Despite the tragic attempts by the early christian church to snuff out any trace of the "works of the devil," Mayan literature today is experiencing a renaissance.  The Mayan's literature is considered some of the oldest in the world, reaching way back, thousands of years before the arrival of the colonial Spanish.  Dennis Tedlock--ethnographer, linguist, poet, and award-winning author posits a view of the Mayans which is much different than most commonly perceived.  Tedlock has presented his findings, after years of living with and studying the Mayans, in a new book entitled: "2000 Years of Mayan Literature."

Mr. Tedlock reveals more than previously considered about the Mayans, including that many of the ancient authors were women, and he challenges the claim that Mayan rulers assumed the status of gods. Even more importantly, Tedlock has apparently taken a new approach to the study of Mayan hieroglyphs and calculiform tablets as well as paper codices.  He presents a "big picture" narrative of the peoples, and shows that the inscriptions and writings of the culture were not simply mythic scenes, but narratives about the lives of real people.

Mayan inscriptions on monuments were not just the abstract speculations of priests or stories of royal life, but descriptions of the lives of every day flesh and blood human beings. Tedlock says they also simultaneously describe events in the skies among the gods.

Tedlock's research, writing, and editing has been supported by grants and fellowships from the NIMH, NEA, NEH, Fulbright Commission, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks museum and library in Washington, D.C.

These findings, which reveal a much richer and tightly woven fabric of consciousness by the Mayans, are another example of our contemporary un-education about all things ancient. Most people outright dispose of ancient cultures as barbaric, brute and ignorant; dismissing cosmological interpretation for oppressive demagoguery.

Source: University at Buffalo

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