How Great Were the Maya

In a recent post, Culture Cult author Roger Sandall uses some incidental passages from Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse (sorry, having weird cut and past issues with Firefox so I'm not including the convoluted Amazon link), as a springboard to diss classical Maya civilization and compare it rather unfavorably to classical Greece.

Mr. Sandall's main point seems to be that for all the accomplished art and architecture the Maya left behind, precious little of value emerged from their time in the sun. The Maya leadership he describes as bloodthirsty chieftains mainly interested in war, wealth, and the appeasement of their gods, and Maya intellectual achievements are dismissed as astrology and numerology.

For the record, I am unfamiliar with Mr. Sandall's work and have no idea what his knowledge of Mayan civilization amounts to. From this essay, however, he seems very familiar with Greek civilization, less so with Mayan, making it difficult to take his dismissal seriously. He seems unaware that all save three Mayan codices, representing the collective knowledge of millions of people over thousands of years, were burned by overzealous Spanish priests and conquistadores. This makes it hard to apply his Mind at Work standard to the Maya, as any record of a Mayan Socrates or Sophocles was long ago destroyed. It is true that what survived does not approach the level of thought found in classical Greece, but take any three random books from ancient Greece and you'd likely find little more.

It is also the case that Maya civilization was severely, violently repressed with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, both by means of cultural and physical violence and also by disease. Though it is true that most major Mayan cities were in ruins when Columbus arrived, there was still a thriving population that had by no means regressed to a stone-age level and still existed in a well-connected network of smaller towns and cities. As witnessed in the archaeological record of the Middle East, not all civilizations progress linearly from stone-age huts to world dominance. There are many stops, regressions, and revivals along the way, and as Mr. Diamond details in Collapse, the geography of the Yucatan made it difficult to support large populations even with modern agricultural techniques. Though the Greeks were invaded several times by the numerically superior Persians, they suffered no technological disadvantage (and in fact had technological and strategical advantages over the invading Persians) comparable to the Maya-Spain mismatch and also did not deal with ideologically fanatical occupiers in the Romans, as the Maya did with the Spaniards.

And as for Mr. Sandall's insinuation that the Greeks were less warlike and more high-minded and peaceful because Athens developed democracy? Please. As for the first claim, the Greek city-states were constantly at war with one another, much like the Maya, or at least were mutually hostile. As for the second claim, it is true that Athens gave birth to a fairer system than other governments of the time, but how much freedom really existed in a city where only adult men had the right to vote? This was a great step forward, sure, but I refuse to wax poetic about so imperfect and institution. And Socrates and Plato, two of Athens' more famous residents, advocated enlightened despotism, not democracy, as the ideal form of government.

I will not pretend that the classic Maya offered more of intellectual value to the human race than the Greeks. It is obviously not so, and Mr. Sandall is right in making this point. However, this is due to a specific set of historical circumstances having nothing to do with the intrinsic value of Mayan civilization. Had the tables been turned and had the Greeks suffered an invasion of technologically advanced, disease-bearing Aztec religious zealots who burned most of their literature and killed most of their citizens, I do not doubt that there would one day have been some New World version of Mr. Sandall publicly discounting Greece and Rome as having never produced much of lasting value.