# Maya Religion · The Canon · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow Source: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/atlas/library/canon/maya-religion/ · The Congregation of Tomorrow · the Atlas · language: en The same words a person sees on this page, nothing more and nothing hidden. Our own words are free to use under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), naming the Congregation of Tomorrow. Words of others keep their own terms. Every page of the site, listed: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/ai/pages.json · the whole site in one file: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/llms-full.txt ← The Canon: all 125 The Canon · No. 044 Maya Religion Classic Maya state religion c.2000 BCE – c.1697 CE (state form) · Indigenous American · Living · Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico, Honduras IV. THE CLASSICAL & IMPERIAL WORLD — c.200 BCE – 500 CE ### How many ### Who began it ### What it is for ### What it worships ### What it holds ### What it does ### After death ### Its texts ### Its branches ### Of note ### Its timeline - c.2000 BCE–250 CE Preclassic; Maya civilisation forms, monumental architecture at El Mirador. - 250–900 CE Classic period; Tikal, Palenque, Copan, Calakmul. Full hieroglyphic writing, the only complete writing system developed in the Americas. - c.800–950 CE Classic collapse in the southern lowlands; drought, warfare and political failure combine. - c.900–1500 CE Postclassic; Chichen Itza, then Mayapan. - 1562 CE Bishop Diego de Landa burns the Maya codices at Mani, destroying almost an entire literature in a single afternoon. He then wrote an account of Maya culture that, with bitter irony, preserved the alphabet key later used to decipher the script. - 1697 CE Nojpetén, the last independent Maya kingdom, falls to the Spanish. - 1950s–1980s Decipherment. Yuri Knorozov in the USSR establishes the phonetic principle in 1952; Tatiana Proskouriakoff shows in 1960 that the inscriptions record real dynastic history. - 1960–1996 CE Guatemalan civil war; the state campaign against Maya communities is found by a UN-backed commission to constitute genocide. - 21 December 2012 CE The 13th b'ak'tun completes. Contemporary Maya elders spent the preceding years explaining, mostly to no avail, that this was a calendar rollover and not an apocalypse. ### Sources Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source. The Atlas The Door