![]() ![]() ![]() It recorded what he mistakenly thought was the Mayan alphabet. ![]() And one key to the glyphs from that time was saved: a manuscript that Landa wrote in 1566 about his contact with the Maya. Only four Maya codices are known to have survived. Each stela depicts a sumptuously bedecked king, and the monoliths are covered in hieroglyphs that, once deciphered, illuminated our view of Maya life.ĭuring the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica in the 16th century, the Catholic Church’s Friar Diego de Landa supervised the burning of hundreds of Maya codices-fig-bark books rich in mythological and astronomical information. At the base of Tikal’s North Acropolis stands a row of tall carved stones, or stelae. It is one of the ironies of this view that evidence for it has long been in plain sight. “Blood was the mortar of ancient Maya ritual life,” wrote groundbreaking epigrapher Lin-da Schele and art historian Mary Miller in their 1986 book The Blood of Kings. Maya cities were not merely ceremonial instead, they were a patchwork of feudal fiefdoms bent on conquest and living in constant fear of attack. Far from being peaceful, the Maya were warriors, their kings vainglorious despots. Mayan art and writing, it turned out, contained stories of battles, sacrificial offerings and torture. When, in the 1960s, the hieroglyphs-the most sophisticated writing system created in the New World-were at last beginning to be deciphered, a new picture of these people emerged. “For all of Eric Thompson’s important findings in many areas of Maya studies,” writes anthropologist Michael Coe in his 1992 book Breaking the Maya Code,“he singlehandedly held back the decipherment for four decades” and, consequently, the study of the Maya. It was a beautiful vision-but nearly all wrong. Thompson, who died in 1975, theorized that Tikal and other sites were virtually unpopulated “ceremonial centers” where priests studied planets and stars and the mysteries of the calendar. Eric Thompson, who argued that the Maya were peaceful philosophers and extraordinary observers of celestial events content to ponder the nature of time and the cosmos. And until recently, the same could be said about the nature of the Maya themselves.įor much of the 20th century, Maya experts followed the lead of Carnegie Institution of Washington archaeologist J. Yet most of Tikal-the heart of Guatemala’s Tikal National Park, about an hour’s drive northeast of the modern city of Flores-has not even been excavated. During its heyday, archaeologists say, “downtown” Tikal was about six square miles, though research indicates that the city-state’s population may have sprawled over at least 47 square miles. Though magnificent, the ruins of Tikal visible today represent but a fraction of the original city-state. 750, Tikal was home to at least 60,000 Maya and held sway over several other city-states scattered through the rain forest from the YucatánPeninsula to western Honduras. Tikal’s great plaza, at the heart of what was one of the most powerful city-states in the Americas, is surrounded by monumental structures: the stepped terraces of the North Acropolis, festooned with grotesque giant masks carved out of plaster and masonry a steep pyramid called Temple I, whose roof comb towers 145 feet above the ground, and its mate across the plaza, TempleII, soaring 125 feet above the grass and a complex of mysterious buildings called the Central Acropolis. ![]()
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