The Maya sun god as shark-man -- one of his several guises on a newfound monument in Guatemala. Photograph courtesy Edwin Román, Brown University
Posted on 07/22/2012 8:12:13 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.
Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.
Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization -- which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map) -- was a loose aggregation of city-states.
"This has been a growing awareness to us since the 1990s, when it became clear that a few kingdoms were more important than others," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who announced the discovery of the new temple Thursday.
El Zotz, in what's now Guatemala, was one of the smaller kingdoms, but one apparently bent on making an big impression.
By 2010 archaeologists working on a hilltop near the ancient city center had discovered 45-foot-tall (13-meter-tall) Diablo Pyramid, Atop it they found a royal palace and a tomb, believed to hold the city's first ruler, who lived around A.D. 350 to 400.
Around the same time, Houston and a colleague spotted the first hints of the Temple of the Night Sun, behind the royal tomb on Diablo Pyramid. Only recently, though, have excavations uncovered the unprecedented artworks under centuries of overgrowth.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
The Maya sun god as shark-man -- one of his several guises on a newfound monument in Guatemala. Photograph courtesy Edwin Román, Brown University
In before the El Zotz?
Such a happy, pleasant culture.
:)
At first read, I thougt it said “covered with giant feces”.
So...do all the people who bought the panicky 2012 books get a refund, now?
Lots of guys with primitive stone hand tools built these things.
REALLY! NO FOOLING!!
Love the cartoon that showed the two Mayans carving a wheel and the one says, “Well, we’re out of room on this one.” The other one says, “That’s really gonna mess up some people in the future.”
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Uh-oh, El Zotz? Guess we know what happened to that Mayan city. |
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LOL Me, too.
Yup.
Barbaric.
I always said that the guy making the calendar just ran out of space on the rock.
I quit counting on stuff like this when the Y2K crash didn’t fry the IRS computers and save me.
Oh no you don’t!
*I* said that!
LOL
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Uh-oh, El Zotz? Guess we know what happened to that Mayan city. |
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“When it became clear that a few kingdoms were more important than others” - ohhhhh.....liberal kingdoms.......
LOL! That’s what I read as well.
Ehhhhh....looks like hillary Clinton to me......
FReepers are slipping. Nearly twenty posts and no picture of Helen Thomas.
Judging from the portraits, they also used their teeth.
/johnny
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