The Maya Lesson 18 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
1 They had a full writing system, brilliant maths with their own zero, and calendars that tracked the sun, the moon and Venus. 2 Scholars have been able to read most of their writing only since the 1970s. 3 Think of a phone with the battery gone flat: everything is still inside, but you cannot read it. 4 That is what happened when Spanish priests burned Maya books; only four survive, and a huge amount of knowledge was lost for ever. 5 Many southern cities were abandoned around 1,100 years ago, probably because of droughts, wars and too many people for the land. 8 Millions of Maya people still live in the same lands today and speak Mayan languages; the Maya did not disappear. 9 Maya cities like Tikal and Palenque had tall stone pyramids with temples on top, palaces and plazas, and some are still being discovered with lasers fired from aeroplanes. 10 The Maya had a full writing system of glyphs, carved on stone and painted in folding books made of bark, and it has mostly been deciphered since the 1970s. 11 Spanish priests burned many Maya books, thinking them dangerous, and only four are known to survive. 12 The Maya counted in twenties and had their own sign for zero, a shell, invented separately from India. 13 The Maya had very accurate calendars that tracked the sun, the moon and Venus, which helped them plan farming and festivals. 14 The Maya calendar did not predict the end of the world in 2012; one long cycle simply ended and a new one began. 15 The Maya played a ball game with a heavy rubber ball, hitting it with their hips through stone rings high on a wall, and the game had religious meaning. 16 Rubber was a Native American discovery, made from the sap of trees. 17 The Maya and Aztecs made a bitter, frothy chocolate drink from cacao beans, with no sugar and sometimes with chilli, and cacao beans were even used as money. 18 Around 1,100 years ago many southern Maya cities were abandoned, probably because of long droughts, wars and too many people for the land. 19 Later Maya cities in the north, like Chichen Itza, kept going, and at the spring and autumn equinox a shadow snake seems to slide down the stairs of its great pyramid. ← previous Native peoples of North Americanext → The Aztecs and the Inca↑ back to History This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/