The Maya Indians lived in Mexico for thousands of years before the Spanish explorers arrived in the 1500s. They achieved many great things. They had farms, beautiful palaces, and cities with many buildings. The Mayan people knew a lot about nature and the world around them. This helped them live a better life than most people of that time.
The Maya believed in many gods, such as rain gods, sun gods, and corn gods. The people built large temples to honor the Mayan gods. Workers built cities around these temples. It was hard for them to build these cities. They had no horses to carry the heavy stone they used for building. Workers had to carry all of the materials themselves. Today, many of these Mayan cities and temples are still standing.
The cities that the Maya built were beautiful, and the people worked hard to build them. But very few people lived in them. Usually, only the priests lived in the cities.
Everyone else lived in small villages in the forests. Their houses were much simpler. They lived in small huts with no windows. The walls were made of poles covered with dried mud. The roof was made of grass or leaves. Most Mayans lived simple lives close to nature.
Measuring time was important to the Maya. Farmers needed to know when to plant and harvest their crops. Mayan priests made a system to keep track of time. They wrote numbers as dots (…) and bars (—). A dot meant one, and a bar meant five.
The Mayan priests studied the sun, moon, stars, and planets. They made a calendar from what they learned. The year was divided into eighteen months of twenty days each, with five days left over.
Around the year 800, the Maya left their villages and beautiful cities, never to return. No one knows why this happened. They may have died from a disease. They may have left because the soil could no longer grow crops. Scientists are still trying to find the lost secrets of the Maya. They are still one of our greatest mysteries.