Classic Maya Civilization

For some six hundred years the Maya of the southern lowlands ran one of the most sophisticated civilizations of the ancient world out of a tropical forest. From cities like Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque and Copán they raised limestone pyramids, kept a written history in carved hieroglyphs, and measured time and the planets with an accuracy no contemporary culture matched. There was never one Maya empire — instead a shifting board of rival kingdoms, with the superpowers Tikal and Calakmul fighting proxy wars that set the politics of the whole region. At its height, around 750 CE, the lowlands held dozens of cities and millions of people.

Then, over little more than a century, the great cities emptied. The most consistent thread in the evidence is a long, severe drought between about 760 and 910 CE, falling on a society whose farming and reservoirs depended entirely on the rains, and already strained by relentless warfare and exhausted soils. One by one the southern cities stopped raising monuments — the last Long Count date is 909 CE — and the courts, the scribes, and the populations dispersed into the forest that quickly swallowed the ruins. It is the museum’s most careful entry on this point: the civilization of the Classic lowlands collapsed, but the Maya did not vanish. Five million people still speak Mayan languages today. What died was a particular grandeur, not a people — proof that even a culture that outlives its catastrophe can lose the world it built.