Cast of stela Copan Honduras 1881 1894 Indian Maya America
The Pre-Columbian city today known as Copán is a locale in western Honduras, in the Copán Department, near to the Guatemalan border. It is the site of a major Maya kingdom of the Classic era (5th through 9th Centuries). The kingdom, anciently named Xukpi (Corner-Bundle), flourished from the 5th century AD to the early 9th century, with antecedents going back to at least the 2nd century AD. Its name is an apparent reference to the fact that it was situated at the far southern and eastern end of Maya territory. The nearby modern village of Copán Ruinas itself may have anciently been known as Oxwitik. The fertile Copán River valley was long a site of agriculture before the first known stone architecture was built in the region about the 9th century BC. A kingdom seems to have been established in Copán in 159. It grew into one of the most important Maya sites by the 5th century. Large monuments dated with hieroglyphic texts were erected in the city from 435 through 822. Xukpi was one of the more powerful Maya city states, a regional power, although it suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of its former vassal state Quirigua in 738, when the long-ruling Xukpi ruler Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil (18 Rabbit) was captured and beheaded by Quirigua's ruler K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Yopaat (Cauac Sky). Though Copán's rulers began to build monumental structures again within a few decades, both cities withered in the face of unsustainable population growth bringing about the depletion of natural resources, factors that brought several of the Classic-Age Maya city-states to their end. The area continued to be occupied after the last major ceremonial structures and royal monuments were erected, but the population declined in the 8th century - 9th century from perhaps over 20,000 in the city to less than 5,000. The ceremonial center was long abandoned and the surrounding valley home to only a few farming hamlets at the time of the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century.
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