The only Maya city with an urban grid may embody a creation myth | Hacker News Reader

The only Maya city with an urban grid may embody a creation myth

archaeology.org

68 pointsThevet16 comments

It's fascinating to imagine how future peoples might interpret current day cities, should there be a similar loss of knowledge in between.

Skyscrapers in particular will be interesting, given that to date no building over 200m tall has been voluntarily demolished[0], and there are currently 1340 buildings in the world over 200m tall[1].

[0]: http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/buildings?list=tallest-demol... [1]: http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/

Aliens.

Is that true? I understand JPMorgan will scrap their current skyscraper to rebuild another one. I assumed this was common place in New York.

Well if you believe Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N... the tallest NY building voluntarily demolished to date was the Singer Building at 185m. My guess is that there is a point of diminishing returns at which there is no economic return in knocking down your existing building to build an even larger one. In JPMorgans case they have a 50 year old building that they are planning to replace with one that doubles their office space so they seem to have a good rationale.

I wonder what they’ll make of “Manhattan-henge”. That always comes to mind when I hear of folks of the Graham Hancock type speaking knowingly of advanced astronomical intentons being encoded into the various layouts of ancient buildings... and I find myself thinking “er, no... stuff lining up on astronomically relevant dates occurs whenever you arrange stuff regularly, and if you’re willing to ‘force’ these to fall on equinoxes or solstices you only have to mess around with the dates you’re willing to quote for construction”.

(To wit, some of these theories may be correct, but it’s easy for one’s sense of skepticism to be blindsided by apparently compelling cases that arise by sheer chance.)

Vaguely related humorous piece about archaeologists of the distant future discovering a well-preserved example of a mid 20th century motel; they conclude every unfamiliar item within it from the toilet to the television has religious significance

http://sultanaeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Motel...

Just recently went on a bit of a neolithic binge. Fascinating work being done by this generation of archeologists, on a time where we previously had very little knowledge. There isn't much that survives 10k+ years, so lots of speculating, extrapolation and wondering by necessity.

Anyway, future archeologists will find a lot of things about us, that'd surprise us.

We have a continuity with paleolithic religions' "fertility cults." From Venus of Duseldorf figurines in the upper paleolithic to Madonna statuettes in half of European homes today, Europe has continued a long tradition of Mother Goddess worship as the primary religious object. Clearly, we are a matriarchal culture.

The ancient Egyptian, Summerian & Hittite sphinx continues to guard most temples (especially gothic and neogothic churches) in the form of the gargoyle. Clearly gargoyles-sphinxes are very important to our culture....

It's interesting, playing this game. One thing that it highlights is how low key and nearly invisible "memes" can become. Gargoyles aren't really a part of our myths and religions (never heard a priest mention one), but they are all over European Christian churches and other buildings. Is this sphynx related? Seems possible. They look similar and are used in the same way architecturally as Hittite sphinxes. If they are related, it isn't in a way that's commonly known. What is the christian-gargoyle connection anyway? Is there a mythology that goes with these symbols? Do they symbolise anything to us or are they just a thing we're putting on houses of worship out of habit?

The Madonna is an important religious symbol, but not the main character or god of the religion. Still, you'll find more Madonna in household or public religious art than you will find Jesus art. Then, most Jesus art is symbolic (a cross) and we don't do YHVH (jesus' dad) art because depicting god was a Taboo. It isn't taboo in this milenia, so god is *occasionally" depicted in Christian art (eg the sistine chapel) but the ancient customer was different. The result is that churches don't seem to be temples to god, to archeologists.

Looking at a pile of art and symbols and stuff... I think we assume it had a symbolic or mythological sense to it. A reason that ancient priests could have articulated. In truth we are probably overphasizing some things that they though of as unimportant and completely missing other things that were vital to understanding the culture.

I couldn't find the GPS coordinates for Nixtun-Ch’ich’ listed anywhere, so I went hunting for it around Lake Petén Itzá and found it here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lago+Peten+Itza/@16.953099...

Thank you!

What is this:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/16%C2%B058'10.7%22N+89%C2%...

It is to the west of the old city and points directly to the city. Distance to the city ~7.4km

So did I just miss it, or is there really no image with this supposed 'crocodile' overlaid on the layout of the city as they found it so far?

Apparently the weak point of accepting this explanation of the layout is that so far they have not found such confirming evidence as this.

It is very, very difficult for archaeologists (or any humans, really) to say, "I don't know why".

It's somewhat important to note that this is the only Maya city with an urban grid. The city of Teotihuacan, as pointed out in the article, was much bigger and also had a planned urban grid system. It also was founded several centuries later.

The key here is "may".

Add this to the long list of evidence of ancient contact between Asia and the Americas.

The words "long" and "evidence" are gross overstatements, but the claim is trivially true if including the Asian origin in "contact". While there is no definite proof for extended contact beyond that, there is no final proof to the opposite either.

The basics are easy to look up. There is plenty of time for exchange in the at least 4000 years of immigration from Asia through the Bering Strait before it almost completely submerged at a time when the first civilizations already emerged, among them chinese.

Still though: Mezo America is far from there in time and space; Grid layout is kind of natural, because only a few space filling polygons exist; The linguistic evidence is very weak at the very least because of the time span, isolation, the lack of written records and corruption of oral tradition.

The search space is huge. A few attractive artifacts may just be noise in the signal. All it takes to satisfy the claim beyond the initial exchange is a single successful explorer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com