 2012 hubbub seems to be the most recent in a long chain of related theories and ideas about Mesoamericans, and the Maya in particular, depicting them as somehow oddball, not “of this world,” or having some strong mystical link to other realms and dimensions. As early as the nineteenth century, the emerging accounts of ancient civilizations in Mexico were widely seen as too impossibly advanced to be the handiwork of “Indians,” especially among many in the young United States, where native populations were being slaughtered, displaced, and culturally marginalized along an ever- increasing frontier. Some people claimed that the impressive ruins of Central America had to be the works of Phoenicians, Israelites, Scandinavians (?!), or even inhabitants of the lost continent of Atlantis. How could “Indians” have built such great cities and created such artwork?—or so the thinking went.

This notion was largely dispelled among scholars by the mid-1800s, as archaeology blossomed and exploration established no doubt about historical and cultural links between the ruined cities and the native inhabitants of the area. But by the twentieth century, the same vein of thinking had morphed somewhat, now depicting the ancient Maya not so much as Old World seafarers but as peaceful, star- gazing intellectuals little concerned with the real world of human affairs. No wonder, perhaps, that by the 1970s, pop culture references to the exotic Maya had them making direct contact with aliens, who, after all, must have built their cities using spaceships. Even today we see the same motif in movies and books. The most recent Indiana Jones film— always good PR for archaeology— shows Maya pyramids in the Amazon, of all places, guarding crystal skulls and flying saucers.

At present, with the ominous year 2012 fast approaching, it isn’t surprising that many of these same ideas are back in the news. According to many breathless writers and to TV accounts, the “Maya calendar will end,” and the Maya were somehow able to tap in to their mystical knowledge to predict the future of our time. At the very least, through some supposed special connections to the outer cosmos or to the inner being of humanity (depending on what you read), the Maya alone were able to predict a coming end of times, a galactic alignment with the rising sun, and the transformation of human consciousness, among other weird and great insights. I’m convinced that these outlandish claims about 2012 and its meaning (as if it needs a meaning) are the latest manifestations of a deep- seated idea within the American popular imagination, that Mesoamerican peoples and the “mysterious Maya” are exotic and even, in some way, alien.

Fundamentally, this speaks to an inability in much of our own culture, seldom addressed or even recognized, to confront the fact that many ancient Americans were as civilized as their counterparts in the Old World. There’s a lot of intellectual baggage behind these thoughts and denials, some going back to centuries- old notions about “the Indian” as a noble savage, or maybe just a savage. Couple these ideas with the profound cultural barrier that exists between the United States and the history and culture of Mexico and Central America, and you have a recipe for major cultural misunderstanding.

To me, the whole situation reveals the fact that modern America still has a difficult time grasping the reality of ancient advanced cultures south of our border. If one looks at attitudes about Mexico and illegal “aliens” today, maybe this is not so surprising. The irony is acute. For just at the moment when decades of hard work in the field and in the libraries have paid off, when we can proudly claim to have cracked the Maya code, most of the loudest “expert” voices are those who simply misrepresent the truth about the Maya, a remarkable people who deserve far, far better. In other words, nearly all of the books and television shows on 2012 are by gurus and spiritualists who wouldn’t know a Maya glyph if one hit them on the nose. I’m convinced that the emerging 2012 phenomenon says far more about today’s culture and its larger concerns than about the ancient Maya.

This profound misrepresentation of the Maya motivated the writing of this book. In my outlook, the reality of Maya accomplishments is far more interesting and awe- inspiring than the ubiquitous false...

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Verlag: Crown
Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN 10: 0385527276
ISBN 13: 9780385527279
Einband: Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten: 368
Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verf�gbar
Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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