/lit/ - Literature

>>18818366
I never did a full dump on it, but you can see a shorter one here: desuarchive.org/his/thread/5506706/#5528682 and a longer version I never finished here: desuarchive.org/k/thread/39546199/#39557233

There's been additional major findings on Tikal's water mangement system (see pic) since I typed those up btw, such as a filtration system

Also, it's Aztec, not Maya, and I don't think I touch on it too much in those links, but IMO Texcotzinco/Texcozingo is the single coolest example of Mesoamerican waterworks. It was a retreat for royalty from Texcoco, it's watering systems allegedly built by the city's most famous king, Nezahualcoyotl, who built a number of other aqueduct and dike systems and wrote a great deal of poetry, some examples allegedly written by him survive today

It sourced water from a spring in the Sierra Nevada mountain range around 5 miles away, with the aquaduct that transported the water at times reaching 150 feet above ground. This brought it a hill where it flowed into a series of branching channels and pools to regulate the flow speed, with the water then travelling over another aquaduct over a large gorge between the peaks of that hill and Texcotzinco itself, wherin the aquaduct formed a circuit around it's peak, the water flowing into various shrines and displays, and being directed into artificial waterfalls to water the plants in the gardens at the hill's base, with different sections of the gardens mimicing different biomes with their specific plant life

A cut down description of the gardens and the shrines:

>These parks and gardens were adorned with rich...ornamented alcazars (summerhouses) with their fountains...canals... lakes and their bathing-places and wonderful mazes, where he had had a great variety of flowers...and trees of all kinds, foreign and brought from distant parts... and the water intended for the fountains, pools and channels for watering the flowers and trees...came from its spring: to bring it, it had been necessary to build strong, high, cemented walls of unbelievable size, going from one mountain to the other with an aqueduct on top which came out at the highest part of the park...The water gathered first in a reservoir... with historical bas-reliefs, and ...flowed via two main canals...running through the gardens and filling basins, where sculptured stelae were reflected in the surface. Coming out of one of these basins, the water ‘leapt...on the rocks, falling into a garden planted with all the scented flowers of the Hot Lands...it seemed to rain, so... violently was the water shattered upon these rocks. Beyond this...there were the bathing-places, cut in the living rock... The whole of the rest of this park was planted... with all kinds of trees and scented flowers, and there were all kinds of birds apart from those that the king had brought...all these birds sang harmoniously and to such degree that one could not hear oneself speak

>>15172155
>Is there anything you want to know?

Stuff like how cities were generally laid out, average population sizes, site expanses, and how complex/involved any irragative, freshwater, and drainage/anti flood systems were or anything else involving water mangement systems. If you know stuff about adminstrative structure and complexity or any intellectuslism that'd be fun too.

I do a lot of posts and infodumps on Mesoamerican history (Aztec, Maya,. Olmec, etc) and while I think pissing contests about if X or Y was more advanced are dumb, invariably people try to make comparisons and I'd like to be able to give more educated and informed replies: My knowledge on egypt is pretty surface level, more or less just what I learned in school and from general history reading.

As an example, In the context of the sort of disscusions I mention for example, people will often label Mesoamerican socities as "stone age", and while I think the entire "Age" label; system is dumb for this sort of thing, I often end up making a rebuttal pointing out that (to my knowledge) the largest Bronze age city was Uruk and it covered 4 square kilometers and had 40,000 people vs Mesoamerican cities in both the Mesoamerican Classical and Postclassical periods where cities got much larger and more populated then that (albiet of less density as a result): But I'd like to verify that Uruk was indeed the largest Bronze age city and that there weren't larger ones in egypt at the time. Again, similar comparsions get made either by others or by me for those other societial elements I mention above such as water mangenemtnn systems, goverment complexity, intellectual practices, etc.

Again, I want to stress though that I'm asking not because I want to be able to go HA THE MAYA WERE BETTER or anything like that, but just to be able to make better comparsions to other people about them and how they compare to other socities. Ideally, I wouldn't need to, but unfortunately it's necessary as a result of most other people's ignorance abnout mesoamerican socities at best requring me to compare them to other cultures just as an example, or at worst to refute somebody else claiming that they are barbarian savages.