Megapolis - The Ancient World Revealed | Episode 3: Tikal | Free Documentary History

you are about to discover one of the largest ancient cities of the Mayan civilization Tikka located in Central America in the heart of Guatemala this jungle Megapolis occupied for more than a millennium will be made up of 12 000 buildings and its immense Prestige will Tower over more than 40 other cities the importance of Tikal is comparable to that of any of today's major cities cities like London Paris New York or Shanghai [Music] foreign are those of the north Acropolis King wanted to leave his Mark but how could they keep outdoing their predecessors there was a previous pyramid and they built another one and many of these pyramids are like in the Russian dolls but um this is our just an internal structure it's truly an extraordinary achievement but clearly despite their lack of knowledge of Metallurgy they're Stone instruments they're tools their technology and their techniques were effective enough from a platform on a wide rectangular base were built compartments of more or less cut Stones joined by a mortar made of sand clay and lime [Music] fascinated by the Stars the Mayans dedicated the mythical Lost World to them a veritable astronomical Observatory according to remember that it was just with a naked eye because they had no optical devices and using architectural elements like the lost world that served as markers of the solstices and equinoxes we know for example that they predicted eclipses of all kinds thousands of years ahead the prowess of the Mayan Builders who knew neither the wheel nor metal tools and didn't even have working animals is astonishing in the Maya world you can have uh anywhere from three to six months without rain and this leads to Great engineering work for water management and to Monumental buildings such as the iconic temple one of the great Jaguar over 150 feet the height of a 17-story tower block I mean you're talking about millions of tons of weight in five centuries the Mayans built here 42 edifices on a platform that would reach a length of 235 yards in Central America the ball game is 3 000 years old but was it really a game all the power of the Mayan rulers is there to be seen in Temple 4 the highest in tikau a giant that had 213 feet is almost as high as paris's Cathedral of Notre Dame this is the incredible teacup an invitation to discover the fascinating world of the ancient Mayans as it's never been seen before thank you foreign [Music] foreign at the crossroads of the two Americas the Mayan civilization developed over an area that covers five Central American countries Tikal is located in Guatemala in the peten lowlands region Town closest to the site of Tikal is Flores stands on an island in the middle of lake pitten and has 25 000 inhabitants Flores is the departure point for most of the tourism in Guatemala [Music] this is a circuit that would lead them to the iconic tikau the largest Mayan city ever built which sits at the heart of a huge 222 square mile National Park [Music] it's hard to imagine how in the midst of this apparently inhospitable tropical forest one of the most glorious Mayan cities could set down roots and become the capital of a powerful Kingdom slowly little Villages of just a few houses grew into a real City it was a modest one at first until the first Monumental buildings began to appear the north Acropolis is tikal's most ancient complex of monuments built in 750 BC it served as a royal necropolis the resting place of Chiefs and kings around its base the north Acropolis measures 330 feet by 260. that is nearly ten thousand square yards and it was over 130 feet high the north Acropolis starts as a complex of several pyramids each with a temple at its Summit which soon give way to more most astonishingly of all these monuments were built solely by human hands with only the simplest of tools the Mayans used neither Wheels nor pulleys and no metal tools or beasts of Burden nothing but tools of stone like the whole of the Yucatan Peninsula the subsoil of Tikal is a vast Limestone base and this brings with it the great advantage of actually having the raw material for building very close at hand they knew what stones to use especially in the lowlands if you hit Limestone with a volcanic Stone then obviously that volcanic Stone will be able to break the limestone people are always saying they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have metal very important if you're in the plains of Mesopotamia it's great for chariots but if you walk in the jungle you see that it's useless and roads in the in the tropical forest are very very hard to maintain so they didn't need those at the top of each pyramid there is usually a Temple dedicated to worship but underneath it inside the pyramids are royal tombs these pyramid temples are funerary monuments that contain the graves of members of the dynasties that succeed each other at the head of the city in the universe of the Mayans ancestor worship is very important and the ruler who held rituals in the presence of Royal tombs legitimized his authority over his subjects the King was the sacred intermediary between the Earth and the supernatural forces [Music] Stella visible to all at the feet of the pyramids bear witness to this they are over seven feet high and they tell us about the lives of the kings of Tikal engraved on them are all the major episodes of their Reigns their victories marriages and deaths how exactly though do these stellae come to be standing here in the Sacred Space first the Mayans cut Limestone blocks from the local quarries they cut trenches into the Rock with their Flint axes to outline the shapes then they dug along under each block to free it [Music] this style is 10 feet long by more than 3 feet wide and almost one and a half feet thick it must have weighed more than one ton [Music] it was only once in place that the stellae were carved using Flint shears and wooden mallets the orientation of the pyramids is aligned with the cardinal directions the north corresponds to the sky the South to the Underworld the Land of the Dead the East to the Rising Sun to life and rebirth and the West to the gates of death so the Sun and its progress as they watched it across the heavens was incredibly important to them these pyramid temples where their rituals were performed are characteristic of the Mayan's Monumental architecture each pyramid Temple is like a kind of miniature mountain and the mountain is what connects you to the sky of course while any other kind of cave or a hole in the ground is what connects you to the underworld the cities and their kings will Vie to erect the most spectacular temples in other words the ones that will most impress their people the pyramids were part of the of the theater King's role was Central and so that theater of which we now have only the stages was absolutely critical and he was the star these Monumental oedipuses took a huge number of workers to build them so how with their very basic tools did the Mayans manage to build such gigantic structures if you're a Divine King and you have a hundred and fifty thousand people worshiping you it's not hard to say hey you spend the next month carving this line secret of all of it is labor Associates I think Society has always been amazed to see these huge and magnificent buildings given the technology used by the Mayans it's truly an extraordinary achievement but clearly despite their lack of knowledge of Metallurgy their Stone instruments their tools their technology and their techniques were effective enough to achieve constructions of such complexity and not just the complexity of the construction but also the beauty of these buildings foreign on a large rectangular base we're built compartments of rough cut stones they were held together by a mortar made of sand clay and lime then these compartments were filled with a ballast of large Pebbles rubble and Earth which gave the construction its great stability and that's how they managed it by knowing the hardness of the stones and how to cut them and shape them all the techniques that allowed them to develop the architecture that amazes us all to this day the basis of tikal's pyramids are all filled with hundreds of thousands of stones everything seems full heavy massive the same process was repeated at each level of the pyramid sometimes leaving a single empty space in the middle to serve as a burial chamber the pyramids all bear witness to the power of the Kings but the ones at tikau are special because of their great height from 130 to 213 feet high they're almost as tall as the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris every King wanted to leave his Mark but how could they keep outdoing their predecessors there was a previous pyramid and they built another one and many of these pyramids are like you know the Russian dolls but uh this is a just an internal structure I mean you're talking about millions of tons of weight all around us all the sculptures all the buildings and all the Pavements of the city center are made of limestone easy to extract and sculpt but fragile how is it then that constructions of such a porous Stone have survived through the centuries the solution the Mayans came up with was to cover them in a thick protective coating stucco the advantage of stuccoing was twofold first of all you can paint much more easily on stucco than on Stone and secondly it helps to prevent erosion of the stones this protective coating simple to carve and model was an easy surface to paint decorative ornamentation on so how did they make stucco they took the Limestone so readily available in the ground around them and started by breaking it into little bits [Music] a pit filled with wood was covered with Limestone and then burned at 1 000 degrees for several days to obtain fragments of quick lime [Music] this lime was mixed with water before being mixed with very fine sand thus producing a stucco paste [Music] stucco was not difficult to make but getting quick climb from those little pieces of limestone called for large quantities of wood to burn 150 foot trees that they had to cut down with simple hatchets Made of Stone only a strong ruler was able to mobilize the necessary Manpower attracting new populations was a part of the history of the classic Mayans and a central objective of all their rulers because when you attract people you're attracting a Workforce and this Workforce is very useful it will pay tributes to you and at the same time it can build by the beginning of our era there were around 10 Mayan cities all competing with each other and Tikal was determined to stand out pyramids are a center of power and one that provides a fine spectacle sort of think of it as a stage but also as a complex doesn't make any sense to the individual pieces you put them together and it's pretty impressive these pyramids form a ceremonial Center an urban nucleus where all the inhabitants gathered on the occasion of the great rituals that bound the community to its sovereign we know that they would go down those great stairways with their hands bleeding because they had done genital bloodletting up above and they would go down these huge stairways the people would Gather in the squares at the foot of the pyramids to witness these rights and hear the sovereign's predictions but the Mayan population was mainly Agricultural and it was a scattered one how did they know when to meet up in the city center they saw it in the Stars the Mayans have a cyclical conception of time based on the observation of the Stars they believed that the past the present and the future are all linked and that only rituals intended to satisfy the Gods on specific dates can predict the future so astronomy has become the basis for divinatory calendars which Define the dates of these rituals that are obligatory to attend [Music] in fact the Mayans had several calendars they basically had a 365-day solar calendar they also had a ritual calendar that was not directly related to the sun since it was composed of 260 days and they had to combine these two calendars [Music] but to achieve the Precision of these calendars of theirs the Mayans must have had an amazing knowledge of astronomy the Mayans were passionate about astronomy and they very early on had a sacred center for the study of the paths of the Stars a mythical group of monumental pyramids known as The Lost World this group located Southwest of the north Acropolis is the second nucleus of the ancient city most intriguingly at the center of the group stands a pyramid 100 feet tall with sides 250 feet long at their base [Music] was originally decorated with stucco masks of jaguars in pairs and shows traces of color mostly red [Music] red is the color of the East and of the sunrise it celebrates the birth of the Sun and of life itself [Music] most of these temples were painted really bright red so they were very impressive Mayan buildings were actually brightly colored the color palette is immense we know about it today thanks to fragments of Stucco recovered from several sites we know that there were not only red and black but also purple pink ocher greens and blues the reason we think of them as red and black is because those are the pigments that are best preserved [Music] this pyramid in the lost world with four staircases has strangely no Temple at the top why could this be it is in fact a platform for observing the stars in particular the Sun to the east it faces three small constructions that are linked together and aligned north-south yeah you could see the sunrise from here the sun in the left corner of the north building indicated the summer solstice June the 21st it Rose behind the middle one at the spring and Autumn equinoxes and it Rose at the right corner of the one to the south at the winter solstice the 21st of December thank you the course of the sun of the Moon of Venus the Mayan priests observe them all [Music] these observations made it possible to define the best dates for sowing or harvesting what perhaps defines the Mayans more than anything else is that they increasingly Associated their astronomical observations with arithmetic since they were also mathematicians they even made predictions we know for example that they predicted eclipses of all kinds thousands of years ahead and remember that this was all just with the naked eye because they had no optical devices and using architectural elements like the lost world that are markers of solstices and equinoxes [Music] [Music] from the third to the 9th Century's A.D Tikal went through an extraordinary development the real golden age of the city started at the end of the 7th century it now ruled over as many as 2 million people and its influence extended over dozens of cities towns and villages beyond the site an initial radius of 10 square miles was enough for day-to-day trade Farmers went to local markets up to a day's walk away throughout its history Tikal also developed its relations especially political ones with distant cities like kopan in Honduras Caracol in Belize and even teotihuacan more than 600 miles to the West in Mexico beginning of the year 378 would Mark a major turning point 600 miles away and considered the greatest Metropolis of Central America extended all its contacts far afield and may even have invaded tikau well in uh in the late 4th Century there's this contact interaction uh Invasion something with teotiwakan which to understand the importance of that you'd have to see territory Khan it's this great City in central Mexico that was involved all over huge economic system pulling in resources and the pyramids are just huge everything's huge and so it was a very impressive place but what I believe is that um after this contact the incoming person with the leader with the teotihua Khan sort of associations and Roots he kills the king but then he marries his his daughter then he's a Maya tiwakan Offspring many experts are still wondering what the point was for the powerful teotihuacan of invading tikkom 600 miles away as a city Tikal was an example for the others most likely at the time the other cities were all talking about tikau just like people all over its Empire spoke of Rome they've been talking about its Grandeur its huge buildings it's art it's ceremonies it's political activities now people say they invaded it because they wanted to have trade there's nothing that they would want the tropical forest is resource to deficient in terms of non-food products that doesn't have any Hard Rock it doesn't have any obsidian or pyrite or Jade and all that stuff was imported from the highlands and that's the importance of tcol can be compared to that of the world's major metropolises of our own day and age such as London Paris New York or Shanghai it was a center of political economic and cultural power influencing the whole of Middle America Tikal had a lot of influence Tikal May well have been invaded because of its Prestige and its great Fame it is easy to see how teotiwakan may have wanted to tighten its grip on the Mayan world then and after that there are lots of architecture and things that have teotihuacan modified style of this great Mexican city [Music] from then on Tikal incorporates elements of the invader's culture into its own and their influence on the city only leads to further development at its northeast corner at the foot of the central Acropolis this two-roomed building probably a temple is a perfect example of this especially since it was built 400 years after the invasion the platform on which it stands reproduces the embankments typical of teotiwakan architecture the fact that it was built so long after teotihuacan first got involved in tikal's Affairs shows how long lasting in effect the Mexican Metropolis had on Mayan lands but Tikal had long before become a major city with many outlying towns Villages and hamlets and migrating workers who'd come to build The Monuments had further swelled its population this was the Heyday of Tikal with the best architecture the biggest pyramids the thickest stucco in terms of the late Technologies of pre-classical times it's magnificent had a population of more than sixty thousand and the Heart of the site covers an area just six square miles this is surrounded by an intermediary Zone that gives way to a rule belt of 23 square miles that is both residential and agricultural the victories over rival cities have increased its power between city-states armed conflicts or alliances to establish the power of Kings were frequent events between Nobles or ruling families for the Mayans were warriors as well the idea of war is an interesting one because for a long time it was thought that the Mayans were peaceful with a Theocratic State and dedicated only to studying the stars and it wasn't until the mid-20th century that we began to study them closer and to notice how many representations there are of people with weapons of war or where the King has a captive At His Feet sometimes even under his feet being trampled by him a great king was measured by the number of Warriors he was able to take captive and closer Studies have revealed that the Mayans were always at War just like any other Society on Earth tributes conquests and marriages have provided the new rulers with considerable resources and given fresh momentum to Construction temple one known as the great Jaguar is one of tikal's most beautiful and emblematic a perfect example of the drive for Grand monuments located south of the north Acropolis temple one was built at the beginning of the 8th century it took 15 years to build [Music] looking up at temple one you cannot fail to be impressed by its colossal size it is 154 feet high all solid Stone temple one the great Jaguar has become the emblem of the city it's the most impressive one in the area it's entirely typical of the Tikal style that stands out from all the other Mayan cities by being so vertical and by the size of the crowning Stone on the top of the Temple this Temple is important because it's one of the first structures to be built without a platform Mayan temples usually face East but not this one [Music] in general the East has a privileged position for the Mayans but the great Jaguar looks worse and this is all about cyclical time the sun rises during the day and when it sets passes into the underworld for the Mayans the universe was organized into three superimposed worlds at the top the celestial world of the Gods source of light and life [Music] in the middle the Earthly World in which we live and below the underworld The Realm of Darkness and death [Music] the underworld has nine levels like the pyramid's base that's filled with 50 000 tons of limestone on top of it all the Temple dedicated to a great king faces the sunset as well as the temple to his wife on top of the temple itself is a crowning stone or roof comb a decorative block of masonry on its roof there's almost nothing left of it but to get a better idea of the design of the building here are some computer generated images the roof comb is a 30 to 50 foot high wall that reaches for the sky from the back of the roof it was sculpted and painted this type of Comb is characteristic of the decoration of tikal's temples on the facade there was an imposing sculpture of The Sovereign on his throne it is something that existed and it's not the only example of early classical architecture I think that this is one of the overall features of what is defined as the original paten style a pyramidal base a small Temple and a large solid comb on the top this pyramid is the monument to a dynasty dedicated to the great king jasochan kawil 26 Sovereign of tikau thanks to the Stella we know that he was the most famous of the 33 Kings who reigned over tikau [Music] who is the first great king really really great king he has always you know they had the charismatic things so he's graded like marriage Alliance and dancing and War whatever you want and so it spreads out the Tikal influence and the place really starts to Boom and under the ground at the foot of the pyramid in a crypt from the top we can see that the pyramid was just a plinth for the Temple dedicated to the Cults of the Gods and the ancestors the view from the top is spectacular and one can imagine what a striking impression The Sovereign celebrating the rights up there accompanied amidst the vapors of incense by priests and musicians must have made on the crowd it had to be seen and to use an anachronism it was a kind of government of communication the king is good if he communicates well if he can get the crowd to follow what he's doing like a communion you could call it the theater of State the music would really ring out because the building and the grand square it gives out on had amazingly resonant Acoustics [Music] the temple itself as a building didn't have any particular acoustic properties was the whole square one of the great things again about having all these plaster surfaces is that you get this amazing acoustic effect so that when the King was speaking from the temple or down below everyone would hear it like a microphone and you mustn't forget the dancing because music was very important in the rituals so in this space with these fabulous Acoustics it must have been an amazing experience the interior of the temple consists of three small rooms the Jaguar that's depicted is a figure that's often to be found with the Mayans here's the jungle's greatest predator and he represents political power we know that in Mayan Society only the leaders the almonds wear anything in Jaguar's skin in other words it was considered a sacred animal foreign of the building the architecture is very original in a way that's characteristic of all Mayan constructions don't forget that all they had were stone tools to create rooms within the stone buildings the Mayans developed the technique of the false Arch or korbeld Arch built on top of the longitudinal walls they are made of layered Stone levels that overlap a little layer by layer and are held together with mortar the two sides of the arch gradually join together and are then covered with a slab that links the two sides next to Temple one there's an unusual area which is actually a ballpark like many of the peoples of mesoamerica the Mayans played ball but for them it wasn't really a game the ball game well we call it a ball game because that's what we have today but in reality the famous Mayan ball game a mess of American ball game was more a ritual than a game we know from Colonial Chronicles that in some places they made bets on the winners and losers but we know very little about the rules of the game the ball represented the sun and the objective was to always keep the sun in motion and politically it seems that only the sites that were capitals had a ball court it would in fact be an emblem of the power of a city and we know this by the inscriptions that on some occasions all kinds of dignitaries were invited to attend the ball games this was to impress them of course or else to settle conflicts [Music] the pitch was divided in two to set day against night teams through to each other a hard rubber ball about six or eight inches in diameter that weighed about six pounds apparently the ball had to never touch the ground and to send it back you could not use your feet or your hands or your head so they played with their hips their knees their elbows and their shoulders in front of an audience sitting on the side platforms the pitch represented the universe and the moving Bowl the path of the sun we don't in fact know what the aim of the game was we know that as a ritual a ball game didn't happen every day it was part of a series of activities and ceremonies and it may or may not have resulted in human sacrifices that said Bloodshed especially of Chiefs and by self-sacrifice was an important practice that ensured continuity in the world for the rulers it was a ritual Duty that often took place in public [Music] their other most important duty was to solve the problem of water in an area with no big rivers and without a water table how could water be supplied to its thousands of inhabitants the extensive marshes to the east and west of the site may be What attracted tikal's first occupants and their water and Wetland management was extremely ingenious and efficient [Music] remember that at its peak the great Tikal had a population of 40 to 60 thousand sustainable Water Supply Solutions had to be found so what did the Mayans do first of all on the edge of the swamps the fields were raised and landscaped and canals were built to irrigate or to drain them in all societies water is essential in the case of paten located in the central lowlands they had the advantage of having surface waters such as lakes and rivers and it's a tropical forest it's not a rain forest because it has a dry season and it surprises people with all of the rain they have per year in the Maya world you can have uh anywhere from three to six months without rain so they had to be able to stock water during the dry seasons [Music] secondly and certainly on the initiative of several rulers the Mayans performed a feat of engineering by creating huge reservoirs of drinking water at the heart of the site to supply the elite who lived there and their dependents how did they do it [Music] ever since ancient times the Mayans had developed a whole technique that you could call Hydraulic Engineering they designed their cities in such a way that the squares became open-air catchment areas that could direct water to the reservoirs though the giant reservoirs were a lot of they were quarries mostly and it's interesting because as the city grew you would need to dig more to construct the temples at the same time you're basically making your Reservoir bigger foreign the reservoirs like all the major architecture were made of porous Limestone and they were covered with Clay to waterproof them to supply them the Mayans came up with the idea of using their big buildings the large Reservoir south of the central Acropolis collected the water that fell on this building thanks to the stucco covering all the buildings the rainwater and the violent monsoons all flowed down them easily this was due to the slope of the buildings and their height the water ran down to the great Square which was built with a slight slope to it and the underwater pipes then carried it to the reservoirs but the water did contain impurities how to solve it the Mayan's solution to this was to use quartz sand that they placed over the clay layer of the reservoir to filter it they invented a filtration system to clean their water [Music] that the first tank was a kind of filter that let water through to reach the so-called Temple Reservoir a little higher up so obviously the water management was part of real urban planning in Tikal it can also be seen in this residential area near the central Acropolis with its Sumptuous palaces in five centuries the Mayans built here 42 edifices on a platform that would reach a length of 235 yards these palaces served as homes for the elite as well as administrative centers these were residential areas of course residences of an abundant and varied population their reception areas too as well as meeting areas the spatial organization of amayan city is different to anything we know you won't find adjoining buildings opening onto streets but groups of houses organized around an inner Courtyard this complex building to the east of the central Acropolis is a noble or Royal residence at just 100 meters from the ceremonial Center it was definitely the home of somebody powerful at Tikal one thing people don't realize there are many palaces because the high Nobles had palaces and so as you you know you only see a small part of the site and they had pillows and they had cushions and uh in addition to you know making it comfortable it gets cold at night in the jungle and as you know I mean the castles in Europe you know very uncomfortable and they would have big fireplaces um but um so that was part of making it uh endurable the floors of these well-to-do homes were covered with stucco they didn't have the gray Limestone aspect that we see today foreign thanks to the Reconstruction by CGI we can now get a glimpse of the Mahler Palace [Music] we can see that there is an important difference between the Civil architecture of the elites and the religious architecture the religious buildings were built vertically while the residences were horizontal even with its two floors and its Rich ornaments the Maller Palace is mostly horizontal [Music] and also what's fascinating to me is that you know he's sitting there on the great throne and there's incense and there's smoke pouring out but there's also music impressive music and so on again it's all a stage everything from the main plaza to the little Courtyards for rulers or Nobles it's all about theater [Music] let us discover now the biggest pyramid in tikon a giant almost 200 feet high and weighing millions of tons temple four 650 yards west of the main Square tikal's Majestic Temple 4 is the tallest pre-columbian structure in the Americas still standing it is a giant that reaches a height of 213 feet almost as high as Notre Dame this pyramid Temple was certainly a funerary Monument it has the same characteristics as all the others meet the construction materials needed to erect this pyramid and its platform can make your head spin nearly 7 million cubic feet of them and all carried up on men's backs and that took a Workforce of hundreds of men at the summit of Temple 4 the arduous Ascent is rewarded by a Sumptuous Panorama of the site to look out over the forest canopy is like being on top of the world the roof comb alone is over 40 feet high inside it the openings between its three rooms were topped with beautiful carved wooden lintels the rooms were narrow and the walls colossal setting the lintels in place cannot have been easy because the sapodia wood they're made of is heavy more than one ton per 35 cubic feet the men who carried them all the way up here must have suffered each wooden lintel is well over six feet high in addition to their beauty these panels have secrets to reveal thanks to the carved inscriptions we've been able to date Temple 4 precisely it was built in 741 A.D back then in the 8th Century the city became so dense with so many new occupants arriving that the sovereigns were constantly building new constructions among the biggest the city had seen much of what we see today dates from that time an incredible technological invention is revolutionizing all our knowledge of Mayan civilization a laser detection technique called leader with its help we can now see through dense layers of trees this is an extraordinary Leap Forward for research it would have taken an archaeologist a century to discover what back in 2016 the lead are Unearthed in just two days later is terrific at discovering canals changes in the landscape cultivation Terraces anything that can be hidden by vegetation please they were all the buildings of course but you can also see the outlines of fields and Terraces the exploitation of wetlands the paths connecting the different neighborhoods as well as roads leaking different sites and you know a place like Tikal they've only excavated I don't know 10 15 and uh so it really it really helps especially um it helps in the beginning uh replaces a lot of ground survey so you can see things since 2016 mapping with lidar has revealed Tikal to be much larger than archaeologists suspected the Mayan Village is built of perishable materials have all disappeared the experts thought Tikal was surrounded by 3 000 structures forming secondary centers or Villages but the leader revealed not three thousand but twelve thousand in particular it showed us that the site was much more densely populated than we'd previously thought [Music] foreign [Music] City and that's unusual in the west it's an urban center surrounded by a lot of farms around tikau and its towns there are large tracts of cultivated Fields with intensive agriculture Terraces drain fields and raised fields which all ensure a large production of food to feed the population this interweaving of town and country is what probably distinguishes these classical cities thank you and the leader has opened a whole new chapter of understanding for us [Music] Tikal may have disappeared into the depths of the Jungle but the Mayan world has not faded away there are still six million Mayan people in Central America and southern Mexico Mayan culture is one of the most resilient in the world the pre-columbian Mayans were fantastic and the present-day Mayans are fantastic if the Mayans were the Greeks of pre-columbian America Tikal was the heart of the Mayan World these pre-columbian remains of The Magnificent City lost in the jungle reveal the secrets of a brilliant civilization organized around a sacred King and an omnipresent spirituality chika remains to this day the largest Mayan megopolis ever discovered foreign [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 336,323

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, History Documentary, Ancient History, Ancient History Documentary, Megapolis Documentary, Ancient Cities, Megapolis, Tikal, Tikal Documentary, Maya Documentary, Maya Civilisation, Maya Civilisation Documentary, Pre Columbian Era, Mesoamerica, Mesoamerican History

Id: 0CtvqFuG7dA

Length: 51min 44sec (3104 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023