As might be expected with a game played over so long a timespan in several different nations, details of the games varied over time and place, so the Mesoamerican ballgame might be more accurately seen as a family of related games. Some versions were played between two individuals, others between 2 teams of players.

The games shared the characteristics of being played with a hard rubber ball in a court shaped like a capital letter "I".

The game was called tlachtli by the Aztec and tlaxtli by neighboring central Mexican peoples, ulama in Sinaloa (where it continues to be played), and poc-ta-tok was a Yucatec Maya name for the game.

Every Pre-Columbian ruin of any size in the area contains at least one ballcourt, often several. Ancient cities with particularly fine ballcourts in good states of preservation include Uxmal, and Zaculeu; the grandest ancient ballcourt of all is at Chichen Itza, measuring 166 by 68 metres.


While the game was played casually for simple recreation, including by children for play, the game also had important ritual aspects, and major formal ballgames would be held as ritual events. The game between competing teams of players could symbolize the battles between the gods in the sky and the lords of the underworld. The ball could symbolize the sun. In some of these ritual games, the leader of the losing team would be decapitated as a human sacrifice. His skull would then be used as the core around which a new rubber ball would be made. The Popul Vuh***, what is often called "The Maya Bible", has long sections relating stories of the ritual ballgames between the Maya Hero Twins* and the demonic Lords of the Xibalba.**


*Maya Hero Twins
The Hero Twins feature prominently in Maya mythology.
The twins were Ixbalanque and Hun-Apu. Their father was Hun Hunahpu. After Hun Hunapu was tricked and killed by the lords of Xibalba, Hun Hunapu's skull was hung in a tree. When a young virgin woman aproached the tree, the skull talked with her and then spit into her hand, in this way she became pregnant with the Hero Twins.

Much of the Popul Vuh is devoted to stories of the Hero Twins. They are frequent subject of art on Maya ceramics.

The stories of how the Hero Twins defeated the lords of Xibalba was taught as an example of how Maya people could also defeat demons in the afterlife.

The Hero Twins were deft players of the Mesoamerican ballgame.


**Xibalba
In Maya mythology, Xibalba was a dangerous underworld, ruled by the demons Vucub Caquix and Hun Came. The road to it was steep, thorny and very forbidding.
Much of the Popol Vuh describes the adventures of the Maya Hero Twins in their struggle with the evil lords of Xibalba.

Alternative name: Xibalbay



***Popol Vuh
The Popol Vuh ("Council Book") is the Maya mythology book of scripture, containing the Maya civilization's creation myth followed by the religously important stories of the Maya Hero Twins.

The best known and most complete manuscript of the Popul Vuh is in the Spanish conquest of Guatemala, the usage of Maya script was forbidden and Latin alphabet was taught instead. However, some Maya priests and clerks clandestinely made copies of older heiroglyphic books, but using Latin letters. One of these was discovered about 1702 by a priest named Francisco Xim?z in the Guatemalan town of Chichicastenango, and rather than burning it Father Xim?z made a copy of it, and added a translation into Spanish. This copy found its way the to a neglected corner of the University of San Carlos library in Guatemala City, where it was discovered by Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg and Carl Scherzer in 1854. They published French and Spanish translations a few years later, the first of many translations that have kept the Popul Vuh in print ever since.

After the mythological sections, this manuscript continues with details of the foundation and history of the Guatemala; tying in the royal family with the legendary gods in order to assert rule by divine right.

The text of the Xim?z manuscript contains what some scholars believe are mistakes based on exact transliteration of an earlier hieroglyphic text, a proof that the Popol Vuh is based on a copy of a much earlier text. However,their were clearly additions and modifications to the text in Spanish Colonial times, most notably the Spanish governors of Guatemala are mentioned as the successors of earlier Maya rulers.

The manuscript is now in the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Pre-Columbian Maya funeral pottery often contains sections of text from the Popul Vuh in hieroglyphs, and illustrations of scenes from the legends. Some stories from the Popul Vuh continued to be told by modern Maya as folk legends; some stories recorded by anthropologists in the 20th century may preserve portions of the ancient tales in greater detail than the Xim?z manuscript.


from: http://neohumanism.org/m/me/mesoamerican_ballgame.html



For info on the Olmec ballgame, refer here: http://members.aol.com/cabrakan/ball.htm