okay i just got cut off but i was talking about the concept of time in the west where you and i live in a western civilization was very linear and in the rest of the world it is very cyclical where no beginning and no end that is why if you take the calendars of the ancient maya that is very cyclical and that's the only thing that you need to know is very cyclical for this course right but it's interesting you have to have different types of calendars in order for them to work in this case you have a 260 day sacred calendar we also have a sacred calendar for example if you are orthodox very conservative orthodox christian you might still be using the julian calendar as a sacred calendar as opposed to the gregorian calendar which we're using perhaps many of you do uh but in the west we tend to convert over to what is most common among everybody else it's just easier i still don't understand all about lunar cycles and stuff you notice here you have the bars and dots which is the vegetable system here you also have a solar calendar the uh sacred calendar goes inside of the solar calendar the solar calendar was pretty accurate but not perfect it was 365 days uh 18 months of 20 days plus five unlucky days days the extra days they just don't seem to fit so they're the five friday the 13th in a row those are not the good days if anything's going to happen it's going to happen here this is kind of a unique calendar that and i don't really know a whole lot about everything here but i know that if you go round and round it is a century 52 years a century is means a hundred but oftentimes century actually refers to something else for example centurion was in charge of 80 men in the roman army as opposed to a hundred which would have made sense over 100 but i don't know okay anyway in this case so so that was a century that goes together here and then you also have a long count calendar which i always found interesting and i i don't truly understand it but it was a start in august 13 1314 bc so br translated to our calendar and it ended december 23rd 2012. so i was only teaching here for about four years and everybody wanted to know about the the end of the calendar and i don't know i had a a joke you know this said uh uh we ran out of space where we gonna put it i just end with 2012 that'll trick people in the future so i don't really know why they have this actual long count calendar as well but the whole point was not calendars though was the point is to the whole point was to point out the cyclical nature of much of the rest of the world's understanding of time as opposed to our understanding of time and our understanding of time will indeed determine a lot of our science our way of understanding our natural philosophy everything around us aha so one civilization will also adopt things from previous civilizations so the maya is going to adopt some of the indigenous gods of the olmecs one of the most important gods is going to be uh oh my gosh quetzalcoatl although they call it kukulkan uh oftentimes so they have the maze god somebody to bring uh corn from the middle of the earth to present it to mankind you always have this beginning story in myths about the beginning to domesticate plants and animals super important uh most people refer to quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent as the maze god but the question is maybe there are two different gods in fact right a good question i don't know the answer and that could be that i'm just not um up to date on my indigenous uh religion like it should be here's a great greater image of quetzalcoatl here is the great uh snake and the snake uh quality snake and quetzal is the feathers from the quetzal bird right so it means feathered serpent here this particular one uh i imagine water can come out here although i've never seen it with water coming out from this one but they have lots of them and they're usually associated with these amazing pyramids so the question is how do they build these pyramids well it's much easier than talking about ancient egypt they simply had a small pyramid then they built another one over the top of it so it's interesting because you can actually dig through the pyramid and find out a great deal about the people here uh based off of uh the the what's in the pyramids for example i read you inside of a pyramid one of the the the story about the ball game among the maya which is pretty interesting but it's very difficult too you don't want to dig through the pyramid because i need to destroy it i'd like to know what's inside the tree how old this tree is so i'll cut it down but now the tree's dead so oh well for that so lots here's a series if you want to look at it by a history channel no no it's by national geographic i'm sorry not history channel national geographic uh called lost temples my pyramids of chichen itza which is one of the important uh city-states of the ancient maya well eventually the maya civilization from which they developed lots of advanced science technology when i was a kid we always were taught in high school and stuff that they were very uh peaceful and all they did is look at the stars and they were very uh uh you know with the calendar system uh their understanding of time and also their numbers and writing system very peaceful people but then once we translated their writing we find out that they're very violent people violent like anybody else that is you know not more or less just they're also violent they're not just like these uh philosopher kings sitting out in the middle of nowhere the jungle and sipping on their chocolate which they did right and talking about what's going on i don't know they are going to move out of their city-states if you go to guatemala or belize or even parts of mexico today the maya indians don't live in the big old faint old cities that they did a thousand years ago why not well because they moved demographic and ecological stress is one of these big things that push people out all of those videos that you may or may not watch on youtube about the maya will say we don't really know but usually if something is obvious that's the answer you know uh it's like the smoking gun if somebody has a gun and it's smoking and there's a dead body there that person probably killed that person but maybe not there could be some exceptions in this case probably what happened is that too many people lived in those big cities and then there was a period of drought the drought is more obvious that's a smoking gun because uh if you use endo endocrinology you can never say that word and you counted the tree rings you go find out how how well those trees were being watered and there was indeed a period of stress can you imagine having that as your job i'm going to count tree rings for a living that's all you're going to do yes well you need a new pair of glasses good luck with that anyway so people moved out so the the great civilizations of the might died uh died out but they still live there and uh they just don't live in the the city-states the city-states then got covered over with the ancient um with jungle uh but in order to find all the cities you'd have to chop the whole jungle down right wrong not anymore now you could use ground penetrating radar and these advanced technologies to go down and discover all about the maya without digging up their cities can you imagine you've been walking to school every day and then you find out that that place you've been walking over uh underneath it maybe a hundred feet is a famous pyramid you know wow i had no idea that's fascinating anyway so we talked about number one the ole mix then we'll talk about number two da maya let's talk about number three uh they're actually two different peoples but we'll mush them together for the sake of not being here all day which i wouldn't mind which is the toltecs and the aztecs now i love them together and i put that they came during an age post classic after the maya had reached their haiti and they moved down to the countryside but we don't really know exactly where they came from and i lumped them together because they were called chitcha mecca's by people chichamecas refers to people without knowing their past it's actually defined as lineage of dog people lineage of dog people or lineage of dogs like because they didn't write they'd have writing they were barbarians and so people would uh want to know their past and they'd be like i don't know well who's your grandpa i don't know where you come from i don't know we just came from up north somewhere and we've been migrating uh in the case of the toltecs just for some reason migrating south in the case of the aztecs following the god with the lapochely as they led him to the promised land how interesting so where the chicha mekkas dog lineage people come from i don't know but it's probably this region here how do you know that kim well probably because the languages the languages uh that they speak here are called utto aztecan and the same language family that the aztecs speak nowada is utto azteca so therefore since they speak a same language you could presume and they said they came from the north that they came from this region because it's the same language family could be could not be right the toltecs followed their god you don't need to know this taz catlepoca means smoking mirror and the uh oh and then they adopted the the traditions and values of the people they they encountered when they came down like quetzalcoatl becomes very important the calendrical system very important the writing system they begin to write stuff down great poetry written down too uh and of course the uh religious traditions that i kind of hinted at with quetzalcoatl but you know whatever right very important if you took my mexico class we could really talk about some of these great stories they came down the toltecs first and there was a big lake the name of this lake is usually referred to by the middle one lake texo so they came down here and eventually they're set on the north end but another wave of barbarians the aztecs i don't know why i went back but aztecs are going to come down and they're going to settle right down on top of the lake on an island and they're going to do that because they see that this is the promised land that their god which apparently was guided in towards which is um they could see the symbol which was a a cactus on top of the cactus a bird and in the beak of the bird uh snake therefore it's still on the flag of mexico right that's the aztecs so when the toltecs and the aztecs those chichamekas came down to the valley of mexico following their gods uh then they saw lots and lots and lots of people but i told you that all the people need to have uh irrigation networks they did not have the irrigation networks that they were used to in europe or or the old world they had a different type which they would call hydroponics it's called the chanumpa or floating garden you can kind of see here they came down here and you could actually build a garden floating sort of right on top of the lake and that's what they did if you come down here you can see here's the top of the water if you're looking at on it and then you put the you you weave a mat and then you put a flat you're gonna have to have people hold it then you put a bunch of dirt and stuff on it and you then you get a whole bunch of sticks and you pound it down in this particular image drawn by the aztecs afterwards they have more than you'd imagine down here i don't know why they have so many uh if the more the merrier absolutely you know uh if if you can but usually these are going to be far off in the middle of nowhere so then you pound them down and then you plant the corn and you could have three harvests every year that means if more food equaled more people with regards to the indians from india and the um chinese then more food is also going to equal more people in the aztec civilization and indeed they're going to have a tremendously large population they're all gonna die okay they don't all die but uh later on when the europeans come we'll cover that later are we gonna cover i think i think i was gonna cover it but uh the europeans are gonna come and uh these people here had uh no diseases right so therefore they got virgin territory and so then when the europeans come with their diseases they get smallpox and chickenpox and the common cold and the flu and they they die it's called the demographic catastrophe and about 95 percent of the people are gonna die had a friend that was uh joking around okay he wasn't joking it was kind of serious right because i tend to be more uh we should wear masks and other people are more like you guys are idiots and so he said well uh i think shouldn't it be kind of like uh if you don't if it doesn't kill you it gives you immunities to it like perhaps perhaps right except in this case it killed 95 of the population at least 100 million people will die of this disease um i guess what doesn't kill you could make you stronger unless you are than 95 to 100 million people that died now we don't know exactly how many people died we know that because nobody counted all the people before the europeans came and even then it took them a long time to count the people that were left so i was kind of guessing i got off track thanks a lot kim hey has it ever been 15 minutes okay let's pause this video and i'll come back for part three