Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…So the Classic period was the golden age. And then the Preclassic is the interesting time that we were talking about. And the Postclassic is when the democracy came about. Well, midway through it. Reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils. So yeah, we have Preclassic is like the origins of civilization. They’re starting to build cities. They’re starting to create their calendar. They’re starting to create these wonderful works of art. And the Classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you’ll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically that’s the age of kings to me. That’s when these cities decide that they’re going to organize themselves around elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in contact with the gods. The Maya never contact their gods directly. They contact their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods. And so the Maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have basically snowed the rest of the people, that they’ve got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the gods, where everybody, every Joe Maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor. But Joe Maya’s dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he’s got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and act as liaisons. So that’s the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we say 250 to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it’s interesting that it’s actually specifically the ninth bakʼtun of their history. The ninth bakʼtun begins in like 426, and it ends in like 829. So it’s a 400-year period of time. And before that, there were no kings. And after that, there really aren’t kings. They’re heads of councils. So I call it the age of kings, where everybody’s following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while, that’s great. Cities build up, populations happening. I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too. Strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together. But eventually happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden there’s this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else. And they start saying, “Well, I think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go take these things. ” And people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities, and that’s how we get the mysterious Maya collapse where all these cities are just gone. That’s one of the great mysteries of the Maya civilization is that over a very short period of time, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly. It collapsed. What do you think explains that? What happened?…

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