Dozens of Maya elite are buried within Tikal's temples.
The ancient Maya city of Tikal, in modern-day Guatemala, flourished between roughly 600 B.C. and A.D. 900. Starting out as a modest series of hamlets, it became a great Maya city-state with more than two dozen major pyramids.
Like people in other Maya cities, Tikal's residents used a system of glyptic writing inscribed both on stone and on a perishable material made from the bark of trees . Scholars have been able to decipher the writing, which, along with the city's archaeological remains, have helped them to reconstruct much of Tikal's past.
One notable example of Teotihuacan's influence occurred on Sept. 13, 379, when a ruler named Siyaj K'ak' is recorded to have ascended at Tikal. He is depicted in carvings wearing feathers and shells and holding an atlatl — features that are typically associated with Teotihuacan, wrote Montgomery. This may signify that he was from Teotihuacan or strongly influenced or supported by them when he became king.
Temples I & IIIn addition to the twin pyramid complexes, Tikal's rulers also built"temple" pyramids — structures that often marked the burial place of a ruler. Two of them, known today as Temples I and II, face each other at the center of the city, with Tikal's grand plaza sitting between them. The North Acropolis appears to have been started sometime between 350 B.C. and 200 B.C. and was rebuilt several times throughout the city's history, wrote Herbert Stanley Loten, a professor of architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, in a study published in the book"Tikal: Dynasties, Foreigners & Affairs of State " . The acropolis covers more than 2.5 acres .
On the east side of the complex is a"reviewing stand" that overlooks an I-shaped ball court that has been excavated. The ball game, which was popular across parts of the Western Hemisphere at the time, was played with a rubber ball, although the exact rules of the game are unknown.
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