Robert A. Heinlein said:"A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future." Actually, I totally agree with this statment. Because our past it is our experience; of course, we can't change this, but we could learn from it. Today I have a great opportunity to talk about past and future, I would like to compare two societies: Maya collapse and Russian society nowadays. I think they both have a lot of common and differences. First of all, I should mention that both of them are really powerful countries and have an enormous territory. This is the most common feature. But talking about these societies I am going to compare features such as: the environment and climate, agriculture, history, wars, collapse.
To begin with Maya's environment,
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In Russia Churches were only the buildings, constructed of stone. Also of those Maya temples were constructed by stone and wooden tools and by human power alone (Diamond 166). Interesting was Maya's Long Count calendar, it was divided not into day and moths, but into units of days, and every unit had own name. In Russia was used Julian calender. But then as it is known, it was superseded by the Gregorian calendar. Despite of this, Julian calendar continued to be the civil calendar of the Soviet Union. It was the last country convert to the Gregorian calendar. As a result Orthodox Church still use Julian calendar. I think it wasn't a good idea to leave Julian calendar, because now I am (as a comers from the post-Soviet states) celebrate my holidays in different days as Western tradition. Also as we know in “Maya society the king also functioned as high priest carrying the responsibility to attend to astronomical calendrical and rituals.” (Diamond 167) Actually for this reason peasants supported the luxurious lifestyle of the king. Similar situation we have in modern Russia, when the President and his court live very wealthy, but ordinary people live very poor. To better understanding – peasants eat cucumbers and tomatoes only in summer, because it is very expansive to buy them in winter. The same thing was in Maya, that only king ate venison, but not peasants. So, this large gap between government and people very common in both societies, and I think one …show more content…
Talking about wars in Maya; Jared Diamond certain that: “Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable.” (172) The same thing I could say about Russia, except unresolvable, because all Russian wars could be resolve very simply, but Russia is aggressor.
They just need to stop intrude the borders of another country. Then, according to Jared Diamond there were three kinds of violence: wars between separate kingdoms; attempts of cities to secede; and civil wars due to repeated attempts to seize the throne. (Diamond 173) Concerning Russia's wars, Since 1480 and to the end of Union Soviet there was about sixty eight wars. It is an extremely large number. The most often reason was seizure of territory. As a result Russia still the