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Merida, near the Chichen Itza pyramid.

We’ve been in Mexico for more than a week and after so many ruins and corn tortillas we’re turning into Aztecs. The country is interesting, but everything repeats itself. Mesoamerica is full of pyramids of all sizes and cultures. There are so abundant it has plenty to spare. Zapotecas, Mixtecas, Toltecas and more. The same indigenous community with different feathers. If the textbooks keep them separated it’s because none of was able to dominate the others for a long period of time. Only the Maya in Yucatan and the Aztec in the Mexico Valley imposed themselves on their nearest neighbors. But little else.

Despite all that, the guides here never stop praising these civilizations and whenever they can, comparing them with the Inca emphasizing that the ancestors of the Mexicans knew how to read and write, while the future Peruvians didn’t do much else than move rocks. One needn’t destroy their fantasy, but we’d be lying if we didn’t think that most of their ruins are rather simple. Chichen Itza, the most emblematic work of the Maya, is worth the visit. But it’s not a great work of architecture if you think that it was built 3000 years after the great pyramids of Egypt, or 1,000 years after the Parthenon.

Regarding writing, however, they’re right. Their pictograms have an air of Egyptian hieroglyph turned into comic strip that make them special, even fun. A pity that the witch doctors with cassocks that came to save their souls insisted also on censoring their reading material:

“We found a great number of books with their writings and because in them there was nothing but superstition and the Devil’s lies, we burned them all, which they felt deeply and were very sad about.” Fray Diego de Landa, Yucatan, sometime in the 16th century.

Needless to say, the pyromaniac with a crucifix couldn’t read the glyphs , so it was impossible for him to really know if there were “Devil’s lies” in them or if they were only cookbooks with the first ever guacamole recipe.

Luckily, despite nice characters such as Fray Diego de Landa, some texts survived. Just enough to see that as farmers they knew about the motion of the stars and how to calculate when equinoxes and solstices were taking place. Based on that knowledge, they aligned their temples and palaces, playing with shadows and lights to get dazzling effects on special occasions, like when the shadow of a snake climbs up the steps of the Kukulcan temple during the Sun Festival. They also elaborated a complicated calendar in which they combined the solar year with the lunar month and two sacred numbers, twenty (the sum of the fingers and toes) and thirteen (months in the lunar year). With these numbers they made predictions and prophesies, the most famous being the exact date of the arrival of the Spaniards and with them, the end of their own reign. According to their calculations every 520 years a cycle ends and a new era begins. According to this calendar, the next big change will take place in 2012. This is one of the prophetic texts for the year to come:

“The owners of the black posies of the land will rule no more.”

Do they mean the end of oil-based dominion and the coming of an alternative source of energy? That’s too esoteric for us. What we would like to know is if the Maya had a soccer lottery and if it was fixed (having so many prophets), because their favorite pastime was something similar to soccer. By all means, the most interesting aspect of the ruins are the long courts where two teams of seven players touched a ball with their feet, knees or hips in order to shoot it through the rival’s hoop, located at a great height. Etchings show the captain of one of the teams holding in his hand at the end of the game the severed head of his opponent. Historians still don’t agree on whether the winner had the honor of using the knife or losing his head.

The Greeks invented the Olympic Games, but in them athletes competed individually. Maybe the first ones to play team games were the inhabitants of Mesoamerica. If you think how important sports are in today’s society, then, yes, we recognize the merit of the Mayans, Aztecs and all their cousins in our book of the Great People in History. And we do so wearing Barça t-shirts, which, just like in the rest of the world, is worn here the most .