The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art

"The Blood of Kings replaces a highly romanticized conjectural image of the Classic Lowland Maya civilization (fl. 250-900 c.e.) as a peaceful, primitively agrarian theocracy attended by anonymous calendar priests who were learned in astronomy and lived in ceremonial centers to which the general populace was invited to witness spectacle and ritual with irrefutable evidence that the Maya lived in cities, had a highly advanced agricultural system, engaged in constant warfare among their city-states, and were ruled by dynastic kings who commissioned major artworks to memorialize themselves and ensure their place in history and who shed their own blood and that of their captives in bloodletting rituals that had dynastic, religious, and cosmic significance. Drawing upon varied sources in other fields in addition to those in their disciplines of art and art history, the authors provide a comprehensive guide to the Maya that is informative to neophytes, satisfying to amateur Maya enthusiasts and useful to students, teachers, and scholars in the field, and that leads to a realistic vision of a culture and civilization built upon the blood of its divine kings. This vision is never clearer than in the treatment of the edifices and artifacts beautifully and carefully photographed by Justin Kerr and reproduced in 122 color plates, the three hundred original drawings by Linda Schele, and the fifty other black-and-white illustrations. In their introduction, the authors provide not only a clear sense of the divisions of Maya history and salient points about geography and agriculture but also an overview of the modern invention of the ancient Maya, the basics about the Maya calendar, a primer on the characteristics of Maya art, and a discussion of Maya gods and icons that all proceed from new readings of the Maya glyphs and iconography. The wealth of knowledge amassed since 1960 is amply evidenced and expertly used to explain the phenomenon that the Maya are only now emerging from a misty prehistory to become a people with a written history dating from 50 b.c.e., a history principally celebratory of such kings as Pacal of Palenque, Bird Jaguar of Yaxchilán, and Yax-Pac of Copán. The notion of kingship here espoused and explained is not that of a single Maya emperor but of kings who ruled concurrently in different parts of Mesoamerica. The emphasis on blood is an important new element in the general understanding of the Maya: Their kings let blood on every important occasion in the life of the individual and community, a fact powerfully illustrated by the comparison of a sanitized nineteenth century drawing and a modern one of a detail from Yaxchilán Lintel 17. The former, by Annie Hunter, shows only the stylized head of a woman; the latter gives a fuller and more faithful rendering, complete with the rope which Lady Balam-Ix draws through a hole in her tongue..." by Mary Ellen Miller