Re: Maya

I've read that before. Sometime before the conquest,
Mayapán was the principal Mayan city but I think it
was surpassed by Mérida (Ti Ho).
I don't know if Mayapán belonged to the Xiu --but if
it did, and it was a rival of Mérida, that may explain
how and why the name passed to the Yucatecan as a
whole, given that the Xiu collaborated with the
Spaniards against the Itzá.
Given the ending -pan, I'm guessing Mayapán is from
Nahuatl --there was a strong Nahua influence in Mayan
areas, especially after the fall of southern Mayan
city states in Petén, Belice, El Salvador and Honduras


--- Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...> wrote:

>
>
>
> --- 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!
>
>

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