The state of Puebla became their chosen ground, and quite soon after the above achievement they undertook the building of the famous tower of Cholula, which is so closely allied in its traditional history with the Tower of Babel. The first great exploit of the Olmec chiefs, the destruction of the giants, was performed at some distance from their earliest settlement. Palenque, the oldest American city, was built by tbe Olmecs. The Olmecs passed from Mexico to Guatemala, which they conquered. This cultural influence was to have significant and widespread consequences. For lack of a better name, these mysterious artificers have been called the Olmecs, an Aztec word meaning "people of the regionof rubber." At a later period their art, techniques andreligious ideas influenced a number of groups which had migrated from the distant northern shores of the Pacific Ocean. A number of extraordinary artifacts have been found there, along with the oldest calendar inscription yet discovered. Perhaps the earliest cultural ferment of any importance in pre-Columbian Mexico took place on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The most ancient architectural remains in Mexico, indicating the presence of ceremonial centers, date from about five hundred years before Christ, a time when the Old World had already heard the words of the Biblical prophets, and when the first pre-Socratic philosophers had already spoken in Greece. The artifacts, which push back the date for the first New World writings about 350 years, challenge previously held notions about the earliest of Mesoamerican peoples who developed the first system of written communication. The writings were produced by the Olmecs, a pre-Mayan civilization, and are estimated to date from 650 BC. The earliest form of writing ever found in the New World consists of glyphs carved on a cylindrical seal used to make imprints and on greenstone plaque fragments found near La Venta in Tabasco, Mexico, in the Gulf Coast region. The Olmecs were the first known peoples in Mesoamerica to have a state-level political structure, and writing is a way to communicate power and influence. The Olmecs, appear between 1300 BC and 400 BC, and are considered the Formative period of Mesoamerican history. The Olmecs were the earliest complex civilization in Mesoamerica, flourishing along the Gulf Coast lowlands of what is now Mexico from 1200 to 400 BCE and building a society dominated by an elite group employing a system of governance known as divine kingship. It is very likely that, contrary to common archaeological belief, domestication of several important new world food plants occurred in a lowland rather than highland context. The earliest Middle American civilization, the Olmec, appeared in the lowland tropical Gulf Coast region of Tabasco. The fabled Olmec sculptors of Mexico's colossal stone heads were the region's first dominant civilization, a "mother culture" that set the pace for emerging cultural complexity in the region over three millennia ago. While other ancient settlements made pottery with symbols and designs in the Olmec style, only the early Olmec themselves at San Lorenzo on Mexico's Gulf Coast exported pottery with the distinctive carved designs. They built cities, developed an early calendar and used hieroglyphics as their written language in the area surrounding present day Veracruz.įor decades, a debate has raged in anthropological circles between the mother-culture hypothesis and the theory that the Olmec were just one of several "sister" cultures that developed at the same time. The Olmecs were the first high civilization to develop in Mesoamerica (the fertile region that runs through the south of Mexico and into Central America) from 1200 to 100 BC. The most famous of the Pre-Columbian civilizations in Mexico, the Aztecs and the Maya, were themselves preceded by a large and powerful civilization that influenced their way of life.
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