hckrnws

> The Maya Civilization, from Central America, was one of the most advanced ancient civilizations

The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.

(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)

The Maya are still around, but the Maya civilization's institutions were all destroyed. And the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books [1] they could find and burning them. So a lot of knowledge was lost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

The link doesn't mention "seeking out" those books, in fact it mentions catholic priests both burning and lamenting the burn.

They hunted down all of the libraries, collected all of the books inside, and burned them in massive bonfires, accidentally saving a total of like 3 books which had already been shipped back to Europe as trophies. I think there are also some remaining fragments of a few others. One Spaniard wrote about it:

> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

It is worth noting that the friar who organized this book burning was recalled to Spain to stand trial on account of his actions.

It is also worth noting that he was absolved of all crimes and eventually consecrated as a bishop.

Why is that worth noting?

Because it might not have been the “Spanish”, but certain people who ruined history. So it’s not fair to blame a whole country for the actions of a few.

It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top.

(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.

It's really not sane to do so, today.

You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it

Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.

While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.

They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.

Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.

If that is the case, why did the trial absolve him of all crimes and why did get consecrated as a bishop by the king of Spain?

I guess that is implied since these things always happen this way, its not like book burners are just having a nice campfire and the books they dislike just happen to be close by.

I was surprised to find out that there are still many indigenous groups with populations in the millions. My California public education made it seem like they were all pretty much wiped out save for those who survived to the various reservation systems.

My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.

Even in the US, the Indian Wars weren't finished until the 1890s. In fact, most of the big wars against the Native Americans took place after the American Civil War. One of the big faults I have with US history in the education system is that it tends to front-load the depiction of Native Americans in the Precolonial portion of history, with an echo in the Trail of Tears and forced migration in the 1830s, and largely edits them out of the history of the settling of the west, despite this process requiring a very violent dispossession of the existing inhabitants.

> most of the big wars against the Native Americans

As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.

Look up the american bison. The US government's official policy was to eliminate bison to eliminate Indians/First Peoples. Mountains of skulls. In under a decade, the bison population was pushed down from 30-60M to approximately 500 individuals.

Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.

Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....

Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.

If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.

This is also a difference in outcomes between traditional colonialism (where indigenous people were viewed as a source of labor) and settler colonialism (where indigenous people are viewed simply as "in the way"). That's not to say that traditional colonialism is in any way acceptable, however.

The Mapuche even expanded their territorial control, in large part to their acquisition and mastery of Spanish horses.

The Commanche also held out until after the Civil War.

Was always weird to me how "the French and Indian War" had Indian involvement almost over emphasized to pretend like it wasn't the extension of a European war...

While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.

One of my first realizations of slant put on history.

It's more properly a campaign of the Seven Years War, which was almost a world war of its time.

I've been in towns in Mexico where the kids ONLY speak a Mayan language. No Spanish or English.

I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.

How does one even come up with 260 day year?

Is the weather in the tropics so similar that year-on-year mismatch stops mattering?

The origins of the 260 day ritual year are not known for certain, but there are a couple of hypotheses:

1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)

2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.

3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.

It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.

(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)

This reminds me a bit of how the Islamic calendar year is 355 days and doesn't have intercalation for religious reasons (many calendars insert extra months now and then to realign with the year, but the Islamic calendar does not). This is why Ramadan always seems to be at different times of year when you hear about it.

> And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos.

Any reason number 13, of all numbers, has been so significant in different parts of the world, sometimes associated with completely opposite meanings (e.g., between Jews and Persians/Europeans)?

generally, 7 and 13 get a lot of attention because a)they are prime b)1/7 and 1/13 have long period when written as decimal fraction - so you keep stumbling in your calculations every time you encounter them

1/7 in base 20 takes surprisingly short form of 0.(1h) (h is 17), unlike 1/9 or 1/11 - so I wonder if there's Mayan prejudice on those instead

The sad thing is that for all their advanced ways of the time, they succumbed to the same thing we are experiencing now... being too comfortable to fix what's broken.

The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.

Sounds like the opposite no? Since we are going through population collapse in a time of abundance. Does make me wonder what the political dynamics were at the time, whether some could see problems but weren't in power to change things. Or maybe they couldn't understand or figure out solutions to the problems. What I'd give to be a multilingual fly on the wall throughout history.

The original RDB!

Whenever I see these backwards-applied math models I think of the “wet streets cause rain” expression.