Maya never meant one nation to the people themselves
From archaic farming before 2000 BC to the 1697 fall of Nojpetén, Maya cities filled southeastern Mexico and northern Central America with temples, mathematics, and the Americas’ most elaborate pre-Columbian script. Today more than six million Maya descendants speak over twenty-eight languages in nearly the same landscape.
Preclassic centuries from about 2000 BC to 250 AD planted maize, beans, squash, and chili and raised the first complex societies; cities appear around 750 BC. Classic politics hinged on divine kingship, while the Postclassic elevated northern Chichen Itza and expansionist highland Kʼicheʼ power. Spanish campaigns after the sixteenth century finally extinguished independent Maya polities when Nojpetén fell in 1697 after long resistance.
Maya is largely a modern umbrella word. For most of their history these peoples lacked a shared ethnic or political identity; colonial Yucatán sources used the term for Yucatec language and speakers, not a continent-wide nation-state. The civilization’s footprint covered the Yucatán Peninsula, all of Guatemala and Belize, and western Honduras and El Salvador—much of it low limestone plain with sparse hills.
Glyphs were in use by the third century BC, and Classic-era monuments carry Long Count dates. Lowland rivals Tikal and Calakmul dominated a web of trading city-states, while Teotihuacan meddled in royal succession and hosted a strong Maya presence at its Tetitla compound. Kings, usually succeeded by eldest sons, were expected to win wars, but by the Late Classic a swelling aristocracy had eroded royal monopoly. Ninth-century collapse in the central region brought civil war, abandoned cities and a drift of people northward.
Literate elites wrote history and ritual lore in screenfold books, only three undisputed examples of which survive, alongside texts on stelae and pottery. Artists worked jade, obsidian, stucco, wood and painted murals, and mathematicians used one of the earliest explicit zeros. Human sacrifice formed part of religion. Today more than six million descendants speak over twenty-eight Mayan languages in much the same homeland.
Source: Maya civilization
