--- title: The Maya — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The Maya», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: They had a full writing system, brilliant maths with their own zero, and calendars that tracked the sun, the moon and Venus. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / The Maya # The Maya Lesson 18 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/18-the-maya/). - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/1/) — They had a full writing system, brilliant maths with their own zero, and calendars that tracked the sun, the moon and Venus. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/2/) — Scholars have been able to read most of their writing only since the 1970s. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/3/) — Think of a phone with the battery gone flat: everything is still inside, but you cannot read it. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/4/) — That is what happened when Spanish priests burned Maya books; only four survive, and a huge amount of knowledge was lost for ever. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/5/) — Many southern cities were abandoned around 1,100 years ago, probably because of droughts, wars and too many people for the land. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/8/) — Millions of Maya people still live in the same lands today and speak Mayan languages; the Maya did not disappear. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/9/) — Maya cities like Tikal and Palenque had tall stone pyramids with temples on top, palaces and plazas, and some are still being discovered with lasers fired from aeroplanes. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/10/) — The Maya had a full writing system of glyphs, carved on stone and painted in folding books made of bark, and it has mostly been deciphered since the 1970s. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/11/) — Spanish priests burned many Maya books, thinking them dangerous, and only four are known to survive. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/12/) — The Maya counted in twenties and had their own sign for zero, a shell, invented separately from India. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/13/) — The Maya had very accurate calendars that tracked the sun, the moon and Venus, which helped them plan farming and festivals. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/14/) — The Maya calendar did not predict the end of the world in 2012; one long cycle simply ended and a new one began. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/15/) — The Maya played a ball game with a heavy rubber ball, hitting it with their hips through stone rings high on a wall, and the game had religious meaning. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/16/) — Rubber was a Native American discovery, made from the sap of trees. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/17/) — The Maya and Aztecs made a bitter, frothy chocolate drink from cacao beans, with no sugar and sometimes with chilli, and cacao beans were even used as money. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/18/) — Around 1,100 years ago many southern Maya cities were abandoned, probably because of long droughts, wars and too many people for the land. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/18-the-maya/19/) — Later Maya cities in the north, like Chichen Itza, kept going, and at the spring and autumn equinox a shadow snake seems to slide down the stairs of its great pyramid. - ← previous: [Native peoples of North America](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/17-native-peoples-of-north-america/) - next →: [The Aztecs and the Inca](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/19-the-aztecs-and-the-inca/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)