Evidence found of ancient world war
Recently found
hieroglyphs tell of Mayan conflict
Eng/Arb
إكتشاف حديث
حول حضارة المايا
تمكن الباحثون مؤخرا من تحليل نصوص( هيروغليفية hieroglyphs ) من آثار حضارة (
المايا Maya )، و تؤكد تلك النصوص نشوب حروب دامية بين دويلات المايا المتنافسة
.
و قد وجدت تلك النصوص محفورة على الأدراج الحجرية لأحد الأهرامات المايية في (
غواتيمالا Guatemala )؛ فقد أدّى إعصار قوي من نوع ( الهوريكان HURRICANE ) إلى
إزاحة الرمال عن الأهرام ، مما كشف عن الدرجات المنقوشة بالخط الهيروغليفي
المايي في موقع يدعى ( دوسبيلاس Dos Pilas ) ؛ الأمر الذي سيرغم المؤرخين على
إعادة تدوين تاريخ المايا .
ما كان يعتقد أنها سلسلة من النزاعات المحلية عصفت بشعب المايا في القرنين
السابع و الثامن ، تأكد بعد هذا الكشف أنها كانت حربا شاملة بين قوتين ماييتين
رئيسيتين أدارتا الصراع حتى الإنهيار
Recently found
hieroglyphs tell of Mayan conflict
Sept. 18 — A bitter war between rival Maya city-states may have set the
stage for the collapse of that once-great civilization, say scientists who
translated recently found hieroglyphics on stone stairs in an ancient
pyramid in Guatemala.
A HURRICANE LAST SUMMER began exposing the carvings at a site known as Dos
Pilas, and the story they tell is forcing scholars to rewrite history.
What was once thought to be a series of separate local conflicts in the
seventh and eighth centuries turns out to have been the equivalent of a
“world war” for the Maya, with battle lines formed by vassal states
controlled by two superpowers, Arthur Demarest, of Vanderbilt University’s
Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology, said Wednesday.
Demarest said in a telephone interview that the discovery is forcing him to
rewrite part of his institute’s lengthy history of the Maya civilization.
“The hundreds of new glyphs fill in a vital 60-year gap of unknown Maya
history and clarify many of the political and military relationships of this
critical period,” Federico Fahsen, a Maya specialist at Vanderbilt, added in
a statement.
Their discovery was supported by the National Geographic Society,
Vanderbilt, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies and
Guatemala’s Ministry of Culture. National Geographic, which reported the
discovery of the steps in the October issue of its magazine, announced the
details of the findings.
The 18 steps were discovered after a storm blew down a tree in Dos Pilas.
Demarest, who previously had explored there, returned with
other scholars to investigate.
“I didn’t think for a minute it would be anything like this,” he said. “We
thought it was just going to be a few steps, and it kept growing and
growing.”
While many scholars believed the wars of this time were local and unrelated,
the discovery supports the theory of Simon Martin of University College,
London, and Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn, Germany, that this
period in Maya history was a “long world war” between the superpowers Tikal
and Calakmul, said Demarest.
This staircase is overpowering confirmation of their theory, he said.
Demarest said he had not been able to contact Martin and Grube to tell them
of the find because they are doing field work.
Then the city-state Calakmul, located to the north in what is now Mexico,
conquered Dos Pilas, took the king prisoner, and then restored him to the
throne as a puppet ruler.
“When I read those glyphs, I had to blink to make sure I was reading it
correctly,” Fahsen said. “I had never heard of Calakmul actually invading
and defeating the king of Dos Pilas. We thought that, at most, they may have
had a weak alliance of some type.”
But the new carvings say that the king, now loyal to Calakmul, launched a
decade-long war against Tikal that ended in his victory. His forces sacked
Tikal and brought its ruler — his own brother — and other Tikal nobles to
Dos Pilas to be sacrificed.
“This west section of the steps was very graphic,” said Fahsen. “It says,
‘blood flowed and skulls of the thirteen peoples of the Tikal place were
piled up.’ The final glyphs describe the king of Dos Pilas ‘doing a victory
dance.’ ”
Dos Pilas then launched a campaign of conquest with Calakmul’s backing and
became a major regional power.
actor as previously thought, it now appears that Dos Pilas was a pawn in a
much bigger battle,” said Demarest.
He says this appears to be a time when the Maya civilization was on the
verge of moving to a higher level of organization and consolidating into a
single empire.
“However, this didn’t happen. Instead, the giant war went back and forth.
After Tikal was sacked, it eventually roared back and crushed Calakmul. And
then the Maya world just broke up into regional powers, setting the stage
for a period of intensive, petty warfare that finally led to the collapse of
the Maya,” said Demarest.
By 760, Dos Pilas was abandoned.
