Decay in the Jungle

THE ANCIENT MAYA (520 pp.) -- Sylvanus G. Morley--Sfanford University Press ($10).

Bat-haunted and deserted for centuries, the mysterious limestone cities of the Maya crouch in the Yucatan bush and the Guatemalan-Honduran jungles. They were already in ruins when Hernando Cortes marched into Mexico 400 years ago to teach Montezuma's Aztecs a Spanish lesson. The names of those deserted cities echo with a kind of distant, mournful music: Tikal, Copan, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Mayapan.

Sylvanus G. Morley of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who has worked in the Maya country for 40 years, is the man who discovered some of its most famous monuments and directed Carnegie's elaborate restorations in Yucatan. Even he cannot unravel all the tangles of the Maya past, but this patient, expert, profusely illustrated book is by far the best general survey of the mystery as a whole: who were the ancient Maya, how did their civilization arise, why did it fall?

Knife & Corn. The Maya, he says, were remote cousins of the Inca, the Iroquois and the Eskimo. Squat, copper-colored, often cross-eyed (admiring crossed eyes, they hung beads of resin before the eyes of their infants to induce a squint), they were wise, brilliant, cruel.

They produced delicate works of art, designed remarkable buildings--and tossed human victims screaming into a holy well, or held them while a priest groped for the heart with a sharp stone knife.

Archaeologist Morley thinks that the Maya, rather than the Inca, were the first of the New World people to cultivate corn. Out of this skill and the sedentary rooted life it led to, they evolved their extraordinary culture. Just when the Maya flowering began he can merely guess at, but by the dawn of the Christian era there was probably already a considerable Maya civilization in what is now the Guatemala Department of Peten.

By A.D. 300-400, this civilization had accomplished marvels. It had an exact chronology, a "more accurate knowledge of astronomy" than that of Egypt under the Ptolemies, an arithmetical system involving the concept of zero, a complex hieroglyphic writing (much of which is still undeciphered), highly accomplished arts & crafts. Yet the Maya were aboriginal people--without metal tools of any kind, without beasts of burden, without even a wheel.

The Flowering. During the next few hundred years, they spread north, east and south, until Maya cities & towns dotted an area of 125,000 square miles. No one knows the total number of settlements, but there were "countless" small ones, and at least 100 that were metropolitan enough to have temples, statues and hieroglyphs. Tikal, in Guatemala, may have had a population of 200,000 or more; its ruins cover several hundred acres, and include five temples, one of them over 200 feet high. Copan, in Honduras, has within its inner group of buildings a sizable stadium, sculptured stairways, terraces, pyramids. At Chichen Itza and Uxmal in Yucatan were colonnades, palaces, and a series of stone courts on which a basketball-like game was played.

Morley believes that the great Mayan cities were slowly abandoned, one after the other, principally because of crop failures, partly because of epidemics, social disintegration, wars. The last great city founded was Mayapan, about A.D. 1000. It was sacked by local rivals some 450 years later. Within another century Cortes and his Spaniards appeared. Their conquest of the Maya lands was difficult and protracted, for the Maya were degenerate but they were stubborn.

What other race did so much, so long, with so little, asks Archaeologist Morley proudly? Not the Incas or Aztecs, he says --and probably not the Egyptians, Persians, .Greeks, Romans, Chinese.

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