Re: Maya

The scholars have no unified answer to the origins of Mayans. Nor no one knows conclusively why they are called Mayans and who called them so first. My guess that they are called so after Maya is as good and as scientific or imaginative as yours (that they are called after some city which itself belonged to the decaying times of Mayan).

If Mayans did not call them so, can you please give me the original name/s of the civilization and the concerned references?

The sanskrit influences on Mayans are beyond doubt and that influence is highly limited on them means they followed their own languages and their own traditions- just as Daityas, while staying in Indian Subcontinent,did.

Give me better reasons and counter evidence to condemn my "dogmas"

Kishore patnaik

On Jan 19, 2008 11:24 AM, Rick McCallister < gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

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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