To the beginning of the Christian Era, the Mayans coming from the north, occupied the zone that at the present time corresponds to the Mexican States of Tabasco, Chiapas and Campeche, the republics from Guatemala and Honduras and the denominated from Belize; bushy, warm and humid regions.

There, they developed a civilization whose more famous centers were the cities of Palenque, Quiriguá, Kopán and Tikal, whose ruins remained, until one century ago, buried in the forest. This period is known with the name of Old Empire. In the year 629, for reasons not very well-known, the Mayans emigrated to Yucatán, where they erected the new cities of Mayapán, Chitchen ltzá, Uxmal, Itzamná and many more. The New Empire finished with the Spanish conquest, in 1541.

The Mayan society considered the bases of society, the family clan. The clans assembled in tribes, and these constituted a federation with elective, civil and military bosses. The agriculture was their main occupation and the corn their primordial food. They stood out in the making of knitting cotton, feathers and vegetables fibers, and in the, of ceramic objects; they worked the gold and the copper and they obtained the brass. They traded actively by earth and by sea.

The art offers admirable expressions in the temples: pyramids truncated of four faces, flat or ladders, ladders that lead to a platform where is the altar, outdoors or inside a temper, and in the palaces, very vast, with piazzas and open lobbies sustained by serpentiform columns, and with facades of profuse ornamentation. The sculpture was used as ornamental element to the architecture, with their first floor reliefs; they also sculpted monolithic stone trails. The painting reproduced mithologycal, historical and common scenes. They traced the figures always of profile and without perspective. They cultivated the music and the dance. They possessed a writing, mixture of ideograms, syllabic and phonetic signs. They left, between other books, the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam, at the same time religious and historical.

They used a system of twentieth numeration; they possessed notable knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. They divided the year in eighteen months of twenty days, plus five supplementary days. Fifty two years formed one century; between the end of one and the beginning of following they inserted thirteen days, equivalent to our leaps.