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I am still a little confuse about the name "Belize." Not really sure if I want to accept the two theories given in school. Is there some one out there who can give me a comforting answer?

The origin of the name Belize is unclear, but one idea is that the name is from the Maya word belix, meaning "muddy water", applied to the Belize River.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Maya civilization spread itself over Belize beginning around 1500 BC and flourished until about AD 800. The recorded history of the center and south is dominated by Caracol, where the inscriptions on their monuments was, as elsewhere, in the Lowland Maya aristocratic tongue Classic Ch'olti'an. North of the Maya Mountains, the inscriptional language at Lamanai was Yucatecan as of 625 CE. In the late classic period of Maya civilization (before A.D. 1000), as many as 400,000 people may have lived in the area that is now Belize. Some lowland Maya still occupied the area when Europeans arrived in the 1500s. By then the primary inhabitants were the Mopan branch of the Yucatec Maya.

There is also another theory that the first slaves to Belize were from Belize Town in Affrica, and the called the place Belize it lovery much like their homeland. The slaves were the same people who gave the howler minkeys the name "Baboon" as they think back of the baboon that they had in their homeland.


Donald Ramirez