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Until the discovery that Maya stelae depicted kings instead of high priests, the Maya priesthood and their preoccupations had been a main scholarly concern. In the course of the 1960s and over the following decades, however, dynastic research came to dominate interest in the subject. A concept of royal ʼshamanismʼ, chiefly propounded by Linda Schele and Freidel, came to occupy the forefront instead. Yet, Classic Maya civilization, being highly ritualistic, would have been unthinkable without a developed priesthood. Like other Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican priesthoods, the early Maya priesthood consisted of a hierarchy of professional priests serving as intermediaries between the population and the deities. Their basic skill was the art of reading and writing. The priesthood as a whole was the keeper of knowledge concerning the deities and their cult, including calendrics, astrology, divination, and prophecy. In addition, they were experts in historiography and genealogy. Priests were usually male and could marry. Most of our knowledge concerns Yucatán in the Late Postclassic, with additional data stemming from the contemporaneous Guatemalan Highlands.
An eccentric flint is an elite chipped artifact of an often irregular ('eccentric') shape produced by the Classic Maya civilization of ancient Mesoamerica. Although generally referred to as "flints", they were typically fashioned from chert, chalcedony and obsidian.
During the pre-Columbian era, human sacrifice in Maya culture was the ritual offering of nourishment to the gods. Blood was viewed as a potent source of nourishment for the Maya deities, and the sacrifice of a living creature was a powerful blood offering. By extension, the sacrifice of human life was the ultimate offering of blood to the gods, and the most important Maya rituals culminated in human sacrifice. Generally, only high-status prisoners of war were sacrificed, with lower status captives being used for labor.
References
- ↑ "34548395". Archived from the original on 2020-06-23. Retrieved 2020-06-22.
- ↑ https://www.worldcat.org/title/comparative-analysis-of-the-mesolithic-and-prepottery-neolithic-cultures-of-palestine/oclc/80167855&referer=brief_results Archived 2020-06-26 at the Wayback Machine worldcat item page
- ↑ https://www.worldcat.org/title/late-postclassic-settlement-patterns-on-cozumel-island-quintana-roo-mexico/oclc/81989814&referer=brief_results Archived 2020-06-23 at the Wayback Machine worldcat item page
- ↑ https://www.worldcat.org/title/maya-cosmos-three-thousand-years-on-the-shamans-path/oclc/825735113&referer=brief_results Archived 2020-06-23 at the Wayback Machine [ bare URL ]
- ↑ https://www.worldcat.org/title/ancient-maya-political-economies/oclc/834258127&referer=brief_results Archived 2020-06-25 at the Wayback Machine [ bare URL ]
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