Original subtitles

In the year 1695, right at the end of the 17th century, a Spanish monk fled

barefoot and starving through the tropical forests of Central America.

His name was Andres de Avendano y Loyola and along with his men, he was

dying of thirst and hunger. Their faces had been torn by thorns and his feet cut

open by pieces of flint scattering the swampy ground. Avendano and his men

had been part of a mission to the city of Tayasal, an island stronghold that

was the last independent holdout of a once mighty civilization; the Maya.

Avendano's mission had been to convince the Mayan king of Tayasal to

convert to Christianity and to accept the Dominion of Spanish control which

had now spread to cover most of Central and South America. But Avendano's

mission had failed. The Mayan people of Tayasal had rejected him and now Avendano

and his men fled through the jungle back to Spanish lands. Their journey was

hard and treacherous. They climbed over hill after hill through thick forest

cover, desperate for food and water, their legs almost giving out from under them.

But then they came over the crest of one hill and saw something that stopped them

in their tracks. It was an enormous pyramid of stone jutting out of the

forest canopy, tangled with roots and vines. Although Avendano was weak

from hunger and thirst, he still found strength enough to approach the ruins.

There was a great variety of old buildings and though they were very high

and my strength was little, I climbed up them, though with some trouble. They were in the

form of a convent with the small cloisters and many living rooms all roofed over

and arched like a wagon and whitened inside with plaster. It seemed to us that these

buildings must stand near a settlement but we found ourselves, as we saw

afterwards, very far from a settlement. At the time that Avendano stumbled across

this ruined city, the Mayan civilization was a shadow of its former glory.

The invasion of the Spanish in the 16th century had spread diseases like

smallpox that harrowed the Mayan population long before the Spanish

conquistadors arrived with guns, steel blades, and war dogs to subjugate the

remaining population. Avendano had seen Mayan people living relatively simple

lives on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula but what he

encountered here was something different. These were the ruins of a city that

rivaled the ancient capitals of the old world in size, magnificence, and grandeur.

Avendano couldn't have known it then but he had stumbled across the ruins of the

great Mayan capital of Tikal. For seven centuries, Tikal had ruled a vast empire,

conquered its enemies, and raised monuments of astonishing size and

quality. Tikal wasn't alone; it was just one of at least 40 Mayan cities

that have flourished in this region, giving birth to a thriving and colorful

culture of arts and literature. Then, over five hundred years before any

European first set foot on the American continent, this complex society had

collapsed. The great city of Tikal was abandoned along with every single other

city in the area. After this catastrophe, the forest swept in to reclaim the

stones of Tikal. Its imposing pyramids were left to crumble one by one into the

earth and the story of exactly what happened

is still one of humanity's greatest mysteries.

My name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations

podcast. Every episode I look at a civilization of the past that rose to

glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history.

I want to ask what did they have in common? What led to their fall and what

did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their

world? In this episode I want to look at that

great romantic mystery; the fall of the classic Maya civilization. I want to show

how this great civilization grew up among environmental conditions that no

other society has ever contended with. I want to explore the fatal flaws that

lay beneath the surface of this civilization and describe what happened

after its final and cataclysmic collapse.

Despite Avendano's encounter with the ruins of Tikal, the legacy of the Mayan

civilization didn't really capture the world's attention until the early

decades of the 19th century. This is down to the work of the American writer and

Explorer John Lloyd Stephens and his artist companion Catherwood.

The pair had traveled together for two weeks through the deep Guatemalan

interior, following rumors that the ruins of an ancient city lay somewhere in the

jungle. They traveled in greater comfort than Avendano but their journey was

still difficult. They were beset by mosquitoes and the

constant mud of the seasonal rains, but as they rounded a bend in the river, they

came across a sight that Avendano would have recognized. It was the top of a

towering pyramid just visible above the trees. We ascended by large stone steps;

in some places perfect and in others thrown down by trees which had grown up

between the crevices. We followed our guide through the thick forest among

half-buried fragments to 14 monuments; one displaced from its pedestal by enormous

roots, another locked in the close embrace of branches of trees and almost

lifted out of the earth, another hurled to the ground and bound down by huge

vines and creepers. The only sounds that disturbed the quiet of this buried city

were the noise of the monkeys.

Stephens and Catherwood would go on to explore over 40 sites around the Yucatan

Peninsula and the books Stephens wrote, illustrated with Catherwood's detailed

lithographs, created a sensation around the world. Until then it was thought that

only old-world civilizations like Egypt or Babylon had built cities of such

magnitude and elegance. People of the time simply refused to believe that such

enormous constructions had been built by the people who now lived a relatively

simple existence in Central America and called themselves the Maya. 19th century

experts flocked the news, proclaiming that ancient Egyptians, Indians, Chinese,

or Norse explorers must have crossed the ocean from the old world and built these

towering pyramids here in the forest. Some even suggested that they had been

built by the mythical Lost Tribes of Israel or even the inhabitants of

Atlantis. But at the time, Stephens caused something of a stir. He was the person

who had most extensively explored these ruined places and he claimed that these

cities were indeed the product of the Mayan people. Working our way through the

thick woods, we came upon a square stone column about 14 feet high and three feet

wide on each side sculptured in bold relief. These were works of art proving

that the people who once occupied the continent of America were not savages.

Stephens insisted that these vast, ancient cities had been built up over centuries

by an advanced society indigenous to the new world. To him, these ruins told that

story clearly enough but of course, they also told another story. It was the story

of a catastrophe that had few precedents in human history; the dramatic and

wholesale collapse of an entire advanced society.

In the romance of the world's history, nothing ever impressed me more forcibly

than the spectacle of this once great and lovely city overturned, desolate, and

lost. Discovered by accident, overgrown with trees, it did not even have a name

to distinguish it. Today we do know the original Mayan names of some of these

cities and that's due to the tireless work of archaeologists who painstakingly

decoded the Mayas written language but before we dive into describing the

collapse of the Classic Maya civilization, I think it's worth pausing

for a moment over how much of a miracle it is that any of this writing still

survives. The Maya were a literate culture. They wrote on books made of bark

paper or deer skin using reed pens and conch shells as ink wells. They used a

rich and complex system of hieroglyphics similar to those used in Egypt and it's

the only true writing system thought to have ever developed in the Americas. The

Maya used their writing in a sophisticated and often playful way but

after the arrival of the Europeans, the written language of the Maya was nearly

eradicated and we can place the blame for that tragedy at the feet of one

particular villain; a sadistic and fanatical Spanish bishop called Diego de

Landa. The span of de Landa's life neatly matches up to the Spanish conquest of

Central America. In 1521, three years before he was born, the great Aztec

capital of Tenochtitlan had fallen to the Spanish and by the time the baby de

Landa arrived screaming into the world, the Spanish had already conquered a

large part of Mexico, enveloping it into a vast colonial territory that they

called New Spain and from there, the Spanish conquistadors or conquerors

moved south into the densely forested lands of Yucatan, the lands of the Maya.

In the lands they conquered, the Spanish colonialists ruthlessly

exploited the indigenous populations. One surviving Mayan text, the Chilam Balam,

records how the Mayan people felt at the time. It was the beginning of tribute, the

beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife of guns, the beginning of

strife by trampling on people with horses, the beginning of robbery with

violence, the beginning of forced debts. But the Mayan people, without steel or gunpowder,

fought fiercely against their colonizers. So fiercely in fact, that it took the

Spanish 200 years to conquer them completely. As the conquistadors advanced

into the Yucatan, the Maya fought guerrilla campaigns in the forests. Their

fighters were protected only by padded cotton armor, armed only with stone

weapons and flint spears, but they ambushed Spanish soldiers with great

effectiveness and laid spike traps for the Spanish horsemen. It was into

this atmosphere of insurgency that Diego de Landa walked, a young man at the age

of 25 when he first set foot in the New World.

The year was 1549. De Landa was meticulous in his work. He kept detailed

notes about everything he saw; about the Mayan culture, language, and society, and

he did so in order to better identify its weaknesses. As a missionary he soon

earned a reputation for being fearless. He would often venture deep into the

jungle, into areas that had only recently been conquered by the Spanish, where

hatred of the Europeans was bitter. Perhaps it was this fearlessness that

meant he was eventually put in charge of bringing the Roman Catholic faith to the

Maya people. Until then, the Spanish had exempted the

Mayans from the notorious cruelty of the Spanish Inquisitions but the sight of

Mayan people continuing to honor their old gods disgusted the new bishop and de

Landa soon announced the beginning of an inquisition, the first of its kind in the

New World. De Landa was brutal in his methods. He tortured countless Mayan

people; hanging them from their necks as a form of interrogation, and in the midst

of it all he built a great bonfire in the center

of one of the last Mayan cities. He gathered together all of the ancient

books he could find, centuries of accumulated knowledge, writings on the

history of the Mayan people, their study of mathematics, astronomy, poetry, and

literature, and de Landa threw these into the fire and watched as they burned. He

later wrote about this event in his memoirs. We found a great number of books

containing these letters and as they contained but superstition and the lies

of the devil, we burned them all which dismayed and distressed these people

greatly. Only three Maya books are known to have survived this act. This ancient

language was nearly lost completely but history as always has something of a

sense of sarcasm. De Landas meticulous notes about the Mayan people have

survived and in those books he wrote down something that he called the Mayan

alphabet. It's not a complete dictionary of Mayan symbols because de Landa

only asked for the letters that already existed in Spanish but these notes were

actually crucial to the later effort to decipher the ancient writings of the

Maya.

So, this is one of the first ironies that gather around the story of the Classic

Maya collapse, that much of what we know about their written language is down to

the very man who tried his hardest to eradicate it. As more of this

language is gradually decoded, we've learned a huge amount from the

inscriptions that the Maya wrote on pottery, on their plastered walls that

they carved into bone and shell or chipped onto the walls of their temples

and palaces. These inscriptions have transformed our understanding of the

society that once ruled the Yucatan Peninsula. We now know that Avendano and

Stephens were right but when the Spanish arrived in the New World,

the Maya were already an ancient culture. They had built vast cities and monuments

to rival any in the Old World and then, like so many civilizations, their Golden

Age had passed. Over 500 years before the first European ever set foot on the

American continent, the whole of Mayan civilization, over 40 large cities and

countless people, had collapsed. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of

people, simply disappeared from the region and the forest crept back to

cover its ruins forever. Before we dive into discussing exactly how this

collapse occurred, I think it's worth asking who were the Maya? It's

important to understand that they were not one people, one Empire; they were a

loose collection of city states and kingdoms clustered around the Yucatan,

right where the continents of North and South America meet. In modern terms,

that's the area of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and the very south of Mexico.

The Maya spoke a family of related languages and shared a cohesive culture

that built stepped pyramids, drank hot chocolate from ornately

patterned vases, and made headdresses of emerald green quetzel feathers.

They were a people of contradictions who developed a mathematics capable of

calculating dates in the millions of years but who never invented the wheel,

the arch, or the pulley. They gave themselves colorful names that drew from

the natural world around them like Lady Shark Fin, True Magician Jaguar, Double

Bird, or Smoke Serpent. Early Spanish accounts of the Mayas appearance

described the Jade plugs they wore in their ears, how they tattooed their skin

with green ink and painted themselves with red and black paint. The Maya

believed that time was circular, that history really did repeat itself and

that the future could literally be foretold by learning about the past. They

worshipped a complex pantheon of gods including the sun god, the god of corn

and rain, the gods of the sky, and the gods of the underworld who lived in deep

caves and sinkholes. Perhaps you already have an idea of the Maya as

having an insatiable appetite for human sacrifice. Modern films like Apocalypto

might have given you that idea but we should be cautious about how we

approach that subject. For centuries, garish stories of human sacrifice formed

the cornerstone of European propaganda and their justification for the theft of

Mayan land. Evidence shows that ritual killings did feature in Mayan society

but it was usually limited and small-scale and as we've already seen,

the Europeans could be just as brutal in the application of their faith. The

Mayans famously played ball sports. One Spanish writer called Herrera wrote one

account of this sport in the New World. The King took much delight in seeing

sports at ball, which the Spaniards have since prohibited. The ball was made of the

gum of a tree that grows in hot countries. Though hard and heavy to the

hand, they did bound and fly as well as our footballs. If we knew nothing

else about the Maya, the colossal ruins they left behind would be enough to

prove their ingenuity. But when you acknowledge the environmental challenges

the Maya faced in the forests of Guatemala, you really appreciate the

monumental achievement that their cities represent. The Yucatan Peninsula is a

shelf of limestone of a sort called karst. It acts a little like a sponge and over

millions of years, rainwater has bored deep channels into this soft rock and

filled it with holes like Swiss cheese. There are barely any rivers here since

any rainwater that falls is immediately drained away into the twisting warren of

deep underground caves. Instead, the water gathers in vast underground sinkholes

called cenotes. These are pools of still water surrounded by echoey cave walls,

often overgrown with vines and creepers. These were sacred places to the Maya,

places where you could access the underworld and its gods, but they were

also crucial to this civilization's survival. The Maya were constantly

battling to preserve water and to do this they dug vast tanks, plastering the

bottoms of the cenotes to make them watertight.

They built complex systems of water control that allowed water to flow from

higher tanks to lower and to irrigate their raised fields. In all of this,

the Maya couldn't rely on four-legged help. In Europe and Asia, domestication of

animals like the horse and ox was one great driver of civilizational progress.

Even in the Andes, in Peru, Chile, or Bolivia, the presence of the llama

allowed peoples like the Inca to carry heavy weights across long distances. But

in the Maya lowlands, the only large animal was the shy and reclusive

tapir which they sometimes hunted for food. All transportation was done simply

on human backs using the simple technology of a strap that tied around

the forehead and another challenge was the inefficiency of Maya farming. Their

staple foods like corn were very low in protein and the harsh landscape meant

that agriculture was a constant battle against the forces of tropical nature.

The soil in Yucatan is very thin, sometimes only a few centimetres deep

before you reach stone. It easily loses its fertility or becomes washed away. The

Maya largely relied on slash-and-burn agriculture; hacking and burning the

forest away in patches in order to grow a few rounds of crops before letting the

tropical forests rush back in to reclaim the land. The storage of food was a

problem, too. In the humid environment of Guatemala and southern Mexico it was

difficult to store corn for more than a year before it started going mouldy.

One final point before we move on is that for most of their history, the Maya

were essentially a Stone Age society. Copper working began in Mexico in the

seventh century, long before contact with Europeans, but it took several centuries

to work its way down to the Mayan lowlands. The Maya never worked iron or

mixed copper with tin to make bronze. To cut and carve stone, they used blades

made of obsidian, a kind of volcanic glass that forms an incredibly sharp

cutting edge when properly worked. So, every one of the great pyramids and

temples you can see today was not only constructed without animals and pulleys

but also carved in all their ornate intricacy without metal tools. But

despite these challenges the Maya flourished, the only great civilization

to ever arise in the midst of such harsh conditions.

The earliest signs of the Mayan civilization began around the Year 1800

BC, nearly 2,000 years before the beginning of the Christian calendar. From

this time, Mayan people domesticated maize, beans, squashes, and chili peppers

as well as the cacao bean which they used to make a rich drinking chocolate.

The inscription on one ornately patterned vase from the city of Maxam,

called the vase of the seven gods, shows that chocolate was often drunk in

celebration and new groves of trees were planted on special occasions like the

birth of a young prince. This drinking vessel for the fruits of a new grove of

cacao trees, it belongs to the smooth skin sprout, the young boy who listened;

sun-eyed Lord Jaguar, the owner of the trees. The Mayan world was essentially

divided into two zones; the highlands and the lowlands. The highlands were of

crucial importance to the Maya; a spine of Rocky Mountains covered with pine

forest that follow the line of the continental shelf. In those cool hills

the Maya found obsidian and the greenish precious stone jade which they carved

into marvellous trinkets. The highlands were also home to the quetzal,

a bird with bright, emerald green feathers that the Maya used to create

headdresses for their kings and priests. If you've stood in these highlands

with your back to the Pacific Ocean, you would see ahead of you a flat, undulating

plain stretching out into the distance. Four hundred kilometres away, the

peninsula ends at the curving Atlantic coast, broken with bays and lagoons.

It's within this basin that all the great wealth of Mayan cities rose. This was a

network of societies that looked a little like the classical Greece of

Sparta and Athens, or Renaissance Italy. Think of the Pope ruling in Rome, the

Medici family in Florence, the Doge in Venice; different centers of

power all sharing a common culture but in constant opposition for power.

In Mayan conceptions of the universe, the gods created three worlds previous

to the current one, each of them resulting in failure. They believed

themselves to live in the fourth world and it's true that when the Mayan cities

of the Classic Period began to grow and thrive, there had already been a number

of rises and falls. But through the third and fourth centuries, Mayan cities began

to grow with astounding speed and for much of the Mayan Classic Period, the

largest and most powerful of these was the city of Tikal. When the fugitive monk

Avendano stumbled across the ruins of Tikal, it's clear why they had such an

effect on him. That's because Tikal is home to some of the most spectacular

ruins in the Mayan world. Its limestone temples tower up to a height of 64

meters or 22 stories, almost as high as the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. These

temples were topped with enormous masks of the Jaguar Sun God and originally

painted a brilliant deep red. When making the first Star Wars film, George Lucas

used Tikal as the setting of his rebel base on a moon of the planet Yavin, and

it's not hard to see why. Today the ruins do look otherworldly; the tips of those

ancient pyramids just peeking above the trees. But Tikal is also one of the Mayan

cities whose history we understand the best. A long list of its rulers has been

discovered and excavations have uncovered the tombs of those same rulers.

Archaeologists now believe that this city may have held as many as 90,000

people during its height. But to understand the history of Tikal, we also

have to introduce another huge player in this region and this player stands as a

shadowy force behind much of what occurred in the Mayan world. This was the

city of Teothihuacan. Teothihuacan lay over 1500 kilometers away in the valley of

Mexico. It was a vast city of stone pyramids, today much of it

buried beneath the urban sprawl of Mexico City. But in its time it was the

largest city in the pre-Columbian americas. Teotihuacan commanded a

powerful military and controlled all the crucial trade networks across the

continent. It had a monopoly over a particular kind of green obsidian that

was of exceptional hardness and quality. In this era it wouldn't be too far off

to think of Teotihuacan as something like an early version of the United

States. It was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic,

with a population estimated at 125,000 or more which would have made it at

least the sixth largest city in the world at the time. Like the United

States in modern times, it was also fond of intervening in the politics of its

southern neighbors. In the early centuries of the first millenium,

Teotihuacan began aggressively expanding its sphere of influence, extending trade

routes far south into the Mayan lands, establishing embassies in faraway cities,

and spreading that shining green obsidian far into the forests of Central

America. The Mayan city of Tikal came under the influence of Teotihuacan in

the 4th century AD. It's not clear if this was a military conquest, a palace

coup, or a diplomatic intervention, but we do know that a young ruler Yax Nuun

Ahiin, which means curl nose, rose to power in Tikal with the apparent help of

this distant superpower. One stone carving in Tikal shows King Curl Nose

being crowned while Mexican soldiers look on carrying distinctive dart

throwers. In the burial tomb of Curl Nose, artifacts have also been found

carved out of that telltale green obsidian that everywhere gives away the

influence of Teotihuacan.

One remarkable image carved on a pot from Tikal shows just how this cultural

exchange happened. On the left of the scene we see a stepped pyramid in the

Mayan style. This is Tikal and on the right is a

temple of Mexican design with a great fanned crown at its top. This is

Teotihuacan and from this Mexican temple, four foreign soldiers come carrying those

dart throwers along with vases and boxes full of gifts. In the center they build a

temple together that has stepped sides like the Mayan temples but a fanned crown

on top like the Mexican. It's a clear image of collaboration and partnership

and might even show the construction of an embassy in Tikal. Is this harmonious

image an accurate portrayal of the situation? We don't know, but under the

influence of Teotihuacan, Tikal grew in wealth and power until it was the most

powerful city in the Mayan world. Its Empire at its greatest height contained

a population of half a million people. One useful hieroglyphic in the Mayan

system is one called 'y ahaw'. It means 'his lord' and when we see it in

the inscriptions of one city talking about another, we know that this city has

been subjugated. The other city has become their y ahaw, or lord. Around the time

that Tikal started its partnership with Teotihuacan, its neighbors began using

this phrase to describe its kings. Tikal soldiers fanned out across the Mayan

world armed with weapons made of that green Teotihuacan obsidian. City

after city fell under its banner. It was the beginnings of a true empire and for

a while it looked like Tikal's plan to rule the Mayan lowlands might have

worked. That is, were not for one very important thing in their way;

that's their great rival, the city of Calakmul.

Calakmul was a city with a very distinctive character. Like Tikal, it

too was building an empire and in every dominion it conquered, Calakmul's

people marked the site with its emblem; a snakehead which in the Mayan script

makes the sound 'kaan'. Its lords called themselves 'kul kaan ahaw',

or the lords of the snake. Another interesting feature of Calakmul is the

emphasis it put on the female line of its royalty. Whereas the inscriptions in

Tikal only speak about kings, those in Calakmul mentioned the joint rule of a

king and the queen. Calakmul was proud of its roots which it traced back

to the ancient Maya of the pre-Classic Period.

So, while Tikal had a kind of international outlook allied with the

distant superpower Teotihuacan, it seems the people of Calakmul saw

themselves as the true inheritors of the Maya legacy. Calakmul was a powerful

city, too; it was surrounded by a complex system of canals and its many buildings

are tightly packed, clustered like the skyscrapers of a modern city. But in the

early centuries of the Classic Period, Calakmul was outmatched by the might

of Tikal, swollen as it was by the riches of Teotihuacan.

The rulers of Calakmul, the so-called lords of the snake, must have calculated

that the only way to challenge the supremacy of Tikal was to outplay them

in the game of strategy. Calakmul set out on a centuries-long game of chess with

their rivals. They slowly gathered the small states that surrounded Tikal into a

network of allies, threatening to Cal's trade routes and supply lines, slowly

suffocating it. It was a kind of cold war and for this reason the snake stones

carved by Calakmul are by far the most numerous of all the Mayan city states.

They appear right across the Mayan world and often in places that for Tikal would

have proven pretty inconvenient; threatening their trade routes and

menacing their farmland. The strategy, although slow, was a success. From the

second half of the sixth century AD, Calakmul gained the upper hand. The

distant power of Teotihuacan fell under mysterious circumstances and now Tikal

was left all alone, surrounded by its enemies. But it wasn't until the rule of

one particular king, a man known as Double Bird, that Tikal's fortunes would

really take a turn for the worse.

Double Bird seems to have been particularly bad at the game of politics

and we know this because his actions would lose the city of Tikal one of its

key allies in the region, a city known today as Caracol. Caracol was once one of

Tikal's underlings. As part of its service it would have paid tribute in the form

of food and valuables. It would have sent soldiers to fight for Tikal in its wars

and workers to build its temples. At least in the year 553, that's what

Caracol still was, but it's possible that the forked tongue of Calakmul was

already beginning to erode this alliance. In any case, the king of Tikal, Double

Bird, wouldn't help matters. I have to stop here for a moment and point out

that we understand very little about warfare in the Mayan world. The Maya

often undertook low-level skirmishes and their wars seemed to have served a

largely ceremonial and symbolic function. These wars, known as 'axe wars', would have

involved perhaps only a few hundred fighters and their main purpose seems to

have been to capture prisoners for sacrifice to the gods, to decapitate an

important noble, hence 'axe war', and presumably to bring back plunder and

glory to the capital. The Mayans in general were not interested in wars of

conquest but just occasionally a different kind of war was undertaken

which had a more brutal and all-encompassing nature.

These wars are referred to in the Mayan inscriptions as 'star wars'. As far

as I can tell, the previous connection to George Lucas is a coincidence.

The name star war comes from a specific type of glyph used in the Maya script

which depicts a star showering the earth with fire. This war seems to have

been something quite rare in the Maya world, a war of total conquest and

destruction. The inscriptions as always are hard to decipher but it seems that

in the year 556 the king of Tikal, Double Bird, embarked on an axe war, a low-level

attack against his former ally, the city of Caracol. His soldiers would have

swept into its territory wearing padded cotton armor, wielding flint spears, and

clubs studded with blades of green obsidian. They would have burned villages

inside Caracol's sphere of influence, robbed anything they could get away with,

and kidnapped a number of its citizens who they would later have sacrificed at

one of Tikal's temples. Double Bird's reasons for ordering this attack are

unclear. It could have been a way of punishing some kind of insult from

Caracol. Perhaps Caracol hadn't been fulfilling the duties expected of it as

an underling, or Tikal feared that it was falling under the influence of its great

enemy Calakmul. Whatever the reason, the rulers of Caracol didn't take this axe

war in good humor. In retaliation they announced the beginning of a true war, a

star war against their former masters in Tikal.

We can assume that Calakmul gave every help it could to Tikal's enemies. It

lived up to its reputation as the kingdom of the snake, putting its pieces

into place for centuries, building a network of allies that surrounded Tikal

and cut off its supply routes, wrapping itself around Tikal and choking the

life from the once great city. Now it seems that crushing grip

tightened. In the year 562, the once-great city of Tikal was surrounded and

besieged. Its defenses were overwhelmed and its enemies swept into the city,

smashing shrines and temples. Tikal's enemies uprooted the stone monuments

proclaiming the achievements of its rulers; broke them and buried their

pieces. They vandalized carvings of its kings, lopping off the heads of its

sculptures, chipping at their faces with stone tools. The destruction was

devastating. For the next century, Tikal's population stopped growing. For a

hundred years, no stone carvings or great public monuments were erected. Its people

were buried with only meager possessions and production of painted pottery ground

to a halt. The fate of Tikal's king, Double Bird, is

unknown. He was probably taken back to Caracol or Calakmul and executed at the

top of a pyramid. A new king was put in place in Tikal; a man named Animal Skull.

Although we know almost nothing about him, inscriptions in his tomb

showed that he was not the son of Double Bird. For the next century Calakmul, and

not Tikal, would rule the Yucatan. But this great Mayan rivalry would go on.

Tikal would regain the upper hand and then lose it. Wars between the two cities'

allies would blaze on for generations but it wasn't war that caused the

collapse of the Mayan world; at least, not entirely. To get to the root cause of

this collapse, we will have to look at how Mayan society structured itself, the

fatal flaws built into its civilization, and the tensions and

conflicts that would ultimately tear it apart.

One way that we can track the progress of the Mayan collapse is by looking at

the number of inscriptions they left. When times were good, the Maya erected

new temples, palaces, and carved monuments. So, we can see that around the Year 500,

as the Classic Mayan Period just got started, the number of dated monuments

was quite low. In the city of Copan, for instance, there were only 10 built in the

year 514 but as the years went by and Mayan society grew, the number of

monuments in Copan skyrockets. It increased to 20 per year just a century

later and by the year 750, over 40 monuments were being constructed each

year. But then the collapse set in. After this, the number of dated monuments

begins to falter. Only 50 years later, in the year 800, only 10 monuments were

built. In the Year 900, the construction of new monuments had ended.

From the Year 800 onwards, all across the Mayan lowland, these inscriptions start

to die out, faltering like a failing radio signal and then crackling out into

silence. Each of these cities goes out one by one like lights blinking out in

the dark. The process began in the southwest

along the Usamacinta River. At the city of Bonampak,

the last date of an inscription is the Year 792. The city of Yaxchilan fell

silent in the year 808 and from there, this wave of doom washed over the whole

of the Maya lowlands. The great snake city of Calakmul went silent after the

year 810 and Copan followed in 822. Tikal held out another 70 years after the fall

of its great rival but it too finally fell into the darkness in the year 889.

The last Maya inscription of all, in the remote city of Tonina, comes in the year

909. The strange thing is, none of these inscriptions give any sense that

anything is wrong. There are no prophecies of doom or accounts of

terrible events. Maya art doesn't decline either but remains elaborate and highly

skilled to the end, so what happened? How could this vibrant and powerful culture

collapse so suddenly and so completely, leaving not a single warning behind? As

with the fall of any civilization, the collapse of the Maya wasn't a simple

event. It's hard to point to any one cause and form a simple one-thing-leads-

to-another narrative. All of the environmental stresses we discussed

earlier meant that to succeed in such a harsh landscape, Mayan society, like any

society, had to accumulate a number of stresses and imbalances. Under extreme

stress, these would form into fractures and with sufficient pressure they would

splinter along the whole length of their world. Of these stresses, surely the most

pressing was the capacity of the Maya to feed their booming population. In order

for any society to work, farmers need to produce enough food to feed themselves

and also enough to feed all the people in the society who aren't farmers; the

soldiers, and carpenters, and masons, and of course the king and all his nobles. In

a hyper-efficient modern economy like the United States, less than 2% of the

population work on farms. Each farmer in America feeds over a hundred and fifty

people as well as themselves, freeing up a huge proportion of the population to

do other things, but for the Maya who used slash-and-burn agriculture and grew

low-protein crops, each farmer could feed perhaps five other people.

As the end of the 8th century neared, the Mayan population was booming. In

Tikal, for instance, the population in the city center was 65,000 with a further

30,000 in the outskirts. There were perhaps as many as 800 people living per

square kilometer and they began living in hastily constructed wooden buildings

piled on top of one another. Today when we walk through the spacious plazas and

temples of the Mayan cities, it's hard to imagine that those empty overgrown

terraces were once teeming with dense residential populations. As the

population of the Maya lowlands exploded, the demands on its agriculture only

increased. Another huge problem was deforestation. Because of what we've seen

of the overgrown ruins of Mayan temples, we have a romantic idea of the Maya as a

people who lived out their lives beneath the jungle canopy but by the end of the

Classic Period, the Maya lowlands had been more or less completely deforested.

Studies of pollen samples found in lake beds and swamps in the region show that

by the end of the 8th century, hardly any forest remained in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The Maya had cut down the trees not only in their cities but between them as well.

So, if you stood on top of one of the great temples of Tikal or Calakmul

around the Year 800, you wouldn't see the thick forest canopy you see today. You

would have seen houses and streets stretching out in every direction and

beyond that, people toiling in the fields. The Maya used some trees for

construction, especially the extremely hard wood Sapodilla which is naturally

resistant to termites, but most of the trees would have been

used for burning. In order to create lime and mortar for the construction of their

great temples and the plaster that lavishly coated them, the Maya burned

limestone in great pits. This intensive industrial process would have used up a

great deal of the forests and the forest land would then have been given over to

agriculture. But you can't grow crops on a patch of soil endlessly. The nutrients

and minerals that plants depend on soon get depleted unless the soil is given

time to rest. The Maya, just like slash-and-burn farmers today, must have

understood that the soil needs to be given long fallow periods between

growing. The ground needs to return to nature to regain its nutrition, but as the

demand for food from the population increased, it's easy to imagine that the

farmers were placed under increasing pressure. With the population growing, the

rulers of these cities may have ordered their farmers to grow crops on the same

soil again and again with no fallow periods allowed. It would have been a

short-sighted strategy that courted disaster in exchange for short-term

gains. But at this point, the Maya may have had a little choice.

Another huge factor is the role of drought. As we've discussed, one of the

greatest challenges the Maya faced was the collection and storage of water.

The climate of the Yucatan is such that variations in annual rainfall can be

enormous. Droughts were a common fact of life and in fact, a large part of Mayan

infrastructure was designed around planning for them and mitigating their

effects. But every system has its limits. Archeologists who've looked at sediment

in the region estimate that in the year 760, the Yucatan Peninsula suffered its

worst drought in 7,000 years. This was caused, it seems, by something the Maya

would have appreciated all too well; the awesome power of the sun. As the Maya

knew, the sun is a fickle god. The radiation it gives out is not constant.

It's subject to variation, going through peaks and troughs. Ice cores taken in

Greenland confirm that levels of solar radiation around this time reached lows

that hadn't been seen for millennia. This caused a harsh, dry cold to descend over

the northern hemisphere and global weather systems shifted northwards. All

the rain that arrives on the Mayan lowlands comes from the Atlantic on the

trade winds; bands of air that move in predictable

patterns across the Atlantic Ocean. With a northward shift of these winds, a

brutal drought would descend on the Maya and this event coincides neatly

with the great collapse. Archaeologist Betty Meggers has combined physics and

anthropology to propose a fascinating theory. She asks us to think about human

societies as simple thermodynamic systems. For Meggers, our societies are like

machines or organisms. They require a strong, stable form of energy to flow

through them and she argues that this energy is what allows the system to

organize itself into increasingly complex forms. Increased complexity

allows greater collection of energy and so the society grows. But if the strong

flow of energy is cut off to a system, that system then collapses to a level of

organization that can be supported with the energy that remains. She puts this

theory in simple terms. If an increase in energy resources or

their control results in increased cultural complexity, a decline in energy

resources should result in a decline in cultural complexity. If the solar

radiation theory is correct, it might be worth us putting Megger's

theories to work. Mayan society was suddenly unable to maintain its

complexity as a result of the sun's sudden drop in radiation, and it imploded.

In some places the collapse was so drastic that the entire area was

abandoned. In the Chilam Balam, a surviving Mayan text from the post-

contact era, you can almost hear the echoes of some recognition, some

authentic memory of what might have happened during this time. When our

rulers increased in numbers, then they introduced a drought. The hooves of the

animals burnt. The seashore burned, a sea of misery.

So it was said. So it was said on high. Then the face of the sun was eaten. Then

the face of the sun was darkened. Then his face was extinguished.

One site where we have a detailed understanding of exactly what happened

during the collapse is the city of Copan, now in western Honduras. Copan was a

small but densely populated city built in a narrow and steep-sided river valley

lined with pine forests. It's people loved sports. It had the

largest ball court of any classical Maya city and it used the symbol of the

leaf-nosed bat as its emblem on inscriptions. For much of its history, it

was a close ally of Tikal and fought wars on its behalf.

Copan was a trading outpost perfectly positioned to profit from the trade in

obsidian, jade, and quetzel feathers coming down from the hills.

In the fertile alluvial silt of the valley floor,

the Mayans could feed themselves on a thriving agriculture; growing their

staples of corn, beans, and chili peppers. But the soil on the hills around copan

is less fertile. It's more acidic and prone to erosion if cultivated for long

periods. Even today, modern farmers can grow

barely a third of the amount of corn in the hills when compared to the valley

floor. From the 5th century onwards, fueled by

this fertile soil and trade, the population of Copan boomed. By the year

800 it may have reached as much as thirty thousand people living in this

small area of only about ten square miles. Between the years 650 and 750,

construction of royal palaces and monuments was especially frenzied and

nobles other than the king even began erecting their own palaces. This all

points to a period of thriving economic success but the opulent life of the

nobles had to be supported by the hard work of Copan's farmers.

As Japan grew through the fifth and sixth centuries, it expanded to fill the

bottom of the river valley but as the year 650 came around, space was beginning

to run out. After that, people began to build their

homes on the valley sides. It must have looked a little like a Brazilian favela

today; houses climbing on top of each other on the slopes, but these dwellings

were inhabited only for about a century. The reason for that can be seen in

the layer of sediment that today covers their floors. As the people built up the

mountain sides, the ground was eroding. Pollen samples taken around this time

show that the pine forests that once covered these hills had been gradually

cut down. As these trees disappeared, their roots no longer held together the

fragile soils on the valley sides, and the earth would now be swept away by the

rains. This acidic low-nutrient soil would have

leeched down into the valley bottom, reducing its fertility as well.

As the hills were slowly abandoned, the burden of feeding all of Copan's

people would have fallen increasingly on the valley bottom.

The fields would now need to be worked harder than ever in order to avoid

famine and this would have reduced their fertility even further.

Farmers would have likely fought over the last remaining pockets of land.

Analysis of skeletal remains from Copan paints a chilling picture. From the year

650 onwards, signs of disease and malnutrition among its residents

increased. Their bones became porous and weak. Their teeth showed increased stress

lines and these signs of ill health showed up in the graves of rich nobles

and kings too, although of course the health of the commoners was much worse.

When times were hard in Copan, it's likely that the common people would have

blamed their rulers. In the Chilam Balam, one of the few surviving Maya texts, we

can see this connection between the king and the natural world explicitly.

This is the first question which will be asked of the chiefs. He shall ask them

for his food. Bring the sun. Thus it is said to the chiefs. Bring the sun, my son.

Bear it on the palm of your hand to my plate. The Mayan system of rulership was

based on an implicit promise; you support the king's lifestyle and he will protect

you. He will keep the gods happy, the sun shining, and the crops growing. If the

king was seen to break that promise, the people may have decided that he had to

go. The last we hear from a king of Copan is in the year 822 with a single

inscription. It was carved when Copan's last-known

king, a man called Ukit Took, came to the throne apparently during a period of

violence and chaos. He began the carving of a four-sided monument just like his

predecessors but it was never finished. One side shows him being crowned; the

next is half-carved but the remaining two sides are blank. It's as if the

carver just got up one day in the middle of his job and left. Whoever Ukit Took

was, he couldn't muster enough support to keep the idea of royalty alive.

Three decades later in the year 850, the royal palace of Copan was burned and

history in that city came to an end. With the collapse of royal authority, a

time of chaos followed in Copan but the population didn't leave all at once. In

the year 950, a full century after the burning of the royal palace, there were

still roughly 15,000 people living in the valley bottom, about half the number

at its height. But the population continued to dwindle and by the 12th

century there was no sign of any inhabitation in the valley. Pollen samples

show that past this point, the forests crept back to recover the ruins of Copan.

At Tikal we don't have the same level of detail but we can trace the collapse of

this great city by looking at its monuments and inscriptions. During the

mid eighth-century, Tikal had once again gained the upper hand over its enemy

Calakmul and with its return to glory, Tikal boomed to an impressive height. As

it consolidated its power over the region and gathered all its wayward

allies back under its protective umbrella, Tikal also embarked on a burst

of construction the likes of which it had never seen. Almost all of Tikal's

great temples and pyramids date from the second half of this century but as the

Year 800 rolled around, all of that would come to an end. By the mid 800s it's

clear Tikal was coming apart. Its vital allies were now putting up monuments of

their own, proclaiming themselves kings of smaller provinces rather than sworn

servants of the great king in Tikal. Monuments began going up in Uaxactun

first, asserting their independence from Tikal. In Ixlue and Jimbal in the

north, the same thing was happening. Tikal's dominion was fracturing into a

mass of small kingdoms and what's worse, the kings of these kingdoms often refer

to themselves on their carvings as the holy lord of Tikal. By the Year 900 there

was no longer a king in Tikal. There were no longer any people, either. The city

seems to have fallen into chaos and the population drifted away. While the

palaces and temples of Tikal were abandoned, there's evidence that poor

people in the city's outer districts moved in to occupy them. It must have

been a strange feeling for these Maya peasants entering the royal palace for

the first time and finding it abandoned. They must have walked its halls in awe

and run their hands along its richly painted walls and carved stones.

These common people seem to have squatted in the abandoned royal palaces

for a century or more after the fall of Tikal. We can see their traces in a layer

of what's called 'midden', scraps of broken pottery, piles of rubbish

now piling high in the corridors of the once opulent halls. These common people

also scratched graffiti into the plastered walls of these palaces; images

of temples and animals, caricatures of people they knew. But the people who

stayed here seem to have continued to revere the great temples and holy

palaces of the city. They continued to worship the stone monuments of bygone

kings and even moved them at times to more convenient places. But it seems they

weren't able to read what the inscriptions said. Some of the monuments

they moved contained writing and the people who moved them put them back into

place upside down. This pattern was repeated around the Mayan lowlands

where common people made journeys into the abandoned cities to pay respects to

the slumbering gods. But one by one, all of the cities in the Mayan lowlands were

abandoned and it may give you a sense of the scale of the catastrophe and the

depth of the damage done to the environment that no attempt was made at

a single one of these cities to ever reoccupy them. The forests of the Maya

lowlands grew back and it's thought that when the Spanish arrived at the end of

the 15th century, the trees they saw covering the land had only just

recovered from that time. In all of this, a picture does begin to

emerge of what happened during the classic Maya collapse. Damage to the

environment and a period of climate change combined to cause a failure of

agriculture which led to strains that the Maya political system simply

couldn't manage. People finally turned against their rulers and the hierarchy

of society collapsed, reverting to chaotic and simple forms of life.

Collapsing cities would have sent refugees fleeing to other cities nearby,

exacerbating their own problems and causing a chain reaction of collapse

that spread like a fire across the whole region. Perhaps if the Maya had ever

formed a unified government, some of these crises could have been averted. But

as the large empires of Tikal and Calakmul atomized

and came apart, each city became its own small kingdom and with agriculture

failing everywhere, the only way for some of these kingdoms to survive was to take

what they needed from their neighbors. Against the backdrop of drought and

famine, a hundred bitter wars over scarce resources began. At the site of Piedras

Negras, archaeologists have found evidence of buildings being burned

during this time and monuments vandalized. At Yaxchilan, the central part

of the city, was hastily fortified with rough stone walls built using stones

taken from the surrounding temples and palaces. It was a last desperate defense.

Spear and javelin heads have also been found here littering the ground in great

numbers, pointing to a violent and bloody battle. It seems that as the fabric of

Mayan society came apart, its people turned against one other and a violent

struggle for survival turned the Mayan lowlands into a bloodbath.

Today, the crumbling pyramids and cities of the Maya are still being uncovered. In

2015, a geographical feature in Tonina that was thought to be a hill turned out

to be a Mayan pyramid and recent measurements have shown it to be one of

the largest ever built. At 75 meters tall, it rivals the Pyramid of the Sun in

Teotihuacan to be the tallest pre-Columbian building in the Americas.

The ongoing battle to decipher the Mayan inscriptions continues. Today, we

understand a great deal of what we read on the stones of the Mayan temples but

so much more remains untranslated. One thing I find particularly moving is to

read the texts of the post contact Maya who had been invaded and ravaged by

European settlers, whose lands were taken away, whose language and history had been

erased. In the time after the Spanish arrival, Mayan people tried to hold

together some vestiges of their great tradition. They passed it down by word of

mouth from generation to generation, sometimes in secret. Some of these

texts survived to this day but it's a strange kind of survival; their complex

webs of reference, mythology, and symbolism no longer point to anything.

All the associations and stories they once referred to are forgotten. All the

meanings they would have once carried have been lost. So, these texts remain

much as the crumbling stone pyramids do. They stand as a silent testament to the

loss of a whole world that will never again return. I want to end the episode

by listening to an extract from one of those texts called the Ritual of the

Bacabs.

It's an incantation written down by a Mayan shaman after being passed down

through the ages from the golden age of his civilization.

Today, although we know the meaning of most of the words, we can barely

understand any of what the text means. But as you listen, I want you to think

about what it must have felt like to watch this great civilization fall; to

watch its great monuments, its palaces and ball courts, crumble into the earth.

Imagine the feeling of doom that must have crept over the whole world, over the

wide plains stripped of their trees and scorched with the smoke of burning lime,

over the hills and mountains where the quetzel birds still called, and over the

empty pyramids slowly but unstoppably crumbling into the earth. Can Ahau,

they say, is the creator. Can Ahau, they say, is the darkness. Coming from the

fifth level of the sky, the head of the dragonfly, the head covering its worms. It

bit the hand of the unfettered creator, the unfettered darkness. It licked the blood

in the sweat-bath, it licked the blood in the stone hut. Now then, throw it to

the demented creator, to the demented darkness.

Thank you for listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast. I've been Paul

Cooper. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and

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