Twenty years ago, Linda Schele was a painter teaching art at a small liberal arts university in Alabama. Frustrated and unfulfilled, she believed that art, and her own teaching, were basically irrelevant to the society around her.
Schele had a recurring dream. ”I kept thinking: What would it be like if art were really crucial to the people who produced it?” she says.
”What if art really mattered?”
In summer 1970, Schele, with her architect husband and a few students, made a vacation pilgrimmage to Mexico`s Yucatan peninsula to see the famous Mayan ruins of Uxmal, Chichen Itza and Kabah.
Traveling through the Mexican state of Chiapas, the group turned off the highway for a side trip to Palenque. The city flourished during the 7th and 8th Centuries as a regional state, but then became the first major Mayan center to collapse. Nobody knows why.
In the middle of a misty green rain forest, Palenque`s broken temples, palaces and noble homes represent the quintessential romantic lost world. Although typical classic Mayan inscriptions are everywhere-on altars, monumental stairs, doorways, wall panels-they had defied translation by scholars for more than a century.
It was there, amid the ruins and mysterious hieroglyphs of a vanished civilization abandoned in the jungle, that Schele`s dream became a reality.
”In an instant,” she says, ”my life changed.”
Entranced, Schele studied the enigmatic pictures on the walls of the tomb of Lord Pacal, the great ruler who had created Palenque`s golden age. She pondered the intricately carved upright monuments, limestone slabs known as stelae, covered with inexplicable glyphs.
Somehow the sights and sounds contributed to a pathos that overwhelmed her. The ancient past seemed to be shouting at her. What was it trying to say? ”I had to understand how, why, when and who had made these things,” she says. ”I simply had to.”
Schele, a professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin, is a large, ebullient woman, grand in gesture, expansive in mood. Three years after her trip, she switched fields and returned to Palenque where she avidly pored over the texts, searching for the names of kings. Within hours, she had identified five rulers, and the dates of major events in their reigns.
She had hurled herself into a scientific revolution, a revolution of decipherment that has opened a lost world to modern eyes.
`Enraptured passenger`
Through such works as ”Maya Glyphs: The Verbs (1982)” and ”The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986),” Schele has advanced to the front rank of Mayan scholarship. Because of scientists like her, the voices of the ancient Mayas are mute no longer.
The writers who centuries ago documented the activities of the first literate civilization in the New World may again be read. And, to the initiated, the meanings are as plain as the handwriting on the wall.
Schele`s latest book, ”A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya,” written with archeologist David Freidel, summarizes the massive explosion in Mayan research and brings it home to general readers and scholars alike (Morrow, 542 pages, $29.95).
”Since that first trip, the magic of discovery has never left me,”
Schele says. ”I`ve been an enraptured passenger on a wondrous voyage to the past.”
Who were the Mayas? Every schoolchild knows they built an advanced civilization in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras that lingered for more than 2,500 years until the Spanish conquest started in 1542.
The Mayan heyday, particularly in the Guatemalan rain forests and surrounding area, lasted more than 1,000 years, from 200 B.C. to A.D. 900. The Indians maintained an empire of 50 or more independent states that were homes to millions and covered more than 100,000 square miles.
Remnants include soaring, 200-foot-high pyramids; a highly accurate calendar derived from detailed astronomical observations; beautiful polychrome pottery: and intricately carved stone monuments. All attest to Mayan accomplishments, but until recently all have been misunderstood.
Serene stargazers, those were the Mayas, according to scholarly tradition. Prior to Schele`s generation, Maya scholars believed the Indians were intellectuals, mathematicians and astronomers who wrote down their calculations on folded screens made of bark paper. Zealous timekeepers, their hieroglyphic inscriptions were considered to be mostly calendric, with dates that corresponded to the Christian calendar.
Traditional model
In fact, most Mayan inscriptions referred to astronomical esoterica and abstruse religious symbolism, decreed the scholars who could make neither head nor tail of them. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians, the Mayas did not record historical events, royal lineages, or economic transactions. Or so scientists believed.
Since 1841, when archeologists started to stumble over magnificent Mayan cities, fanciful scenarios had been created. ”We looked at the Mayas and created myths about them according to what we wanted to believe,” Schele says.
In fact, the lack of archeological evidence to the contrary bolstered the traditional model of the Mayas. The cities had not been populated, scientists wrote, but were merely vacant ceremonial centers for ascetic priests.
Mayan artwork was considered to be anonymous and symbolic: A figure of a man squirming under the foot of a warrior, for example, was viewed as religious symbolism, certainly not the torture it appeared to be. Mayan art did not refer to specific individuals, that was dogma. Ballplayers, those were the Mayas, as their great playing fields showed.
”Above all, the Maya were considered peaceful. That was the key feature,” Schele says. They were bucolic farmers of maize and beans, which explained why the Indians had fallen easy prey to the conquistadors.
The traditional model began to fall apart in 1957, when archeologist Heinrich Berlin demonstrated that certain Mayan inscriptions, which he called emblem glyphs, differed from location to location and indicated dynastic lines and place names of cities.
”He found one at Tikal, another at Paleque, a third at Copan,” Schele says. ”He realized that the symbols referred to those places in the sense of Athens or Thebes, or any other great city-state.”
Then, in 1960, Harvard`s Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed that the patterns of dates on monuments were actually markers of important events in the lives of rulers.
”Her great idea was remarkably simple,” Schele says.
”Tatiana noticed that many buildings had seven or eight stelae monuments in front of them. By reading the dates, she discovered that each had characteristic glyphs, but they never overlapped. They succeeded each other. So she asked: `What kind of things would last 75 years? A lifespan! What would last anywhere from 15 to 35 years? A reign!”
A world view
It wasn`t until the mid-1970s that the glyphs ”opened up,” Schele says, causing a frenzied excitement among scholars that continues today.
”A picture has emerged not only of a civilization, but of a world view and of the individuals who cherished that world view and wanted their deeds to be remembered.”
As it has turned out, the Mayan kings recorded all the great events in their lives on public monuments: births, deaths, accessions, marriages, children, conquests and defeats.
”The inscriptions are what the kings thought the people would accept as explanations of why the world was as it was,” Schele says.
”They`re like State of the Union addresses by our presidents. The speeches are propaganda, sure; but if you put them side by side over 200 years, they`re a good thermometer of what the major problems were at the time, and what our politicians thought the best solutions were.”
It wasn`t only the Mayan kings who sought immortality. Wives and courtiers commissioned monuments of their own. Artists and sculptors signed their works. Calendrical symbols atop each inscription date them precisely,
”to the very day they were made,” Schele notes.
This new American history resounds with the names of heroes, princes, kings, queens, priests, artists and sculptors and the accomplishments of their lives, Schele says. ”Ancient America has its own Alexanders, its Sargons, its Ramses.”
Instead of innocent dreamers, the ancient Mayas were a nation of big business, big government and big problems, in which war and ritual blood-letting enabled Mayan kings to fuse art, architecture and politics into a unified cosmic vision.
Mayan kings ruled millions of farmers, artisans, merchants, warriors and nobility, and presided over capitals studded with pyramids, temples, palaces and vast open plazas serviced by urban populations that numbered in the tens of thousands, Schele says. Outside their realm, the Mayas engaged in war, trade and diplomacy with other great states in the mountains of central Mexico.
To the Mayas, everything was alive. The life cycle of corn, the main crop, was played out in the cosmos. The continued well-being of the universe required sacrificial blood to maintain life, just as corn required rain. Mayan life was filled with endless rituals that seem bizarre and shocking but that to them embodied the highest spiritual devotion.
Blood, not gentility, was the mortar that held ancient Mayan society together, Schele says. The Mayan gods were harsh and demanding. Human sacrifices were common, and blood-letting by the nobility was the central act of piety. The rulers subjected themselves to stoic self-mutilation, drawing the blood from their bodies with spiny vines and the volcanic glass called obsidian.
Stoicism dominated the darker side of Mayan society, a culture where kings drove pointed sticks through the skin of their penises before doing battle, and queens routinely perforated their tongues with knives and drew cords through them, all to shed blood in behalf of the people.
A Mayan king was considered the property of his subjects, who sustained him during good times and kicked him out during bad. Wars were held to capture rival kings: One leader, Kan-Xul (Precious Animal) began building an elaborate palace to celebrate himself just in time to be captured, tortured and sacrificed by a rival.
Even the popular ballgame was a sacred ceremony in which myths were re-enacted. Individuals or teams would strike a hard rubber ball with their bodies through a stone ring mounted on the side of the playing wall. The use of hands or feet to hit the ball was forbidden. Prisoners were pitted against each other to the death. Often the head of a recently killed enemy served as the ball. On special occasions, the losing captain or even his entire team might be sacrificed.
Crisis of faith
Scholars are still trying to determine the causes of the decline of the Mayan civilization, Schele says. Speculation includes troubling parallels to modern times, including destruction of the rain forests, which opened the door to ecological collapse; exhaustion of the cornfields by overpopulation;
changes in climate; hurricanes and pestilences; and wars and insurrections.
But the decline also could have derived from a crisis of faith in the Mayan kings, Schele says, as endemic warfare fed on itself and people grew disillusioned. Mayan civilization was in decline for centuries before the Spanish came.
Unlike the Aztecs and Incas, much of Mayan culture survived centuries of attempts by the Spanish to obliterate it. Mayas still live by the millions in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras, stubbornly resisting attempts to assimilate them. They still follow the old ways when naming children, nurturing the land, performing marriages, healing the sick, dealing with death and predicting the future. Chac, the rain god, is still worshiped.
For the last three years, Schele has been invited by the Mayas to teach them how to read the glyphs that represent their history. ”It`s an incredible honor for me,” she says. ”The modern Maya had their history deliberately ripped away from them in the 16th Century.
”They`re realizing now that it`s still frozen in those stones, and they can go back and get it.”
But, she stresses, ”this is not just the Indians` heritage. It is the heritage of everyone who lives in the New World. Our written history actually begins with the Maya in 200 B.C.”
