maya

The Ancient Mayans were a great civilization that spanned over roughly 3,550 years and then mysteriously just dropped off the timeline. Their reign was like the rising and setting of the sun.  They rose up, reached a climax period of prosperity, then quickly set past the horizon of history never to rise again.
 
During the dawn of their civilization they learned how to produce a surplus of food from their farms, enough to sustain them so that some of them were able to create new jobs such as pottery making and healing.   Simple ceramic pottery has been dug up from their ruins. Since crops were good, they stayed in one place, built homes and stayed attached to families.  Ruins have been unearthed to show that many people stayed together to build all these different places for everyone to hang out.  They eventually created their religion.  Archeologists have found drawings of idols on the pottery and actual idols that may have been used during religious ceremonies. 
Their civilization’s growth climaxed because a small group of elite or noble people would prey off of the working class.  At the top of the chain were the "kings" or religious leaders who were thought to be the reincarnations of Mayan gods.  The second layer of the chain of command were the priests or in the Mayan Language, Ah’kinob and the  “shamans”.  The shamans were like the doctors of today and the priests were like our modern day pastors.  They helped keep order and were probably the smarter people since people looked up to them.  The third layer was the common people who built the Mayan culture into what it was by doing all the hard work as laid out by the kings.  The slaves did even harder labor being at the bottom of the chain.  Again, the ruins show a lot of hard work went into building cities.
 
 
Even though the disappearance of the Mayans is a mystery, the great minds of our day are trying to solve it.   If we figure out what happened to them, we may be able to figure how to make sure it does not happen to us.  If the same thing happened to us, would a future culture dig us up and call us a great civilization?