Last month, for instance, Stuart posted a description of new excavations from Guatemala that suggest the Maya were not necessarily direct descendants of the earlier Olmec culture, as some archaeologists have maintained. You want to lay claim to a new idea and get it noticed by colleagues." "You don't have to wait two years for publication. "The web log gets ideas out quickly, which is very appealing," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, a longtime Stuart collaborator. The work will take years, but with the help of the internet, the pace is quicker than it has ever been. So five years ago, Stuart started up Maya Decipherment, a blog for scholars and amateurs to post new inscriptions, refine translations and debate the subtleties of Mayan language, all in an effort to fill out the history of the civilisation. But I thought that if I had a blog, I could talk about new things and bring out some old stuff from my dusty files." "I had all these boxes of notes and papers in my office, and I was never going to publish every little observation. The two cycles came together every 52 years and this would be celebrated with a New Fire Festival called El Fuego Nuevo, which was a time of new beginnings.Enter University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart, one of the world's leading experts in Maya script. The religious calendar system was called the Tzolk’in and was made up of a 260-day cycle broken up into repeated sections of 20 days and 13 days. The astronomical system, called the Haab’, was counted by tracking the movement of objects in space, especially the Sun and planet Venus. The Maya calendar was based on a very complicated mathematical system that brought together ways of counting time from astronomy and religion. Unfortunately, not many of the codices have survived because many were burned by Spanish explorers who thought the books were evil. The priests would write on long sheets of paper that could be folded together to make a book, called a ‘codex’. The priests had access to black ink made from coal and special turkey-feather pens called ‘quills’. In Maya culture, reading and writing was reserved for rich people who became priests. The Maya number system was made up of different combinations of shapes, with a shell-shape representing zero, a dot representing one and a bar representing 5. Sentences and even whole stories could be formed by placing several glyphs together. Each symbol (or ‘glyph’) was able to represent particular words, ideas or sounds. The Maya recorded their writing in a form of symbols called hieroglyphics. What did Maya letters and numbers look like? The Maya were particularly well known for their sophisticated calendars that helped them to track the time and plan important events like religious ceremonies. ![]() Their writing systems were very advanced compared to other ancient American civilizations. The Maya were famous for developing a system of recording writing, numbers and dates. Why were the Maya famous for their writing and calendar systems?
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