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Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico

75 points by diodorus 4y ago

simple10 4y ago
I really wish ancient sports would make a comeback. I would give an arm and leg to spectate at an ancient sports demo event. Sort of Renaissance fair meets Olympics vibe.
- koolba 4y ago
  The incessant commercialization is a limiting factor as well. Getting rid of uniform logos and going back to the days where all the competitors were naked and covered in oil would certainly boost interest.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    It sounds like they had uniforms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame > The usual dress for players is known from iconographic and figural findings. These show leather protection mainly at the hips and the chest, but sometimes also at the knees and the arms, though very seldom at the feet. The clothing was used to protect against the impact of the ball. The protected parts of the body were used to strike the ball. Some players would wear head dresses (like deer heads) for ritual reasons.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      ...oh, but looking at some visual depictions, it looks like those uniforms didn't cover a whole lot! (Sorry, I was past the edit window.)
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I have been thinking that having the competitors being naked would solve lot of issues related to equipment and equality. Specially in sports like field, swimming and why not in football either.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  For an arm and a leg we’ll let you fight the gladiator!
  - simple10 4y ago
    As long as there are lions in the pit.
- dmn322 4y ago
  Saw some little youtube documentary about a group in mexico trying to resurrect the ball game. I have a feeling it would be tough to weigh where to keep things to 100% to what we know vs. filling in the blanks to make it more entertaining. Seems to have been going on during the olmec period too which would indicate at least around 3000 years of play... lots of different variations over that time. Tough to decide which one to pick.
  - b112 4y ago
    Tough to decide which one to pick. This is what makes me very sad, for those trying to recover their culture. For example, there are many Native Canadians trying to recover their culture and language, their history. And I wish them all success! But at the same time, I often see such discussions talking as if that culture was static. Unchangeable. "This is how we did it", from elders, which barely remember anything other than the fading memories of ther great grandparents. Instead, I hope that such culture can be brought back, but with an understanding of "what if such culture was not wiped out, but instead, stayed alive and existed through change to modern times". An example would be food, and dance, and music, and stories. All of these would transition to modern mediums, and tools, and yet, still stem from the past, while simultaneously being influenced by the widening world, and expanded trade, and so on. I think the greatest loss is not the way things were, past culture, because everyone loses that, humans always change, regardless of technology. Instead, the greatest loss is what could have been today. And I would love to see what could have been.
    - dmn322 4y ago
      I agree but unfortunately those things are lost and such a revival is impossible. The best we can do is try to deeply understand what was lost and why they were lost and how to prevent similar loss in the future. Unfortunately we just repeat the same patterns because it's logically impossible for it to ever be a pressing problem for those with power and representation, so they're never motivated to solve it.
- tragomaskhalos 4y ago
  They used to flood the Colisseum and re-enact naval battles - would pay good money to see that tbf.
- raddan 4y ago
  Agreed, and more generally, I would love to know what life was like for these people. We have an advanced civilization that was almost totally wiped out. Millions of people living their lives independently of western civilization. I’ve toyed with the idea of plotting the era and location of popular TV and movie narratives. I think you’d find that most of them are very narrowly focused on a handful of places and times. This may not be a recipe for successful TV, but I would love to watch a TV show about the Maya or the Olmec or the Inca (or really any of the pre-Colombian indigenous people of the Americas). Like all people, I’m sure that these people had dramatic lives, but it would be all the more interesting because it would be a totally different culture. When you think about what modern civilization has inherited from these people—-agriculture especially—-it’s a shame that we don’t know more about them.
  - mdiesel 4y ago
    I guess it's more difficult to make characters with radically different lives and concerns be relatable. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but not many series are going for high effort right now when it's so easy to make money shipping a rehash of a formula proven to make money.
  - jchallis 4y ago
    Both Maya and the Three and Elena of Avalor had long subplots on Aztec, Maya and Inca characters (human and god).
- jgtrosh 4y ago
  This specific type of ball game is widely known and advertised in Mexico, to the point that the following type of events is organised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvQjgC9sIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvQjgC9sIY But as said in another comment, it's just an interpretation, it's really hard to tell if it's anything like the original intent of the sport/ritual. --- Here's an optimistic video about a different modern approach to what is known of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYJxng6i4NQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYJxng6i4NQ
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    And in a thousand years historians will look back at baseball, a well-known sports game with ritual overtones. The team known roughly as 'the bloody foot-mittens' is known to have been cursed by the gods for over half a century.
- AndrewOMartin 4y ago
  You might like The Moche Toss. An ancient Peruvian sport/ceremony in which participants use atlatls and darts to launch feathered objects into the air, and then try to ensnare them before they hit the ground. It has been filmed in slow motion in this beautiful video. https://youtube.com/watch?v=k99dR1UTqPM https://youtube.com/watch?v=k99dR1UTqPM
  - simple10 4y ago
    Cool! Reminds me of the "most dangerous game" of the 80's, Lawn Darts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khHzGqgO2Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khHzGqgO2Bw
- waihtis 4y ago
  I've had visiting a calcio storico event in my bucket list for awhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino
vijayr02 4y ago
Apparently, the score was: Chelsea - Ajax 4-4 Happy weekend everybody! :)
progre 4y ago
Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?
- cdot2 4y ago
  Humans do a lot of stuff for ritual purposes
  - progre 4y ago
    Yeah, but humans do lots of stuff just for fun too. It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"
    - secondcoming 4y ago
      I believe it's that fact that it has survived for so long that it may have been treated with greater care and build quality than an everyday item. Of course it could have been an everyday object.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Everything new can get that stamp too: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...
  - progre 4y ago
    This is satire
- zitsarethecure 4y ago
  I once went to an Ohio State football pre-game show where the band played and they had the players march through into the main stadium. Everyone was wearing the team colors, every song they played had these hand gestures and words you had to do and say along with the music, and there were all sorts of odd seemingly out of nowhere cheers and exclamations by the fans, the players and the various highly dressed up musicians and officials. If an alien species came down and observed it, I would be surprised if they didn't say this kind of thing had "ritual undertones".
thewildginger 4y ago
The real interest is where it was found. There's so many sites that are not able to be excavated due to the limit of efficiency of the Mexican government and a very select few universities, after the pilfering of colleges in the northern hemisphere
JoeDaDude 4y ago
Every time I hear about something ancient being discovered that has writing on it, I immediately ask What does it say?! I realize it may take a lot of time and effort to decipher these things, but I think we have a pretty good handle on most Maya writing.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Interesting that it was found at Chichen Itza, where millions of people visit a year. An escavation was started there to go even deeper than the pyramid base, but that was paused due to lack of funding. Now you just see a moat on one side that hints at what lies beneath. The tour guide had said that the pyramid is actually constructed on fill above a sink hole.
- clcaev 4y ago
  The Yucatán Peninsula has limestone shelves, as the entire area was a sea floor in primordial times. Holes in these shelves that provide access to an enormous aquifer are called cenote. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenote
  - tough 4y ago
    Bathing inside a cenote is an out of this world experience
    - clcaev 4y ago
      The Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá is also littered with jade fragments, which were burned and then dropped into the water by ancient inhabitants. When scorching jade hits the water it shatters, making sound that reverberates thought the ritual complex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cenote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cenote
    - tristanMatthias 4y ago
      So is scuba diving them! Down you go into a going black hole, swimming through amazing caves (don’t let go of the rope!), the out the other side in a different cenote. Surreal experience
AndrewOMartin 4y ago
Does anyone have a source in how this can be used as a scoreboard? I only ask such a specific question because it seems like a very specific object to recognize it as. I assume there would be some indicator placed next to a symbol around the edge but was a bit disappointed to see nothing describing it in the article. Maybe too obvious to state?
pettycashstash2 4y ago
We just returned from Cancun, where we toured the ruins of Tulum. The maya apparently had folded books, which out of thousands only 3 remain. To see them, you have to travel to Madrid, Paris or Dresden. Apparently the rest were burned by Spanish when they arrived in late 1580. Somehow I was overwhelmed with a huge sense of loss when I heard this. Knowledge from around 3000 bc to 1580 or so just burned.
- nopenotthat 4y ago
  > Knowledge from around 3000 bc to 1580 or so just burned If it makes you feel any better, it’s likely a LOT less time that that. They didn’t develop their complex social culture until ~750BC & the earliest sculptural examples of Maya script are ~300BC. It’s extremely unlikely any books the Spanish burned dated back until then but that’s the likely earliest they would have been. Still a massive cultural crime & attempted genocide tho
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Actual texts might only span ~1900 years, but if they are anything like European cultures their texts also contain written recordings of oral tradition. That would extend the time window, though with decreased accuracy.
- otras 4y ago
  > We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa
- akiselev 4y ago
  Same with the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, who kept meticulous bureaucratic records. We know quite a bit about them thanks to the friars who got to see a lot of the records while Cortes' expedition were guests (/captors) of Montezuma. They all burned during the final battle for Tenochtitlan.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
More and higher resolution images, including something highlighting the figures: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexicos-chichen-itza-archaeologists-discover-mayan-scoreboard-2023-04-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexicos-chichen-itza-... INAH's release: https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/con-su-texto-jeroglifico-maya-completo-descubren-en-chichen-itza-un-marcador-de-juego-de-pelota https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/con-su-texto-jeroglifico-m...
TheBlight 4y ago
How/where specifically did they find it in such a high-traffic tourist destination? What does it say?
bane 4y ago
Anybody in the Southwest of the U.S. may be interested to know that the northernmost known ballcourt for this game is at the Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, an absolutely incredible and very under visited location. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=41696 https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=41696
mannyv 4y ago
Those stone carvers must be fast, since they were presumably doing it in realtime. /s Seriously, it's not a scoreboard.
nateb2022 4y ago
This was a disturbingly violent game, in which the losing team was often decapitated. Ritual killing was a big part of Mayan culture and tradition. According to Atlas Obscura, The Aztecs continued this proud tradition of loser‐lose‐all, as many vases and sculptures depict the inevitable decapitation of the losing team. There are even some depictions of ball players playing with the heads of the losers in place of a ball. Whether this actually occurred is up to artistic speculation. The Spanish who observed the game reported horrendous injuries to those who played it — deep bruising requiring lancing, broken bones, and even death when a player was hit in the head or by an unprotected bit by the heavy ball. (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/meso-american-baseball https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/meso-american-baseball)

75 points by diodorus 4y ago

I really wish ancient sports would make a comeback. I would give an arm and leg to spectate at an ancient sports demo event. Sort of Renaissance fair meets Olympics vibe.

koolba 4y ago
The incessant commercialization is a limiting factor as well. Getting rid of uniform logos and going back to the days where all the competitors were naked and covered in oil would certainly boost interest.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  It sounds like they had uniforms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame > The usual dress for players is known from iconographic and figural findings. These show leather protection mainly at the hips and the chest, but sometimes also at the knees and the arms, though very seldom at the feet. The clothing was used to protect against the impact of the ball. The protected parts of the body were used to strike the ball. Some players would wear head dresses (like deer heads) for ritual reasons.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    ...oh, but looking at some visual depictions, it looks like those uniforms didn't cover a whole lot! (Sorry, I was past the edit window.)
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I have been thinking that having the competitors being naked would solve lot of issues related to equipment and equality. Specially in sports like field, swimming and why not in football either.
dwighttk 4y ago
For an arm and a leg we’ll let you fight the gladiator!
- simple10 4y ago
  As long as there are lions in the pit.
dmn322 4y ago
Saw some little youtube documentary about a group in mexico trying to resurrect the ball game. I have a feeling it would be tough to weigh where to keep things to 100% to what we know vs. filling in the blanks to make it more entertaining. Seems to have been going on during the olmec period too which would indicate at least around 3000 years of play... lots of different variations over that time. Tough to decide which one to pick.
- b112 4y ago
  Tough to decide which one to pick. This is what makes me very sad, for those trying to recover their culture. For example, there are many Native Canadians trying to recover their culture and language, their history. And I wish them all success! But at the same time, I often see such discussions talking as if that culture was static. Unchangeable. "This is how we did it", from elders, which barely remember anything other than the fading memories of ther great grandparents. Instead, I hope that such culture can be brought back, but with an understanding of "what if such culture was not wiped out, but instead, stayed alive and existed through change to modern times". An example would be food, and dance, and music, and stories. All of these would transition to modern mediums, and tools, and yet, still stem from the past, while simultaneously being influenced by the widening world, and expanded trade, and so on. I think the greatest loss is not the way things were, past culture, because everyone loses that, humans always change, regardless of technology. Instead, the greatest loss is what could have been today. And I would love to see what could have been.
  - dmn322 4y ago
    I agree but unfortunately those things are lost and such a revival is impossible. The best we can do is try to deeply understand what was lost and why they were lost and how to prevent similar loss in the future. Unfortunately we just repeat the same patterns because it's logically impossible for it to ever be a pressing problem for those with power and representation, so they're never motivated to solve it.
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
They used to flood the Colisseum and re-enact naval battles - would pay good money to see that tbf.
raddan 4y ago
Agreed, and more generally, I would love to know what life was like for these people. We have an advanced civilization that was almost totally wiped out. Millions of people living their lives independently of western civilization. I’ve toyed with the idea of plotting the era and location of popular TV and movie narratives. I think you’d find that most of them are very narrowly focused on a handful of places and times. This may not be a recipe for successful TV, but I would love to watch a TV show about the Maya or the Olmec or the Inca (or really any of the pre-Colombian indigenous people of the Americas). Like all people, I’m sure that these people had dramatic lives, but it would be all the more interesting because it would be a totally different culture. When you think about what modern civilization has inherited from these people—-agriculture especially—-it’s a shame that we don’t know more about them.
- mdiesel 4y ago
  I guess it's more difficult to make characters with radically different lives and concerns be relatable. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but not many series are going for high effort right now when it's so easy to make money shipping a rehash of a formula proven to make money.
- jchallis 4y ago
  Both Maya and the Three and Elena of Avalor had long subplots on Aztec, Maya and Inca characters (human and god).
jgtrosh 4y ago
This specific type of ball game is widely known and advertised in Mexico, to the point that the following type of events is organised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvQjgC9sIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvQjgC9sIY But as said in another comment, it's just an interpretation, it's really hard to tell if it's anything like the original intent of the sport/ritual. --- Here's an optimistic video about a different modern approach to what is known of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYJxng6i4NQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYJxng6i4NQ
- sdenton4 4y ago
  And in a thousand years historians will look back at baseball, a well-known sports game with ritual overtones. The team known roughly as 'the bloody foot-mittens' is known to have been cursed by the gods for over half a century.
AndrewOMartin 4y ago
You might like The Moche Toss. An ancient Peruvian sport/ceremony in which participants use atlatls and darts to launch feathered objects into the air, and then try to ensnare them before they hit the ground. It has been filmed in slow motion in this beautiful video. https://youtube.com/watch?v=k99dR1UTqPM https://youtube.com/watch?v=k99dR1UTqPM
- simple10 4y ago
  Cool! Reminds me of the "most dangerous game" of the 80's, Lawn Darts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khHzGqgO2Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khHzGqgO2Bw
waihtis 4y ago
I've had visiting a calcio storico event in my bucket list for awhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino

vijayr02 4y ago

Apparently, the score was: Chelsea - Ajax 4-4 Happy weekend everybody! :)

progre 4y ago

Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?

cdot2 4y ago
Humans do a lot of stuff for ritual purposes
- progre 4y ago
  Yeah, but humans do lots of stuff just for fun too. It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    I believe it's that fact that it has survived for so long that it may have been treated with greater care and build quality than an everyday item. Of course it could have been an everyday object.
rippercushions 4y ago
Everything new can get that stamp too: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...
- progre 4y ago
  This is satire
zitsarethecure 4y ago
I once went to an Ohio State football pre-game show where the band played and they had the players march through into the main stadium. Everyone was wearing the team colors, every song they played had these hand gestures and words you had to do and say along with the music, and there were all sorts of odd seemingly out of nowhere cheers and exclamations by the fans, the players and the various highly dressed up musicians and officials. If an alien species came down and observed it, I would be surprised if they didn't say this kind of thing had "ritual undertones".

thewildginger 4y ago

The real interest is where it was found. There's so many sites that are not able to be excavated due to the limit of efficiency of the Mexican government and a very select few universities, after the pilfering of colleges in the northern hemisphere

JoeDaDude 4y ago

Every time I hear about something ancient being discovered that has writing on it, I immediately ask What does it say?! I realize it may take a lot of time and effort to decipher these things, but I think we have a pretty good handle on most Maya writing.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Interesting that it was found at Chichen Itza, where millions of people visit a year. An escavation was started there to go even deeper than the pyramid base, but that was paused due to lack of funding. Now you just see a moat on one side that hints at what lies beneath. The tour guide had said that the pyramid is actually constructed on fill above a sink hole.

clcaev 4y ago
The Yucatán Peninsula has limestone shelves, as the entire area was a sea floor in primordial times. Holes in these shelves that provide access to an enormous aquifer are called cenote. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenote
- tough 4y ago
  Bathing inside a cenote is an out of this world experience
  - clcaev 4y ago
    The Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá is also littered with jade fragments, which were burned and then dropped into the water by ancient inhabitants. When scorching jade hits the water it shatters, making sound that reverberates thought the ritual complex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cenote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cenote
  - tristanMatthias 4y ago
    So is scuba diving them! Down you go into a going black hole, swimming through amazing caves (don’t let go of the rope!), the out the other side in a different cenote. Surreal experience

AndrewOMartin 4y ago

Does anyone have a source in how this can be used as a scoreboard? I only ask such a specific question because it seems like a very specific object to recognize it as. I assume there would be some indicator placed next to a symbol around the edge but was a bit disappointed to see nothing describing it in the article. Maybe too obvious to state?

pettycashstash2 4y ago

We just returned from Cancun, where we toured the ruins of Tulum. The maya apparently had folded books, which out of thousands only 3 remain. To see them, you have to travel to Madrid, Paris or Dresden. Apparently the rest were burned by Spanish when they arrived in late 1580. Somehow I was overwhelmed with a huge sense of loss when I heard this. Knowledge from around 3000 bc to 1580 or so just burned.

nopenotthat 4y ago
> Knowledge from around 3000 bc to 1580 or so just burned If it makes you feel any better, it’s likely a LOT less time that that. They didn’t develop their complex social culture until ~750BC & the earliest sculptural examples of Maya script are ~300BC. It’s extremely unlikely any books the Spanish burned dated back until then but that’s the likely earliest they would have been. Still a massive cultural crime & attempted genocide tho
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Actual texts might only span ~1900 years, but if they are anything like European cultures their texts also contain written recordings of oral tradition. That would extend the time window, though with decreased accuracy.
otras 4y ago
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa
akiselev 4y ago
Same with the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, who kept meticulous bureaucratic records. We know quite a bit about them thanks to the friars who got to see a lot of the records while Cortes' expedition were guests (/captors) of Montezuma. They all burned during the final battle for Tenochtitlan.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

More and higher resolution images, including something highlighting the figures: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexicos-chichen-itza-archaeologists-discover-mayan-scoreboard-2023-04-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexicos-chichen-itza-... INAH's release: https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/con-su-texto-jeroglifico-maya-completo-descubren-en-chichen-itza-un-marcador-de-juego-de-pelota https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/con-su-texto-jeroglifico-m...

TheBlight 4y ago

How/where specifically did they find it in such a high-traffic tourist destination? What does it say?

bane 4y ago

Anybody in the Southwest of the U.S. may be interested to know that the northernmost known ballcourt for this game is at the Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, an absolutely incredible and very under visited location. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=41696 https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=41696

mannyv 4y ago

Those stone carvers must be fast, since they were presumably doing it in realtime. /s Seriously, it's not a scoreboard.

nateb2022 4y ago

This was a disturbingly violent game, in which the losing team was often decapitated. Ritual killing was a big part of Mayan culture and tradition. According to Atlas Obscura, The Aztecs continued this proud tradition of loser‐lose‐all, as many vases and sculptures depict the inevitable decapitation of the losing team. There are even some depictions of ball players playing with the heads of the losers in place of a ball. Whether this actually occurred is up to artistic speculation. The Spanish who observed the game reported horrendous injuries to those who played it — deep bruising requiring lancing, broken bones, and even death when a player was hit in the head or by an unprotected bit by the heavy ball. (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/meso-american-baseball https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/meso-american-baseball)