The Maya Ballgame

The Ancients - History Hit

This episode of The Ancients explores the ancient Mesoamerican ballgame, focusing on its origins, cultural significance, and evolution across

Key takeaways

• The Mesoamerican ballgame is one of the oldest known team sports, with origins dating back over 3,000 years to the Olmec civilization.
• Ball courts were widespread across Mesoamerica and served as centers for ritual, politics, warfare, and religious ceremonies.

Main topics

• Origins of the Mesoamerican ballgame in Olmec culture
• Archaeological evidence from ball courts across Maya cities

Notable quotes

"The ballgame was very popular everywhere in the Maya world and beyond. Every century we find them, including Contact." - Dr. Ed Barnhart

Conclusion

The Mesoamerican ballgame was far more than a sport—it was a sacred, political, and social institution woven into the fabric

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 4 (0:34) Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (1:13) Thank you. Bye. Speaker 5 (1:31) Copan, Mesoamerica, more than 2,000 years ago. An excitable crowd gathers around a packed earthen and stone ball court. Two Maya teams are preparing to face off. Their game plans are simple. Use their hips to keep a heavy bouncing rubber ball in constant motion and strike it cleanly down the central alley of the court past their opponents to score. To win. We know this sport as the ball game. Across the vast region of Mesoamerica for countless generations, the ballgame stood as a cultural cornerstone, woven into the fabric of Mesoamerican religion, politics, art and warfare. From early highland and coastal settlements to great metropolises like Chichen Itza and later the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the ballgame was a constant. So what was it actually like to play this extraordinary ancient sport? What do we know? Why did it become so important to Mesoamerican societies? And could losing really mean death? Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And today, as another football season kicks off here in the UK, I'm talking to Dr. Ed Barnhart, archaeologist, explorer and founder of the Maya Exploration Centre, about this ancient precursor to our modern-day ball sports. Together, we're travelling back thousands of years to uncover the story of the ball game, both in the Maya world and elsewhere in Mesoamerica. We'll discover how it was played, how it evolved, and why a simple rubber ball became so deeply connected to the lives and beliefs of entire Mesoamerican cultures. Let's get into it. Speaker 5 (3:23) Ed, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Well, the pleasure's mine. I'm a big fan. And can we say, I mean, to talk about the Maya ball game, I mean, can we say that this is the oldest known team sport in the world? Speaker 1 (3:35) Well, team sport might be difficult, but ball team sport for sure. Of course, you know, the Greeks had their Olympic sporting events that were very military and they didn't involve a ball. We see things in rock art that makes it seem like people are competing in some ways. But in terms of a ball, especially a rubber ball, absolutely. We had some versions that were in China. We had some versions that were in Persia that were balls. But those were like 500 BCE. The Maya ball game goes at least a thousand years earlier. Wow. So that's how far back Speaker 5 (4:15) in time we can go. And do we have any ideas when the Maya ball game enjoys its height? Oh, its Speaker 1 (4:21) height is Speaker 5 (4:22) probably Speaker 1 (4:22) the classic period, though, I mean, the ball game was very popular everywhere in the Maya world and beyond. Every century we find them, including Contact. Creation stories involve the ball game. They are crazy for it. And you Speaker 5 (4:42) also mentioned something which seems... Really important to highlight straight away, Ed, and we'll cover as this chat goes on. We say the Maya ballgame first and foremost, but actually we should be thinking much beyond just what is known as kind of the classic, the ancient Maya, should we? Speaker 1 (4:57) Absolutely. Every culture that we know of in Mesoamerica played the ballgame. Speaker 5 (5:03) Well, let's focus on the Maya first of all. And you mentioned that kind of the classic Maya period potentially being the high point. And can you describe, can you give us an idea of Mesoamerica at that time? Where was the Maya civilization located and whereabouts should we be talking? Speaker 1 (5:19) Well, we're talking about a period, if we're talking about their classic form, we're talking about 400 to 800, give or take a century. You could read 10 textbooks and get 10 different ranges there. But the Maya are essentially, their heartland was and still is Guatemala. So the entire country of Guatemala was and is Maya. And then Maya civilization goes up all the way through the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It goes over into the first states of Mexico that connect to Guatemala, which are Chiapas and Tabasco. Then further west from there, it becomes another culture. It's the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs. And then down towards Central America, you got them about... halfway through Honduras before the Lenka civilization takes over. Speaker 5 (6:13) Do we call it all Maya because they all share a culture, or should we just be thinking of one kingdom covering that whole area? Speaker 1 (6:21) Oh, definitely not a kingdom. I mean, at best, they were independent city-states like the Greeks were. But they are a civilization because they share a number of key things. religion, their calendar system, their writing system, and of course, the ballgame. Speaker 5 (6:40) And the ballgame, exactly. So when exploring more about the ballgame, if we want to learn more about it, for you as an archaeologist, Ed, what lines of source material, what lines of evidence do you have available? Speaker 1 (6:52) Oh, we have a lot of things. I mean, we have hundreds of ball courts that we've excavated. We have the contact period documents. One of the only buildings in Mesoamerica that we always are sure we know what it is, is the ball court. A lot of other things, even pyramids, we say flaky things like, that's a temple where rituals were performed. But we know what happened in the ball court, and they're easy to spot because there's a very particular construction of a Mesoamerican ball court. Speaker 5 (7:25) So the archaeology itself, do you also have any kind of written texts, any inscriptions? Can that help us at all? Speaker 1 (7:31) Well, there's tons of art that shows them kind of in a freeze frame, you know, diving for the ball and what the ball court looks like and spectators. We get a lot of color there. And the hyperglyphs do speak about it, but I don't know of any text that actually went on about the specifics of a game. We get its name. We know how central it is to their mythology. But in terms of explaining it, sometimes we don't get that much. The Maya are very prescribed about what they write about. And unfortunately, we have very little in the way of prose. Gosh, Speaker 5 (8:11) I apologize then. I'm going to ask first and foremost, I mean, how much do we actually know about the ballgame and how it actually was played? I mean, Ed, what is the limits of our knowledge around this and the actual playing of the game? Speaker 1 (8:23) Well, we have great... Spanish accounts of how the Aztecs were playing the game and people in the 1500s. The caution for us archaeologists is that we know that the game was being played literally 3,000 years before that. So is the one we identify and say, you know, the 500s in Maya Tikal the same game that was witnessed by the Spanish in the 1500s? We have reason to believe that it was pretty similar. I personally am always thinking to myself, you know, look at the typical schoolyard court in the back. How many different games do they play there? They play football, baseball, soccer, football, do you? But there's, you know, I worry that we oversimplify our. quest of understanding the game. But if you want to get into the rules that we knew from the Aztecs, there's a lot about that. I Speaker 5 (9:24) think, shall we start with that just to give us a sense of like how, at least from the texts that survived, like the Spanish texts and so on, give us an idea of how this ballgame was played. But with the caution that you've already mentioned, Ed, the fact that that's maybe a thousand years later than the Maya ballgame and trying to figure out what are the kernels of truth, you know, what are the elements that were probably there, you know, many centuries before. Speaker 1 (9:45) The court gives us a lot of information to begin with. We have this thin lane and then two out-of-bound markers. If you were looking at it from the sky above, it would look like a big capital I. And the action happens in the neck of that I. And there's a center line on the court. The Spanish recorded that the Aztecs would paint a line across that so you knew where midcourt was. In all the Maya ones, we find a marker right there, a stone marker. So there's one thing already. We know they were teams and we know there was a half line like tennis or volleyball. So those are the courts that back the capitals of the eye are the backfield. If the ball goes out there, it's a point for the other team. So crossing the line is important. They can't use their hands or their feet. Really? Wow. No, that's tough. And it's also, the ball is, a typical ball is about six inches in diameter. It can be slightly larger, but these are solid balls. These are not like our basketball or soccer balls. If they hit you, they hurt. And so they wear pads. They have something around their waist they call a yoke. And they have, sometimes we can see them pads on their shoulders and their knees. They're allowed to hit it with their knees and their shoulders and their chest. And the best shot is with your butt. You swing your hip out and pow. But they bounce much harder than our regular balls because they're essentially big super balls. So because they're solid, these things bounce very, very high. Speaker 5 (11:30) So do we have the balls surviving as well then? Speaker 1 (11:33) We have balls that are surviving. Yeah, we've got dozens of them. I'm not really sure exactly how many we have, but we've got them from all time periods, too. We have an earlier ball than we have a ball court. Wow. The Olmec had this swampy location that they were dumping ritual objects in at a site called El Manatee. And in the lowest levels of that, that are like 1600, 1700 BCE. we found a dozen rubber balls. Now, frustratingly, we've never found an Olmec ball court, but they had the balls and they were from the region of Mexico where rubber trees was. So that makes sense. Speaker 5 (12:19) I'm glad you mentioned that evidence as well, because that also reinforces how the Maya ball game is much more than just the Maya. You've already mentioned the Aztec evidence. the Aztec rules of the game recorded by the Spanish. Now we've gone back to the Olmec before, so that's quite a nice kind of sandwiching it all together. Ed, I'd like to ask a bit more about the ball court itself before exploring more about the game. You've visited many of these, I know, but when you go into a ball court at one of these Maya cities, do we know much about the material and how they're made? Should we always be imagining kind of grand stone structures that you're walking through? Speaker 1 (12:53) They are stone built. I have personally excavated one that was just nothing but dirt, so they can be very simple. I like, you know, there's a correlation to football or soccer. I love that the game seems to, there are formal courts and big spectator sports, but there were also little kids playing it in the dirt. So anybody could play it and people were constantly practicing it, but the ball court itself that would be like the showcase for a city. That would be stone built. As you walked through the lane where the competitors were, you'd see that the walls are sloping up from you. And they slope up, oftentimes to where a ring would hang out. And the ring would be parallel to the center line. And if you got that ball through the ring, the game was immediately over. At least in the Aztec versions. And it's very, very hard to do. It was high up, and even if you were throwing it... With your hand, you'd have a hard time getting it through, much less with your hip. So there were these sloping walls on either side of the playing lane. I've heard things that say that the ball's passage up and down those walls and down to the other opponents was symbolizing the movement of the sun through the sky. So for the Aztecs, who were so obsessed with sacrificing so the sun would continue to move through the sky, that had that kind of sacrifice and war connotation as well. Just like our sports, you know, there's steeped Speaker 5 (14:28) in Speaker 1 (14:28) symbolism of war and fair play and competition. Speaker 5 (14:35) So do we see some of those hoops, those rings that the Aztecs have as kind of to score? Do you therefore see them also in the archaeology from Maya times, from classic Maya sites as well, then, Ed? Speaker 1 (14:46) Absolutely. Most of the ones that I've encountered, have the rings. Sometimes they're, those are the first things that got broken off by, you know, vandals and looters and things, so sometimes we have to piece them back together. Not every Maya ball court had rings, so that's a cause for concern that we might not actually know how they were playing the game, but a lot of them do. All the big sites had rings incorporated in their... their ball courts. Speaker 5 (15:17) Well, that begs the question is, Ed, do we think that there are other ways that a team could win the ball game if they didn't have, or if they didn't score through one of those hoops or the stadium didn't have it? Speaker 1 (15:27) Again, the Spanish chroniclers watching the Aztecs and the people in the Valley of Mexico said the teams that form up with front people, kind of like forwards near the center line. And there'd be. one-on-one, maybe two-on-two. And then the other players would be in the back, guarding the back line. Because if the ball went through the back line, that was a point for the other team. So there were defensive guys. It was very much like what we're watching in the World Cup now. There were backs and there were forwards. And so the play would go, the guy in front was, you know, the messy. He was the one who could make that shot. and get it past them, or also if the ball just kind of dribbled out and just stopped on your side and nobody could hit it with their hip again or their knee, that was a point for the other team. How many points you had to score, that varies. 20, I've heard, but there's lots of different versions. But if you got it through that hoop, the game was immediately over. And at that point, whoever made it through the hoop got... presented to everybody in like a fancy cape with feathers or a mantle, that guy would be the hero of the game. Speaker 5 (16:43) Cool. Before we delve more into kind of the people themselves, the competitors, because, you know, the Harry Canes and the Raul Jimenez's of Mesoamerica and so on. I do want to ask a bit more about the archaeology of the ball courts, Ed, because you visited so many. And I loved hearing about how they're almost kind of different levels of ball courts from place to place, almost like there might be a Wembley equivalent and then maybe an eighth division, smaller ball court equivalent at a smaller city elsewhere. I love the differences that you can evidently see in the archaeology surviving. Speaker 1 (17:15) Oh, they are huge. It's one of the frustrating things about studying ball courts is they're great variation. Their orientation is different everywhere. I, as an archaeoastronomer, really want them to be connected to astronomy, but that's inscrutable. They aren't. They could be in any different direction. They're not on Cardinal or on a solar line. They're everything. They're also, some of them are huge. The one at Chichen Itza is so gigantic, it's actually unreasonable to think people even played the game on a court that size. And then some of them are very, very small. Tikal has five courts. And the one that's in their main plaza is not that big. It's kind of small. Speaker 5 (17:57) So that is Speaker 1 (17:58) also interesting. Speaker 5 (17:59) So it's not one ball court per city. Certain cities in Maya times had more than one. Speaker 1 (18:05) Yeah. Tikal