Project Maya

"The Battle for the Soul of the Maya"? "Mourning the Maya"? "The Man who Murdered the Maya"?  I don't decide on a title until I'm uploading the fucking thing lol, it's just "Project X" for me with this stuff by this point.

To be clear, I'm editing a "Top and Bottom Games of the Year" video.  It's in the editing stage, and I expect it out in the next two weeks.  There's just little to say on it.  It's fun to share my opinions on games again, and, of course, it's nice to work on something low-stakes.  I often find that working on history videos improves my writing, and that has definitely been the case with "Project GOTY".

To the matter at hand:

Diego de Landa is the most fascinating man I've ever read about.  He would almost single-handedly erase the pre-columbian Mayan culture which had persisted for over 1000 years, most notably, through book and idol burnings.  In a single day he burned over 20 codices, and as of my writing this, there are only 4 pre-columbian Mayan codices in existence.

The sheer depth of that loss is what I want to communicate.  Civilization spreads and imposes itself upon whatever hunter-gatherer culture which preceded it.  The Maya are fascinating in that their influences are so few, and so isolated.

The Greeks got their alphabet from the Pheonicians, their currency from Lydians, their sculpting from Egyptians.   The Greeks would then reinterpret these things, and build upon them.  I say this not to deprive the Greeks of their accomplishments, which are many, but rather to illustrate that the ancient Mediterranean (and therefore Europe later) was a product of the fertile crescent.  Every human learns what it means to be human from the human which preceded him, and as a consequence, we all live and die in the shadow of Babylon.

Except for the Maya.

They had a written language, mathematics, cities, grand artworks and stories, and Diego de Landa erased more than we could imagine.  A culture can be isolated or it can be accomplished, only the Maya were both.  The subject is intimidating, but I hope to investigate in "Project Maya" this man who both erased an ancient culture, yet also preserved it.  To quote William Gates: 

“ninety-nine hundredths of our present knowledge [of the Maya] is at base derived from what [Diego de Landa] told us, it is an equally safe statement that at that Auto de fé of ’62, he burned ninety-nine times as much knowledge of Maya history and sciences as he has given us in his book.”

"Undertaker, Murderer, Anthropologist, Christian, Monster, Man, Animal,: Diego de Landa."

Maybe that's a title?