Show temple of the warriors ax VT I 1 A C V 4 1 4 i lot I 1 flit vf r 41 V J 1 I r 0 aa le 4 J A the temple of the warriors at chichen itza yucatan recon strutted ted by the carnegie tion one of the best examples THE ANCIENT MAYA by sylvanus G morley A book review this volume is published by the stanford university press and is priced at 10 00 it is not worth it bo so many of the half tone il lustra eions are dim poor and faulty that it detracts very much from ones one s pleasure of ownership in the vol ume it is not up to the standard of other books by morley on the oth erhand morley is pos sibly the foremost authority on the subject of the mayas in both americas he has written much his volumes puli polished shed by the carnegie institution are superb masterpieces in presentation exhaustive and to 0 o the student most valuable con to an understanding of hese these ancient people his volumes bulletin 57 smithsonian tion bureau of american ethnol ogy agy entitled an introduction to the study of maya hieroglyphs is the foundation study volume to which all turn it is very highly valuable this volume the ancient maya is authoritative very care fully written shows a full mastery of the subject and it if one volume only were to be ones purchase then I 1 would advise selection of it for one will be well informed up on a careful study of it but as usual with high scientific books it is dry there are no highlights to relieve the reader there are pages many line drawings and a very liberal let yet the plates have been present ed by himself and others in a much more pleasing manner if one wishes a single volume then it is very valuable work for the library a fine reference book A careful study of it will yield a groundwork better proportioned than any other volume I 1 know of on the subject the old empire its wonders its fine pottery its crude beginnings in sculpture its fully matured system of arithmetic with tion and zero fully worked out so well that never later was a change made in it admired by all and the highest intellectual a achievement chie of any aboriginal peo pie in either america its astron omy passing on a cald calendar to be refined bettered and finally through the new empire ed to be fully as good as our own gregorian and by some held even accurate the rise of sculpture to unparalleled heights w working 0 r k i n g stone without the use of metals to the wonder of all students of anci arici ent history the magnificent build ings the heritage that the maya left only to be followed by a series of misfortunes internecine warfare a collapse and finally the weakened nation to be conquered by the spanish this is always in te resting terest mg morley follows the course gives sufficient detail and leads one authoritatively from the earliest times down to even today when delve into the digs which are the basis of that wonder revealing science he then takes up agriculture government and social tion the raft the despotism and enforced labor of city states in the building of temples the of maya architecture it was built by the mays maya during the later period after the mexican congest convest conquest sculpture of monuments and ste lae all for the aggrandizement of the priests and religious rulers the conquest of the northern area by the mexicans and then an orgy of terrible human sacrifice with blood of victims smeared over id the priest actually walking a bout strutting before the people clothed in the freshly removed skin of the human victim just killed horrible but true and then with in a hundred years the collapse of all that had been accomplished past the peak the people were ex hausted many causes contributed to the downfall of the nation and it sunk to the level now existing in the region when the spaniards came many former great cities were mer merely ely heaps of rubble over which the forest ran and man gone his works gone his astron omy gone never again did they rise after the final burst at chichen itza under mexican influence the spaniards considered all their works the deeds of the dev 11 and uprooted it root and branch they left hardly anything they burned the maya books they broke the images they literally raised hell but out of the chaos bishop de landa wrote to his sup enors a book which has been the base for all future interpretation of the maya glyphs upon which german scientists built until to I 1 day we are reading about one third of all the mayas wrote that i one third is almost purely astron mixed liberally with priest craft on lucky and unlucky days but study gave the base the arithmetic ith and the clue which fol lowed by patient study and masterly insight eventually gave us an understanding of the vast heritage the mayas have bequeathed to the world morley uses a table of superlatives showing in what the e maya were first best largest and other superlatives well chos en and highly gratifying it is in deed a wonderful record the maya were a superlative people and left us a superlative heritage do not misunderstand me tho I 1 condemn the pictures in this book and complain of the price yet as a single volume as a book of study and reference it meets a decided need Is good and will well repay carefully care full study 4 |