The Maya, the Aztecs and the Inca were not one people and did not share a century, a language or a mountain range. What they shared was ambition. These stories take in a capital built on a lake, a queen who outranked her husband, knots that kept an empire's accounts, and several things everyone knows that turn out to be wrong.
Every tile in a Aztec, Maya and Inca game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Cities
nine stories
1The Aztecs named a city they found in ruins
On the tile: Teotihuacanc. 100 BCE-550 CE
The Aztecs found a ruined metropolis, gave it a name in their own language, Teotihuacan, often translated as the place of the gods, and came to it as pilgrims. The people who built it had been gone for centuries, and their own name for the city is still unknown. It was enormous. The main avenue runs more than three kilometers, and the Pyramid of the Sun stands some sixty to sixty-five meters high. At its height, around 400 to 500 CE, estimates of its population run from about 100,000 to more than 200,000.
2A capital built on a lake, with bridges that lifted out
On the tile: Tenochtitlan14th century-1521
Tenochtitlan sat on an island in Lake Texcoco, and everything about it answered to water. Three causeways carried traffic to the mainland, each broken by gaps spanned with bridges that let canoes pass and could be pulled away to protect the city. Fresh water arrived by aqueduct from the springs at Chapultepec. Tradition says the Mexica founded it in the 1300s, at the spot where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus. At its peak the city held more than 200,000 people.
Tikal had no river and no lake, and its groundwater lay some two hundred meters down, beyond reach. So the Maya who built it in the forests of northern Guatemala banked the rain. Great paved plazas were laid at a slant to drain into reservoirs, which filled in the wet season and carried the city through the dry. Estimates of its population run from about ten thousand to as many as ninety thousand. Tikal flourished from about 300 to 850 CE, and its Temple I still rises about fifty meters.
Machu Picchu is called the lost city of the Incas, and it was neither. It was a royal estate of the fifteenth century, thought to have belonged to the ruler Pachacuti, with room for up to about a thousand people when the emperor was in residence. Spanish forces never reached it, and people in the valley below always knew it was there. In 1911 a local farmer led Hiram Bingham up the mountain, where farmers were already working its terraces. Water came by a stone canal 749 meters long to a chain of sixteen fountains.
Most buildings at Chichen Itza are rectangular, in keeping with Maya practice, and then there is the Caracol, a round tower on a large square platform. Its name means the snail, after the spiral staircase inside. The tower and its platform appear to have been laid out for watching the sky, and Venus in particular: the remains of its windows frame the far points the planet reaches along the horizon. It was first built before 800 CE and was probably remodeled later.
At the center of Cusco stood the Coricancha, the sun temple, whose walls were lined with some seven hundred beaten gold sheets weighing about two kilograms each. Early accounts describe a garden beside it where a field of corn, life-size herders and llamas, and even butterflies were all made of gold and silver. Almost none of it lasted. When gold was gathered for the ransom of the captured Inca ruler Atahualpa, most of it came from the Coricancha, and the Spanish melted it down.
7One of the longest Maya texts, shuffled by a collapse
On the tile: CopanAD 710-755
A stairway at Copan carries one of the longest hieroglyphic texts the Maya ever carved, more than sixty steps and over two thousand glyphs recounting the history of the city's kings. It was first built around 710 and was reinstalled and expanded about 755. Later the temple front above it collapsed. The carved blocks came tumbling down and were scrambled, so the inscription is like a book whose pages were shuffled, and scholars are still working to put it back together.
The palace at Palenque has a square tower four stories tall, and nothing quite like it is known from any other Mesoamerican site. The city's builders were just as inventive with water. They redirected the Otulum stream to bring water to the royal palace, sending it underground beneath the main plaza through an aqueduct of great stone blocks with a vault three meters high. Palenque flourished between about 600 and 750 CE, and its most famous ruler was Pakal.
Above Cusco stand three massive terraced walls laid out in a zigzag, built of huge irregular stones fitted so precisely that mortar was unnecessary. Estimates of how much the biggest stones weigh vary widely, from about sixty tons to more than a hundred. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon, writing around 1550, described the workforce: twenty thousand men supplied by the provinces and relieved in turns, four thousand quarrying stone, six thousand hauling it with great cables of leather and fiber, and the rest digging foundations and cutting timber.
1Crowned at twelve, on the throne sixty-eight years
On the tile: Pakal603-683
Pakal came to the throne of Palenque in 615, aged twelve, with his mother Sak K'uk' acting as regent and handing over power only gradually. He reigned sixty-eight years in all and died at eighty. His tomb stayed hidden for more than twelve centuries. In the late 1940s the archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier lifted a slab in the floor of the Temple of the Inscriptions and found a stairway packed with rubble. Four years of clearing brought him, in 1952, to Pakal's tomb, sealed deep inside the pyramid.
Copan counted its dynasty from K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', who took the throne in 426. Texts at the city record him arriving as a warrior and being installed as king, and an altar dedicated some 350 years later shows him handing a scepter to the sixteenth ruler of his line. The bones back up the texts. Isotopic analysis of teeth identified as his suggests he came from near Tikal, while the woman in the richest tomb at Copan, thought to be his widow, was local.
Lady Six Sky arrived at Naranjo from Dos Pilas in 682, and for the rest of her life she kept the emblem of her home city in her title rather than Naranjo's. When her five-year-old son became king in 693, she ruled as his regent, and she made sure she was remembered. Two of her monuments show her standing on a captive, a pose borrowed from portraits of kings and unusual for a woman. A Naranjo stela claims that early in her regency, the kingdom burned at least five enemy cities in five years.
Lady K'abel governed the Wak kingdom alongside her husband K'inich Bahlam II, yet she alone bore the title ix kaloomte', one of the highest royal titles and more often held by men. She was a daughter of the Snake king at Calakmul, and her husband's own monument records that he answered to her father. In 2012 archaeologists at El Peru-Waka' opened a tomb that was almost certainly hers. Inside was a small alabaster jar carved as a shell with an old woman's face emerging, inscribed lady snake lord.
In 562 Tikal was crushed by Calakmul and Caracol, and for more than a century afterward the city fell almost silent in stone. Jasaw Chan K'awiil took the throne in 682, raised Tikal's first dated monument in 120 years, and in 695 defeated Calakmul, the Snake capital that had humbled his city. He was buried in Temple I, in a tomb that held a set of incised bones recording episodes from Tikal's history.
The story goes that when the Chanca attacked Cusco, the reigning Inca and his heir fled, while another son stayed with a small band of loyal warriors and drove the invaders out, helped, in the telling, by stones that turned into soldiers. The account is considered semi-legendary. What followed is firmer: as Pachacuti, a name meaning reverser of the world, he rebuilt Cusco and its sun temple, began the fortress on the heights above, and set the Inca on course to build the largest empire in the Americas.
Captured at Cajamarca in November 1532, Atahualpa offered a ransom measured by volume rather than weight: a room more than six meters long and about five wide, filled with gold to a line above head height, and then filled twice more with silver. For months treasure poured in, including gold plates stripped from the sun temple in Cusco, and the Spanish melted it into bars. Once they had it, they executed him anyway, in 1533.
The story that Moctezuma took Cortes for the god Quetzalcoatl returning is repeated everywhere, and most specialists now treat it as one of the myths of the conquest. The idea spread through Spanish writers after the fall of the Aztec capital, and no document created independently of Spanish influence supports it. What the record does show is a ruler whose empire reached south to what is now Guatemala, who received the Spanish in November 1519 and was their prisoner within two weeks.
9The poet king and the poems he may not have written
On the tile: Nezahualcoyotl1402-1472
Nezahualcoyotl ruled Texcoco from 1431 and is remembered as a philosopher and poet as much as a king. He was a busy lawmaker and builder too: a code of eighty laws, a court of appeal with twelve judges, aqueducts, and terraced gardens at Tetzcotzinco whose stone reservoirs survive. The poems are the complication. Scholars have long debated which verses are really his, and some long attributed to him carry ideas that could not have come from before the conquest.
On the tile: The 2012 mythDecember 21, 2012Myth busted
The belief was that the Maya calendar ran out on December 21, 2012, and something terrible would follow. What that date marked was a rollover. The Long Count, which begins in 3114 BC, is a running tally of days gathered into larger units, and 2012 closed one of the large units and opened the next. Maya inscriptions refer to dates far beyond it, which is the plainest evidence that their own scribes expected time to keep running.
In 1739 a librarian from Dresden named Johann Christian Götze bought a folded manuscript in Vienna. It was Maya, painted on bark paper coated with white plaster, thirty-nine sheets worked on both sides and stretching about three and a half meters when opened out. Nobody could read it. Only four Maya books are known to have survived the sixteenth century, and this one, with its tables for Venus and for eclipses, became central to deciphering the script.
The Inca ran a very large state without writing of the kind we would recognize. Instead they used the quipu, a main cord hung with colored strings whose knots encoded numbers in a decimal system reaching into the tens of thousands. Specialists called khipu kamayuq kept them and could recite what each one meant. Counts of the quipus that survive run from about six hundred to nearly fourteen hundred. Nobody can fully read them, and whether they also recorded language rather than accounts remains an open question.
Inca messages traveled by relay. Runners called chasquis waited at posts set a few kilometers apart. An arriving runner blew a shell trumpet to alert the next man, repeated his spoken message until it was understood perfectly, and handed over any knotted quipu he carried. Estimates of how far a message could move in a day differ between sources, from about 240 to 300 kilometers. The empire had no wheeled vehicles and travel was on foot, so news moved only as fast as runners could carry it.
Across a gorge of the Apurimac River in the southern Andes hangs a suspension bridge made of twisted grass, the last remaining Inca rope bridge. Four Quechua communities renew it each June. Families cut and twist grass into thin ropes about seventy meters long, the ropes are braided up into six great cables, and the worn bridge is cut loose to fall into the gorge. The whole renewal takes three days. UNESCO added the practice to its intangible heritage list in 2013.
Maya blue is not a mineral but a manufactured hybrid: indigo from plant leaves bonded to a clay called palygorskite, probably ground together wet and then heated to about 100 to 150 degrees Celsius. The result resists acids and alkalis and does not fade. At Chichen Itza the paint that remains is still bright blue after a thousand years of tropical sun, downpours and hurricanes. Scientists first identified the pigment in 1931, and many details of how the Maya made it have remained a puzzle ever since.
On the tile: Sun Stonerediscovered 1790Myth busted
The great carved disc dug up beneath Mexico City's main square in 1790 is known everywhere as the Aztec calendar. It is not one. The twenty day signs do appear on it, but it never worked as a device for tracking time. Many specialists identify it as a cuauhxicalli, an eagle vessel, a sacrificial altar dedicated by Moctezuma II a few years before the conquest. The calendar reading came from one early scholar and shaped writing about the Aztecs for almost a century.
Maize by itself is a risky staple, and a diet leaning too heavily on untreated corn invites a deficiency disease called pellagra. Mesoamerican cooks, the Maya and Aztecs among them, solved that long before anyone understood the chemistry. They cooked and soaked the kernels in water treated with lime or ash, which makes niacin available to the body and, as a bonus, lets the ground kernels form a dough that holds together. Corn tortillas and tamales still begin there.
Yuri Knorozov was working in Leningrad, thousands of kilometers from any Maya city, when in 1952 he published the idea that cracked the script open. The glyphs were partly phonetic, and the Maya alphabet recorded in the sixteenth century by the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa actually listed syllables rather than letters. The leading Mayanist of the day, J. Eric S. Thompson, rejected it, and the idea was not widely adopted until after his death in 1975. Knorozov first saw Maya sites in 1990.
The Mesoamerican ball game was being played by about 1650 BC, and a descendant called ulama is still played in parts of Mexico. The ball was solid rubber, and estimates of its weight run from about half a kilogram to three and a half. In the version best known today, players could not use their hands and struck the ball mostly with their hips. Some courts had stone rings set high in the walls. At Chichen Itza, sources put those rings six to eight meters above the floor, so scoring through one was rare.
Aztec farmers built plots out into the shallow lakes around their capital, and the name that stuck in English is floating gardens. They did not float. Workers drove posts into the lakebed, wove branches between them, piled up mud and weed dredged from the bottom, and planted willows at the corners to hold it all fast. The plots were fixed, fertile and worked year round, and the zone around Xochimilco fed something like a hundred thousand people.
Cacao beans served the Aztecs as money, and records from 1545, after the Spanish conquest, give some prices: one bean for a large tomato, thirty for a small rabbit, a hundred for a turkey hen. Where there is currency there is counterfeiting, and cacao was no exception. Fraudsters hollowed out the valuable interior of a bean and packed the empty shell with a filler such as sand, or passed off fakes made from amaranth dough, wax or broken avocado pits.
Before sugar arrived, chocolate in Mesoamerica was a drink and it was bitter. Cooks whisked it hard and poured it from one vessel down into another from a height, over and over, to raise a thick head of foam. The foam was reckoned the best part. Flavorings ran to chili, vanilla, flowers, honey and ground maize, which is a long way from a candy bar and rather closer to a strong spiced coffee.
The Aztecs ran state schooling, and a house of youth stood in every neighborhood of the capital, which put formal education within reach of ordinary children rather than the nobility alone. A second kind of school, attached to the temples, taught history, astronomy, song and formal high speech, and although it served mainly elite families a father could dedicate his son to it. The old sources disagree about how old children were when they started.
The temazcal is an enclosed steam bath heated by pouring water over hot volcanic stones. Unlike sweat lodges in other regions it was usually a permanent building. Archaeologists have found at least eight at the Maya city of Piedras Negras, and one with its domed roof still intact in the buried village of Joya de Ceren. It served for cleansing and healing, and Aztec women took a steam bath right after giving birth. Temazcals are still used across Mexico and Central America, including by midwives.
The Inca state had no coinage, so it did not collect money. It collected work. Under the system called mit'a, communities owed the state labor: building and maintaining roads, bridges, terraces and fortresses, or farming fields set aside for the ruler and the temples. Tribute also moved in kind, from maize and dried meat to cloth and feathers. The Spanish later kept the name and redirected the labor into the mines, which was a different thing entirely.
Maya inscriptions mostly deal with rulers, wars and religion. The murals on one small pyramid at Calakmul, painted in the 600s, show something else: people serving, eating, carrying and handing over food and goods. Their captions skip personal names and royal titles and label figures by a food or material instead, such as salt person, tobacco person and maize-gruel person. Some scholars see a marketplace here. Maya markets are hard to find archaeologically, partly because most of what changed hands, food and cloth and feathers, simply rotted away.
Most Maya were not kings. Commoners made up perhaps ninety percent or more of the population, and Joya de Ceren, a village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption around AD 660, shows how some of them lived. They lived well. Each household had at least three buildings, for sleeping, cooking and storage, built of poles and daub under thatch that reached well beyond the walls, and about seventy pots. Each also had a sideline, such as grinding stones, painted gourds, pigments or cacao, and traded the extra with other households.