We went to the rain forests of northern Guatemala to see the ruins of an ancient city and temple complex at Tikal. Before dawn we climbed to the top of the tallest temple where the peaks of the ziggurats are all that poke above the trees. The sun rose through the canopy mist and painted irregular shadows over the trees to wake up different parts of the forest. The first thing the male howler monkeys do in the morning is scream their lungs out in an eerie echoing wail through the sleeping jungle. Soon tropical birds start exchanging news and then then the insects join in. As the light of day filled in the we saw butterflies, spider monkeys, and even crocodiles. The density of life was greater than you find in a temperate forest, but not like the coral reef on land feeling of the Amazon jungle.

Started around 400BC, we missed Tikals’s peak at about 700AD. The Yucatan Peninsula, from southern Mexico through Guatemala and Belize was the heart of the ancient Mayan civilization. Never so much an empire as a collection of city states, they still managed to build enormous stone temples, cities and develop vast stretches of land for agriculture. The Mayans never formed an empire, but a collection of city states each with their own maize agricultural works. Around 900BC everyone abandoned the Mayan cities, more or less simultaneously never to return. No one knows why, but the sudden collapse of an over stressed agricultural system is a fashionable theory. Tikal was soon covered by the forest and stayed that way for almost a thousand years before nineteenth century Spanish missionaries rediscovered it.

The ruins themselves are made of one cubit blocks of limestone thickly cemented together. A cubic cubit is about the largest you can carve stone and still have men carry it. The ziggurats are uncomfortably steep. Unlike the honeycombed tombs of the Egyptians, these temples were often built over previous pyramids, meaning the entire structure is solid rock. They are positioned and oriented for astronomical purposes and helped compute the marvelously comprehensive Mayan calendar. The Mayans integrated solar, lunar and several planetary calendars to form possibly the most accurate calendar of the ancient world. The conquests of various city states is recorded in the temple’s hieroglyphic engravings.

You might recognize some of these temple pictures as George Lucas used Tikal in Star Wars as the exterior for the secret rebel base on Yavin.