Riviera Maya

Riviera Maya, Mexico may be home to many resorts and tourist site but many years ago it was home to a civilization that was highly advanced. Their civilization spread across much of southern Mexico, and other parts of Latin America. The earliest Mayans were known for their religion, they had many gods for different things. They had over 160 different gods and goddesses and most were associated with nature. Mayans often gave human sacrifices to their gods. The Mayans also worshipped time and were believed to have 5 great cycles.

"Jaguars represented the first world cycle that destructed the earth, the second cycle caused by air, the third by fire, and the fourth by a great flood. The fifth cycle, in which we are currently living in, is destined to end man’s reign in the world by a catastrophic earthquake. The Maya believed this present cycle began August 13, 3114 B.C. and would end December 22, 2012. This would complete the end of another solar cycle of almost 5,200 years which, together with the other four great cycles, total 26,000 years, a duration that approximates the known 25,920-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes." (http://www.rivieramaya.ws/mayanhistory/)

Most people know the Mayans for the building and pyramids that still stand today. I was lucky enough to visit these ruins on a trip I took with my family in 2007. We visit the city of Tulum which is right on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. I learned a lot of information on that day long trip there.


At the small place where the two stones on the left meet is where the Mayans could tell it was spring time. The sun would set right in between those two stones and they would know that spring had arrived.


This is the top of the highest building where religious rituals would be preformed.


This is a photo of the center of the city.



this is another building at the edge of the city's center. In this same direction was where a road stretched through the rain forest to connect the Mayan people to one another for trading.


This is where the boys would go to school to learn about traditions and religious practices.

The Hill of the Jackal

Located in South Africa, the Hill of the Jackal is held with much mystery and horrors from the locals. They dare speak of it in public and is held as a subject of taboo. Believed to be the first ancient African Kingdom, The Hill of the Jackal is also known as Mapungubwe.

Accessible only by two narrow paths, the journey to the top of Mapungubwe is not for the faint of heart. Beginning wide and periodically narrowing, the hill is 300 meters long. It has believed to be the beginning of Greater Zimbabwe and is greatly regarded as being a key player in the Zimbabwe ruins. ESJ van Graan and four others journeyed to the summit of the hill and observed the loss of such a powerful civilization as well as traps that were still intact to harm intruders. van Graan's son and Professor Leo Fouchè began the largest Iron Age archaeoloigical project by a Southern African university. The project continues today.

An estimated 1350 years ago was when a most powerful King built his home upon the top of the hill. This was probably to signify his royal status, being above all. The king was believed to have magical powers to make it rain that would keep the vegetation lush. Archaeological finds show us that those living at Mapungubwe were the first to keep dogs. These dogs however were pack-living animals, acting more like a wolf than our common dog.

Large amounts of treasure were found in a grave site in Mapungubwe, with gold covering the skeletons that were buried there. This probably belonged to the royals who lived in Mapungbwe, since we learned from the movie that great kings and queens were buried with great treasure before they were sealed. Mapungubwe is believed to have been the center of political life when it shifted to Mapungubwe from it's sister site, Bambadyanalo, in 1045 C.E. It was probably moved because of overpopulation. Mapungubwe was invested heavily in trading, its partners being China and India.

A great feature of Mapungubwe were the Baobab trees that are quite frequent throughout South Africa. These deciduous trees have some interesting and amazing characteristics including their amazing live span of up to 3000 years old as well as their branches looking more like roots, generating the nick name of upside-down tree. Also, they are very hard to kill, since it will continue to make new bark and grow, regardless in almost any circumstance, including trying to burn the bark. They're not immortal however; when they die they rot from within and collapse.

The Hill of the Jackal was discussed significantly in the movie we watched this past Wednesday, because it shows us the probable earliest existence where the community's leaders were separated from the rest of the community. Being the earliest kingdom in Africa, we can trace connections to the later civilizations in the area as well as wonder at what an interesting marvel the Hill of the Jackal is.

http://www.africangamesafari.com/limpopo_province.htmlcom/limpopo_province.html

http://www.openafrica.org/route/route-of-lost-kingdoms

Do you Bantu?

Jambo!!!!!!!! (which means hello in Swahili, a language in the Bantu family.)

Bantu was the universally accepted language spoke among inhabitants in the Sub Saharan Africa region before 1500. The language belong to the Niger-Congo family. There are about 513 languages that make up the large Bantu grouping. Presently, Bantu is spoken east and south of the present day country of Nigeria. The term "Bantu" actually means: People.

When it comes to the actual language structure, they tend to use a lot of affixes. An affix is a bound morpheme which adds lexical or syntactic information to a root or a stem. (SIL international.) http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAffixGrammar.htm
Their words are also typically made up of open syllables. These open syllable words often follow the pattern of CV, which is a consonant-vowel. The words are set up mostly with the following letter and sound patterns, CV, VCV, CVCV and VCVCV. By looking at these patterns, you may notice that all of the words end in vowels, that's because closed vowels, CVC, are not allowed or a part of their language structure.

Reduplication is a common trend found in the Bantu languages. For example, the word for "strike" is piga, so when they want to say "strike repeatedly", they simply say "pigapiga."

There are several common Bantu languages:
1) Swahili 2) Kongo 3) Pedi 4) Tswana 5) Rundi 6) Ngumba 7) Basaa 8) Duala, just to name a few, there are actually 48 which are spoken throughout 22 countries.

Some words that we use today came from the Bantu languages before the 1500's. They are as follows, bongo, jumbo, gumbo, Jenga (what a fun game!), marimba, rumba, safari, simba (mufasa's baby boy), and mambo (number 5...anyone, anyone?).

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Bantu+language

There is no doubt that a universal language shaped Sub Saharan Africa and gave the people an ability to communicate with each other and learn. Being able to share ideas also gave the people of the Sub Saharan region an opportunity to grow and advance through a cultural revolution.

Until next time, thanks for reading!!

http://bama.ua.edu/~golar001/The%20History%20of%20Bantu%20Languages.pdf

Queen of Sheba v Prester John

The movie on Wednesday introduced us to the Africa's great ruin, Great Zimbabwe. You can learn a great amount of information through the previous post on our blog, but I am going to introduce you to some of the Europeans ideas on the religion that occupied the land. Their thoughts included the idea that the area might be the capital of the Queen of Sheba or possibly the Christian King, Prester John. Africa and its cities are not completely understood and the ideas of whom, when, and where it began are not positively correct, but we will now take a look at these two different religious figures and you can decide which one you believe to be correct.

http://theculturedtraveler.com/Heritage/Archives/Zimbabwe.htm

Queen of Sheba


http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id=104085

She is a woman of royalty and also a biblical figure who was born in the 10th century B.C. She was born in Sheba which is today's Yeoman, or Ethiopia. She is now known in the Bible as the wealthy queen who tested King Soloman. It is believed that after her experience with the King, she traveled back to Sheba and bore a child to King Soloman, Menelik I, which is, according to the Ethiopian tradition, the beginning of the Ethiopian royal dynasty.

This story is a remarkable one, in which the Queen was invited to a banquet that King Soloman was deliberately giving her extremely spicy foods to induce her thirst. At the end of the night she made the King promise that he would not take her by force and, in turn, he made her promise that she would not steal anything from his home. When she awoke in the middle of the night with a need to quench her thirst she took from a jar of water, not understanding that this would be considered stealing. With this honest mistake King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba spent the night together.

The tradition that the Biblical Queen of Sheba was a ruler of Ethiopia who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem, in ancient Israel, is supported by the first century C.E. Roman (of Jewish origin) historian Flavius Josephus, who identified Solomon’s visitor as a "Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia".

http://www.answers.com/topic/queen-of-sheba#Possible_Egyptian_derivation

Prester John


http://www.home.earthlink.net/.../soldiers/scenario8.html

His name was given to him as a mythical medieval Christian priest-king of a large empire in Central Asia and Ethiopia.

It was during the Fifth Crusade that information on Ethiopia was being gathered by the Crusaders. It was then that the Christian sovereigns of Ethiopia, who were constantly found fighting to defend their religion, became known in Europe. It was Jourdain Catalani who described "the sovereign of Christian Ethiopia as Prester John". After this conclusion was made and more data was found, Prester John's kingdom was believed to be located in Africa and his legend became much more fascinating while his popularity grew.

Prester John was believed to have the power of cutting off the flow of the Nile towards Egypt (an ancient Ethiopian tradition). Again, it was said that, in Prester John's country, children were baptized with fire and not with water.

http://www.dacb.org/stories/ethiopia/prester_john.html


Now that you have a little bit of information about how the Europeans may have formed their opinions on certain areas of Africa, you can form your own.

Zimbabwe

According to the movie we watched in class, Zimbabwe means the “Great House of Stone”. This name is fitting since the city was built out of it, using dry-stone techniques. Africans would spend so much time just shaping the stone to make a wall. The Zimbabwe Ruins consisted of a fortress named Acropolis, and a temple now named Great Zimbabwe (http://www.dlmcn.com/anczimb.html). These structures were so beautiful that white people who saw them could not believe they were built by Africans. They were convinced black people could not create such monumental stuctures and they were thought that there had to be a hidden “white city”. (This sounds a little crazy to me, though I am not surprised.)
On another note, Zimbabwe was active in trade with Muslim merchants. Gold, cattle, ivory, and copper were traded for cloth, porcelain, and glass. Though Great Zimbabwe “was not close to the local gold seam”, they were powerful because they could control trade (http://www.somalipress.com/zimbabwe-overview/early-history-zimbabwe-1140.html).
Overall, Zimbabwe’s history was somewhat a mystery because of the fact that people wanted to think one way, whether or not it was true. Though things in history actully happen only one way, the perceptions of different people can alter the understanding of others in the future, thus “changing” it.