The Mayans Misconceptions

680 Words3 Pages
First, let me start off with the misconceptions that a lot of people seem to have about the Mayans. One, they were not a bloodthirsty people, they didn’t always sacrifice people, and they actually didn’t meet the Spaniards. The Mayans did get into battles, and they did sacrifice, but it was not always humans that they sacrifice. They also sacrificed their livestock and sometimes if they were really desperate for something, they would sacrifice a jaguar, which was a sacred animal to the Mayans along with the quetzal bird. The Mayans were polytheistic, which means they believed in many gods. And they would do almost anything to keep the gods in their own worlds and not invading theirs. The Spaniards arrived about 160 to 200 years too late to meet the Mayans, instead they met the Aztecs. The Mayans ate a variety of things,…show more content…
The Mayans numbers only went to twenty, and after that they made problems with the numbers in it. For example, they would add, subtract or maybe even divide to get the number that they wanted. The Mayans had an alphabet too, and they used picts, like pictures of things to represent things. Certain picts or glyphs together made a story or sentence. The Mayans did have schools, but the girls didn’t get to attend them, they learned from their mothers how to be and act like proper women. The boys went to school and also learned from their fathers how to hunt and perform certain rites after they killed an animal. They didn’t want to make the gods mad by not thanking them, and they didn’t want the gods to think that they were getting greedy or unthankful. The Mayans were a very smart civilization, and they even made a few calendars. Many people think that some of the calendars actually predict the end of the world, because they end in 2012. Maybe the Mayans were right, maybe they somehow knew that the world was going to end
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