Maya

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

> On 2008-01-17 16:47, kishore patnaik wrote:
>
> > The most significant part of it is there was a famous Daitya
> > called Maya, who was a famous architect and engineer being
> > present at the time of MBh, who left India for far off places.
> > The traditional dating of MBh tallies with the Mayan dating.
> > You can't simply dismiss so much similarity between a
> > historical (and architecturally known civilization) and so
> > called Mythological legends as merely coincidental.
>
> We can, since the ancient Mayan peoples did not call
> themselves "Maya". Their linguistic cousins and descendants have
> started doing so recently, presumably to promote the unity of
> indigenous Guatemalans and Mexicans speaking different but related
> languages (related to each other, but certainly not to
> Sanskrit :)). Maya(b)' T'an (literaly, 'the speech of flat lands')
> is the native name of Yucatec, just one of the Mayan languages,
> applied by the Spaniards (and then everybody else) to a group
> of linguistically related peoples.

A more recent etymological hypothesis states that 'Maya' is derived
from the name of the city of Mayapan, and not vice versa as was
previously assumed. In a paper available pay-per-view at

http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/jlat.2004.9.1.64 ,

Matthew Restall suggests that the term Maya may have been in use
prior to the Conquest but, if so, it probably referred only to the
people (and possibly language) of the city of Mayapan in the Yucatán
peninsula.

Regards,
Francesco

P.S. And, of course, the Sanskrit name Maya, first attested in the
Mahabharata as the name of the Architect of the Daityas (demons), is
from the verbal root ma:- 'to measure', the latter being an apt
activity for an architect!