I mentioned that he was an amateur gentleman. And these figures are always looking down on you, in a way that the Maya thought of the ancestors as doing on a perennial basis. The males also let blood, but rather than using their tongues, they threaded the rope through (and also pierced with a sting ray spine) their genitals. The sculptor, Chakalte, signed this lintel and at least two other works during his career. Then there was the time of quarrying, in which the limestone is taken out of a stone bed. Subtle differences in the three lintels suggest that the compositions were completed by two or three different artists. Lintels may be visible or recessed in the roof of the facility, and reduce dose rate in publicly accessible areas by reducing the maze cross section. The original interpretation of the studded rope was that there were thorns attached, but this new evidence in context has caused the interpretation to shift. To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser. The sculpture occupies almost the . It was Mayuy, which is a word that refers to mist and clouds. But the final thing I would say about this trajectory, Jim, that I think is worth mentioning, is that a stunning feature, even today, of all of these descendant Mayan peoples, these Mayan speakers, is that they have this kind of sustained cultural or ritual orientation that demonstrates just astonishing continuity over time. By pulling the rope studded with obsidian shards through her tongue, she causes blood to drip onto paper strips held in a woven basket to be burned as depicted on Lintel 25. Piedras Negras, where I excavated quite a bit in the nineties, is a good example of this, in which half the ceramics went to Philadelphia, to the University of Pennsylvania Museum; and the remainder stayed there in Guatemala City. Bloodletting was also an act related to rebirth and rejuvenation. Direct link to jay.vanderveen.personal's post The males also let blood,, Posted 7 years ago. Other relief sculptures, such as Lintel 45 on Structure 44, show Shield Jaguar II with war captives to commemorate his victory in battles against rival city-states. It is carved, as are all the sculptures of Piedras Negras, of a buff-colored limestone which is soft and easily carved while wet. The ruler was believed to be a descendent of the gods, and the act of bloodletting was of critical importance in maintaining their power and order in the community. The carvings, however, are of a different sort. Hieroglyphic Stairway #2 leads up to the building. And they were then combined with a clay called palygorskite, which is found in only a few locations. The colossal statue of Constantine the Great departs completely from statues of earlier Roman Now, on the carvings that we studied, the blue rims of the glyphs are probably referring to the idea of preciousness. It is often found . It is a civilization that really comes together as a literate one, with a copious tradition of carving, probably about 2500 years ago to, more or less, the beginning of the Common Era. In Lintel 24, he is depicted holding a torch above his first wife, Lady Xoc. A glyphic inscription (oddly, written backwards) in the upper left corner of Lintel 25 notes the date of Shield Jaguar IIs ascension to the throne in October 681. HOUSTON: They were a couple from California who first undertook, in the thirties, a canoe trip from their state all the way down to Panama. Yaxchilan itself is in not a very prepossessing area. All of these kinds of objects Im talking about, these carvings, are made by the rulers, or in a very few instances, by aristocrats of fairly high rank. Modeled and carved works of fired clay show the Maya virtuosity at creating realistic figurines and elaborate vessels and incense burners. So its part of the same world. Lady Xook holds a bowl in her left hand while she looks up towards the rising serpent. There would be events taking place that would be eventually recorded on this monument. We also know something about the work of this artist because we have monuments that span a period of about ten years or so. Lady Xoc is shown here performing an important royal rite of blood letting. And that tells us that its cinnabar, which is a very different kind of material, potentially poisonous, in fact, because it was mercury. Accession rituals, for example, entailed the offering of dedicatory human sacrifices to mark the enthronement of a new ruling lord. The civil war tended to suppress it; it tended to stop the more brazen acts of criminality. Incense burners depicting the sun and rain gods (1978.412.99) were deployed in intimate rituals in palaces, temples, and caves, to honor the ancestors (1999.484.1a, b; 1982.394a, b) and summon benevolent beings. Discover the latest Getty news and stories at our new home on, The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Maya Carving, PODCAST: International Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Collaboration, Part 2, PODCAST: New Insights into Jacopo da Pontormos Style with Curator Davide Gasparotto, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. What does it mean when someone says elaborate? Because there really is zero doubt that this carving was taken from Guatemala when local laws prohibited such removal, whatever the international laws and regulations of that time. And Ive often wondered, as have others, why didnt he eventually fess up? ", TAB-ya yu-xu-lu MO-CHAK-ki a-HIX?-la Theyre like Swiss cheese, Jim. And the carver that the local lord employed to create this piece, a person whose name we know, Mayuy, was almost certainly from an antagonistic dynasty to the north, a place called Piedras Negras, which is quite renowned in the history of Maya culture and civilization. In the same way artists worked the hard stone, they also delicately cut and incised marine and freshwater shell, animal bones, and even human bones. And I was being, I think, a little audacious in that statement I just made about stability, because obviously, looting does thrive in conditions of instability. And so Lambs objective was essentially to do Kon-Tiki in the Chiapan Rainforest. Lintel 24 was found in its original context alongside Lintels 25 and 26 in Structure 23 of Yaxchilan. CUNO: Thank you, Steve, for joining me on this podcast. Direct link to Jin Park's post It's mentioned that the i, Posted 4 years ago. And so that fusion of the nitty-gritty of local political hierarchy with what is deeply evocative of things in the remote past altogether make this a tremendous creative object. Rulers needed to shed blood in order to maintain order in the cosmos. But the pigments were cooked in such a way as to cause them to blend in a manner that could be successfully applied to the surface. It weighs 120 tons, with approximate dimensions 8.3 5.2 1.2 m,[2] one of the largest in the world. JIM CUNO: Hello, Im Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. But there are, in the Guatemalan side, not too far, almost certainly, from which the lintel was found, where there are more or less untouched reserves of rain forest, with forest giants like mahogany or animals like jaguar, which are long gone elsewhere. Its not gonna support a lot of people. Sculpture for the ancient Maya spans all media, from the miniature to the monumental, as artists gave shape to materials extracted from the landscape. There they encountered a rich cache of decorated structures made in the first millennium CE, including a particularly elaborate limestone lintel (a horizontal support above a doorway) carved by an artisan named Mayuy. And these were very much the center of the publication for the Getty. represents? HOUSTON: It was a book that was coauthored by Dana with his wife Ginger, but it was partly ghosted by a bookseller named June Cleveland. One building was constructed a bit early; the later came about ten years after that. But in Guatemala, in the place particularly where this lintel comes from, looting was actually suppressed by the conflicts between the guerillas and the Guatemalan army from a period of about 1997 and about fifteen years before. how do we know that they really did worship shield jaguar, and how do we know the picture showed the queen? view a diagram of this relief and locate this relief on a map, Yaxchiln from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Harvard). These were located in what is known as Element 21 in Room 1 of Structure 23 at Yaxchilan. HOUSTON: This lintel was first seen by an adventurer named Dana Lamb. So they are very much part of the firmament of the United States, as well. Lintels 15, 16 and 17 replicate the scenes carved on the three lintels in Structure 23, constructed by Bird Jaguar's father, Shield Jaguar II. Did it have something to do with the fact that he had another scheme afoot, a future movie in mind? And the buildings themselves are doubtless going to contain some remains of pieces left behind by the looters. Direct link to Maia Diamonstone-Cruz's post Forgive me if this seems , Posted 5 years ago. Though of no great commercial importance in any part of the . And this mustve been in the air of the time, because of the release, in 1947, of a lot of publicity about the Kon-Tiki expedition by Thor Heyerdahl. Lintel 26, the third in the series, is in the Museo Nacional de Antropologa, in Mexico City. Hieroglyphic stairways are also kinetically fascinating from an interpretive viewpoint because you, of course, walk up and down them, but what is often depicted on them, in terms of imagery, or recorded on them in terms of hieroglyphic inscriptions, would be a succession of rulers over time. A lintel or lintol is a type of beam (a horizontal structural element) that spans openings such as portals, doors, windows and fireplaces. Now, he, in this volume, decided to go look for primitive nativesthats very much in quotation marksin rawest jungle. Bricker, "Advances in Maya epigraphy,", J. Marcus, "The Iconography of Power Among the Classic Maya,", Posted 8 years ago. ", Posted 8 years ago. HOUSTON: The stone itself is a depiction of four figures, and probably a mythological being, as well. And I would be also shocked if Mayuy, the carver that weve been examining, didnt know the painters, didnt know the carvers at Bonampak. And it tends to vary enormously in quality. Modern day lintels are made using . Throughout this considerable literature one encounters arguments and corrections as to which structures and doorways the various lintels, long removed from the site, originally pertained. It speaks about cataclysmic storms, almost a hurricane, artesian wells that are spurting like volcanoes, and so forth. The figures on top correspond to the local ruler, whose name we know, Cheleew Chan Kinich. In fact, its being enveloped by the growth of that urban zone. Maya sculptors also invested a monumental amount of labor in portable goods made of stone. An elaborate roof-comb (a masonary wall that rises upwards above a building to give the impression that it is taller than it actually is), arguably the most famous component of the temple, incorporates a decorative frieze, niches, and sculptural elements, including a sculpted human being in the central niche. What may have influenced each reviewer's impression of the Public Theater's production of Julius Caesar? And this is a courtly society; its focused on ancient kings, their courtiers, their immediate families. Anyone entering Structure 23 would pass. Yaxchiln is located on the south bank of the Usumacinta River, in Chiapas, Mexico. Ian tried hard to get to the bottom of that story, but he was never able to do so. In freestanding Indian building examples, the Hoysala architecture tradition between the 11th and 14th centuries produced many elaborately carved non-structural stone lintels in the Southern Deccan Plateau region of southern India. Just a made up name. Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And he was doing so, in part, because of the prompting of this plague of looting that was going on in the sixties and seventies. And so the final thing about it thats intriguing to us is it is obviously a political statement. Look for new episodes of Art and Ideas every other Wednesday, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. So at the moment, I have documented at least about 130 named carvers. The royal courts of the Maya kings and queens employed full-time painters and sculptors, some of whom signed their works. Which is the guerillas not only had this commendable ethos of protecting ruins, they were committed to an ideological perspective about patrimony in the country; but really for a practical reason, they did not want looters padding through the forest in ways that might potentially report on the location of guerilla combatants, and then pass on that information to the military. Now, what makes this lintel fascinating for us, at least in political terms, is that this monument and the other carvings that come from buildings nearby are not from the actual dynastic capital, which was called Yaxchilan, but rather they derive from a pretty small site thats on the troubled margins of that kingdom. HOUSTON: Today, its very much close to a number of millions. And so many of them went to, of all places, Canada, which was, of course, part of the British Empire as well, until fairly recently. We dont know what the ancient name of the city was. Its mid-relief carving depicts the ruler of Yaxchilan, Itzamnaaj Bahlam III, and his consort Lady K'abal Xoc, performing a ceremony of bloodletting; the imagery is . And then the final thing to remember about all of these carvings is that theyre interacting with changing meteorological circumstances. Nonetheless, there are plans afoot to try to return to this region and to explore it in more detail. Direct link to Stf Murison's post I cannot remember the sou, Posted 6 years ago. Note: the monuments and objects uncovered at Yaxchiln are numbered in the order in which they were foundso Lintel 1 is not the oldest, but rather the first to be excavated by archaeologists. And in fact, we know these limestones are literally millions of years old. These are all of these small communities governed by nobles, some of the petty sort, some also like magnates. Its got a nose, its got an eye. And so to some extent, each one of those language groups and the ethnic groups they represent have had their own varied history of research. Hes probably looking for a more lucrative position here in this kingdom. Before the construction of Structure 23, there was a hiatus in building at Yaxchiln for about 150 years. And thats where we have a good purchase on what the Maya felt and thought about these kind of sculptures. And that would, I think, lead to an extremely important chapter in the final century of Classic Maya civilization. Some of the most famous lintels are those on Structure 23a yotoot (palace building . Now, the sculptures from all of these communities, these smaller places like El Tunel or Laxtunich, tend to be fairly emphatic in emphasizing that almost suffocating centralized control that emanates from Yaxchilan. Yaxchiln lintel 24, structure 23, after 709 C.E., Maya, Late Classic period, limestone, 109 x 78 x 6 cm, Mexico Trustees of the British Museum. But as we discovered, the book is full of almost laughable fabulations. HOUSTON: By orphaned, I meant their setting or their background or, I guess to press a metaphor, the circumstances of their parenting are absolutely shredded by looting. Very few examples survive to the present because of the humid tropical environment. a bloodletting ritual Such Maya rituals as bloodletting were only enacted on slaves. Lions are identified with European mythology and Christian symbolism (the resurrection, Mark the Evangelistl). Her necklace also appears to have a pectoral depiction of the sun god. Structure 21, commissioned by Bird Jaguar IV, housed lintels 15, 16 and 17. And so that was extremely distressing for the field. HOUSTON: Its a term that comes from the ancient world, particularly in Egypt, in which many objects flowed out to museums. Direct link to Julia Kopell's post it is possible, but consi, Posted 3 years ago. HOUSTON: Bonampak is a high-ranking city. Is elaborate the same as explain? Itzamnaaj Bahlams remains lay not far, in Room 3. Direct link to Joss Glenn's post For the AP exam, is it im, Posted 7 years ago. HOUSTON: Were blessed, in the Maya evidence, to have many, many named carvers and also calligraphers. Ceremonial blades made of flint (1978.412.195) or chert served as royal scepters. Coe, Michael D., and Stephen D. Houston. It makes them tremendously exciting to study. HOUSTON: Thats right. It was most likely built by Bird Jaguar IV, who like his father Shield Jaguar II engaged in a series of building projects and commissioned various monuments as part of his campaign to legitimate his rule. Since the rest of the costume is depicted without much abstraction, it is suggested that Maya kings may have literally attached a shrunken head to their head band as a representation of power. Blood scrolls can be seen on her face. And so in many ways, the worst looting in Guatemala actually took place also, I would say, prior to that terrible civil war in that country. And then later on, theres an afterlife that would includeand theres the kind of lithic biographyvisits by local later Maya, who would burn incense near or on these monuments. Which of these artworks was not made as propaganda to supplement the power of the ruler it (P) 2006 Nonesuch Records, Inc., Produced Under License From Nonesuch Records, Inc. ISRC: USNO10600825 & USNO10600824. 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