The Maya civilization is one of the most mysterious civilizations on the planet, about which it is not known where it came from or how it disappeared. However, the discovery of a new Mayan city in the Guatemalan jungle rewrites some part of the Maya history as we know it.
About the Maya civilization
Maya civilization is a Mesoamerican civilization as the Mayans lived in the area between Mexico and South America in the territories which are nowadays known as Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Yucatan, and Chiapas.
The areas inhabited by the Mayans were the cradle of other highly advanced, pre-Mayan civilizations such as the Olmec civilization and the Teotihuacan civilization. It is believed that the Mayans are the beneficiaries of the knowledge acquired from these powerful pre-civilizations.
The knowledge of the Maya civilization
Maya civilization was a very advanced civilization, especially in mathematics, astronomy, and architecture. The Mayans priests were keepers of the scholarly knowledge, religion being at that time closely related to astronomy and arithmetic.
The Mayas have accurately predicted the eclipses and have noted Venus’s movements on the tables with a precision that even astonishes the modern-day scientists.
Scientists discovered a new Mayan city in the Guatemalan jungle
With the revolutionary technology of LiDAR, researchers photographed the landscape and could see beyond the dense vegetation of the Guatemalan jungle. The technique revealed the ruins of a Mayan megalopolis that was much more complex and interconnected than the majority supposed.
The results suggest that Central America has supported the advanced Maya civilization that, with more than 1,200 years ago, was more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China, rather than scattered and sparsely populated cities, as suggested by the evidence found in terrestrial research, by then.
The new discovery shows that the Maya civilization covered an area about twice as large as that of medieval England and was much denser populated. All the Mayan cities were connected by large roads, meaning that Mayans conducted trades and other forms of regional interactions.
