Seems the whole “end of the world in 2012” brouhaha is stirring again with the upcoming release of the special effects disaster film, 2012. While topics on this blog are often meant to be pretty scholarly and technical, I thought it useful to offer a simple run-down of important points about what the ancient Maya really had to say — or not — about the “end” of their calendar.

Does the Maya calendar end in 2012?

No it doesn’t. What will happen is a recurrence, an anniversary of sorts, of a key mythological date in the distant past. The Maya wrote this as 13.0.0.0.0 in their “Long Count” calendar (an abbreviation of a much bigger number), which fell on August 11, 3114 B.C. (some correlations of the two calendars say August 13, but I don’t really care). This “creation date” was not the beginning of everything, however. Maya mythological texts tell us that plenty was happening long, long before this starting point of the current era. On December 21, 2012 (some say December 23) we come again to a numerological recurrence of 13.0.0.0.0. The Long Count calendar continues well beyond this date, too. In fact, the numerology of the calendar demands that there will be other similar recurrences of this same date in the far distant future, on a scale of octillions of years. The scale of Maya time reckoning dwarfs anything in our own cosmology by many orders of magnitude.

What did the Maya say about 2012?

They actually said very little, if anything. Only one ancient inscription refers to the upcoming 13.0.0.0.0 date in 2012, from a now destroyed site named Tortuguero. The question we scholars have struggled with is whether the final few hieroglyphs of that text describe anything about what will happen. A few years ago I put forward a very tentative and incomplete reading of these damaged glyphs, including a possible use of a verb meaning “descend” and a name of a god, Bolon Yokte’. Much of it was iffy and remains so; I’m not sure I believe much of what I wrote back then. More recently my colleague Steve Houston has pointed out the glyphs may not even pertain to that date anyway. So there’s considerable ambiguity just in the reading of the glyphs and the rhetorical structure of the Tortuguero passage. What we can say with confidence is that the ancient Maya left no clear or definite record about 2012 and its significance. There is certainly no ancient claim that the world or any part of it will come to an end.

Who came up with this crazy idea?

New Age hacks and, now, Hollywood producers. The idea can be traced largely back to the novelist and mystic named Frank Waters, who in the 1960s and 70s wrote a number of novels and cultural treatises on Native Americans of the American southwest, including his 1963 work, Book of the Hopi (he was not an anthropologist). One of Waters’ last works was Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth Age of Consciousness (1975), an odd pastiche of Aztec and Maya philosophies wherein he proposed that the “end” of the calendar would somehow involve a transformation of world spiritual awareness. Waters’ ideas got picked up and expanded upon by Jose Arguelles in his insanely misguided but influential book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987). Many different writers have followed with their own strange books and essays on the “meaning” of 2012, mostly contradicting one another.

What about the astronomy?

The Maya were fine astronomers, but the 2012 date has little if anything to do with astronomy. Despite claims about the appearance of a “galactic alignment” in late December three years from now, modern scientific astronomers reject this notion pretty much out of hand. Besides, no ancient Maya text or artwork makes reference to anything of the kind.

What do the present-day Maya have to say about 2012?

Although the 260-day round of the ancient calendar system survived in a few areas of highland Guatemala, the 2012 date has nothing to do with it. It’s only associated with the Long Count, which ceased being used well before the conquest. So, any mention of 2012 by modern Maya peoples is probably an example of media or New Age influence.

So, in sum, what’s been widely circulated in the popular imagination about 2012 has little to do about true ancient Maya belief or notions of prophecy.

My brief comments will probably instigate even more endless 2012 discussion and debate, but I respectfully request that such exchanges be taken elsewhere. What more I have to say on the subject, mostly on the nature of the ancient calendar as a whole, will appear in my upcoming book about Maya time, appearing sometime next year.

In this post I offer up another rare and unusual sign in the Maya script. This is what I call the “fringed crossed-bands,” which looks to be an obscure logogram (word sign). I have no good suggestion to make about its value or meaning, but only show some of its scattered examples in the hope it might spur progress toward an eventual reading.

The sign seems visually complex. Its main feature is a fringe-like design on its left side, which appears to droop over a small rounded central element.  A crossed-bands motif appears in its upper central area. This sign often (not always) takes a superfix resembling a twisted cord or knot – I suspect these are all variations on the same form – and there’s a possibility that this an integral of a larger sign.

It appears in four places to my knowledge, mostly in personal names. An early example is from an unpublished Early Classic Tzakol-style vessel, where it looks to be part of a personal name (Figure 1a). On Kerr 1440 (Figure 1b) it may also be part of a name phrase, according to the recent analysis of the passage by Hull, Carrasco and Wald (2009).  There it takes the affixes –ya and -si. Yet another name that makes use of the sign is that of a sculptor who contributed to the carving of Piedras Negras, Stela 14, named on its front, where it again takes the -ya-si suffixes (Figure 1c).  Unfortunately, these cases don’t help us much when working toward a decipherment of the sign – names are contextually “neutral” in terms of their semantic constraints. The -ya-si affixes are difficult to account for, but they suggest a connection to the “body-part” nominal suffix -is noted by Marc Zender (2004).

One last instance of the sign maybe is more revealing (Figure 2).  This appears in the text that ran above along the top of the throne of the platform within Temple XXI at Palenque, in a passage describing a ritual that took place on 9.13.17.9.0 3 Ajaw 3 Yaxk’in (June 14, 709), There it appears as one of two verbs that take a –n-aj verb suffix, in a context that indicates a passive construction for non-CVC transitive stems (Lacadena 2004).

ha-o-ba ?-na-ja ?-na-ja TA-CH’AB-AK’AB-li
ha’oob ..?..naj .. ..?..naj ta ch’ab ak’bil
it is they (who were) ?ed and ?ed in creation-and-darkness

The mystery sign may stand for a non-CVC transitive verb, paired in this instance with some other obscure action. The subjects (“they”) are the protagonists of the scene on the Temple XXI panel, the future king K’inich Ahkal Mo’s Nahb and his possible brother, Upakal K’inich. With such a nicely specific grammatical setting, we may have an eventual in-road toward an eventual decipherment of the “fringed crossed-bands,” but that’s probably a long way away.

REFERENCES:

Hull, Kerry, Michael Carrasco, and Robert Wald. 2009. The First-Person Singular Independent Pronoun in Classic Ch’olan. Mexicon 31(2):36-43.

Lacadena, Alfonso. 2004. Passive Voice in Classic Mayan Texts: CV-h-C-aj and -na-aj Constructions. In The Linguistics of Maya Writing, edited by S. Wichmann, pp. 165-194. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Zender, Marc. 2004. On the Morphology of Inanimate Possession in Mayan Languages and Classic Mayan Glyphic Nouns. In The Linguistics of Maya Writing, edited by S. Wichmann, pp. 195-210. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

THE ART AND HISTORY OF COPAN

November 1 – 7, 2009

Our next Maya Field Workshop takes us to Copan, Honduras, where participants can enjoy an intensive hands-on learning experience on Maya glyphs and art in their original context. All activities are led by David Stuart.

Life is tranquil in Copan these days despite the political mess in the capital, but the town still is needing economic support and tourism.

A few spaces in the MFW are still available. For more information, please go to the Maya Field Workshops website

A few friends and colleagues have been circulating this wonderful new INAH website, allowing one to experience Palenque’s major buildings in an up close and personal way. I especially like the trip into Pakal’s tomb, and the howler monkey sound effects.

Virtual Palenque
http://culturainah.org/panorama360/palenque

In the bodega of the Museo Sylvanus Morley in Tikal, Guatemala, are a number of odds-and-ends of Maya sculpture recovered from looters over the last few decades. One piece is the block illustrated here, known to many epigraphers since its publication some years ago by Karl Herbert Meyer. Its place of origin has long been a mystery, so I was happy to learn a few years ago that Ian Graham was the first to ever see the stone, in the course of his initial explorations of the ruins of Pajaral, Petén, Guatemala, in the late 1970s. He included a quick but recognizable sketch of it in his field notebook, now in the archives of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. So, the block is certainly from Pajaral, and I therefore suggest a new designation for it, following the standards of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions: Pajaral, Miscellaneous 1. I believe one or two other stones in a similar style, also looted, may be from the same inscription.

The glyphs show a partial Long Count date, best reconstructed as [9.16.]10.0.0 1 Ajaw [3 Zip] (March 11, 761).

I write this new post, the first in many weeks, from the Casa Herrera in Antigua, Guatemala. This newly restored mansion opened June 1, 2009 as the University of Texas at Austin’s new academic research center devoted to Mesoamerica and its interdisciplinary study. With the cooperation and vision of the Fundación Pantaleón, the owners of the facility, UT-Austin inaugurates what we hope will be a long-lasting and important venue for conferences, seminars, residential scholars, and international academic programs. More information will be available soon once the new website for the Casa is up and running later this summer.

We’re happy to be hosting our first formal academic event this coming week: a mini-conference on “The Future of Mayan Linguistic Research.” More gatherings of students and scholars, large and small, are in the works for later this year and next.

Very soon I and others will be getting back to posting more blog entries on epigraphy and archaeology; in the meantime I simply want to share my own excitement about the Casa Herrera’s potential in the coming years as an important place for intellectual exchange and creativity, in the heart of the Maya world.

TO BE LIKE GODS: DANCE IN ANCIENT MAYA CIVILIZATION

by Matthew G. Looper

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2009

$40.20 with website order discount

Description from the UT Press catalog:

The Maya of Mexico and Central America have performed ritual dances for more than two millennia. Dance is still an essential component of religious experience today, serving as a medium for communication with the supernatural. During the Late Classic period (AD 600-900), dance assumed additional importance in Maya royal courts through an association with feasting and gift exchange. These performances allowed rulers to forge political alliances and demonstrate their control of trade in luxury goods. The aesthetic values embodied in these performances were closely tied to Maya social structure, expressing notions of gender, rank, and status. Dance was thus not simply entertainment, but was fundamental to ancient Maya notions of social, religious, and political identity.

Using an innovative interdisciplinary approach, Matthew Looper examines several types of data relevant to ancient Maya dance, including hieroglyphic texts, pictorial images in diverse media, and architecture. A series of case studies illustrates the application of various analytical methodologies and offers interpretations of the form, meaning, and social significance of dance performance. Although the nuances of movement in Maya dances are impossible to recover, Looper demonstrates that a wealth of other data survives which allows a detailed consideration of many aspects of performance. To Be Like Gods thus provides the first comprehensive interpretation of the role of dance in ancient Maya society and also serves as a model for comparative research in the archaeology of performance.

Order directly from the UT Press website.

Over the course of several visits to Bonampak, Chiapas, I’ve been intrigued by the unusual design of the site, and the way its buildings and plaza clearly “face” out toward the range of hills to the northeast. A great many Maya buildings exhibit architectural orientations of one sort or another, but few if any whole sites are so clearly oriented toward one particular direction. 

Figure 1. Topographic map of Bonampak, Chiapas, adapted from Paillés (1986).

As one can see in the accompanying map (Figure 1), the principal structures of Bonampak are built on the side of a natural hill, probably once named Usij Witz, “Vulture Hill.” The buildings generally face over the large open plaza that gives the site its clear orientation, about 30 degrees east of north. I find it remarkable that this orientation faces precisely in the direction of the far larger site of Yaxchilan, located on the Río Usumacinta some 24 kms. distant (Figure 2). To my knowledge, this is a unique instance of a entire site’s ceremonial layout reflecting an orientation toward another, distant center.

Figure 2. Google Earth view, showing line of orientation between Bonampak and Yaxchilan. The high ridge between them prevents any direct line of sight.

Inscriptions at Bonampak show very strong historical and political ties to Yaxchilan during the Classic period. According to the main text of Structure 1’s murals, the late ruler Yajaw Chan Muwaan II assumed the throne under the auspices of Yaxchilan’s king Shield Jaguar II.  He was also married to a Yaxchilan woman, depicted on Stela 2 as well as in the murals. Two of Yajaw Chan Muwaan’s monuments, Stela 1 (780 A.D.) and a lintel from Structure 1 (791 A.D.), exhibit carver’s signatures citing artisans from the court of Yaxchilan. Moreover, a much earlier local Bonampak ruler named Yajaw Chan Muwaan was said to have been placed in office by the contemporaneous Yaxchilan king nearly two centuries before, in the year 600 A.D. 

Throughout Bonampak’s history, then, the ties between the two sites were extremely close, with Yaxchilan clearly the more larger and dominant of the two. Given what we know of architectural development of Bonampak, its overall orientation toward Yaxchilan seems to have been established early, perhaps when Yaxchilan’s ruler began exerting their political authority in the region in the sixth century. By the end of eighth century, in the reign of Yajaw Chan Muwaan II, the same linear axis continued to be emphasized, with Yaxchilan’s “presence” strongly indicated in the sculpture as well as in the murals.

(I would like to thank Stephen Houston, Charles Golden and Andrew Scherer for their emailed comments and feedback on the issue of Bonampak’s orientation, placing it in valuable regional context.)

Reference:

Paillés, Maria de la Cruz. 1986. El nuevo mapa topográfico de Bonampak, Chiapas. Primer Coloquio Internacional de Mayistas, Tomo I, pp. 277-302. México: UNAM.

In 1990, my friend Dr. Oswaldo Chichilla Mazariegos oversaw exploratory excavations at a small elite architectural compound at Dos Pilas known as Group N5-6 (Chinchilla Mazariegos 1990).  In the course of his excavations he discovered several beautifully carved blocks in the interior chamber of Structure N5-21, the largest of the buildings in the group.  These included sculpted masonry “legs” for a bench or throne, each depicting kneeling humans figures with duck-bills with their hand aloft. These were clearly once Wind God supports for the bench. Also found by Chinchilla were four carved stones that must have formed one of the two upper side panels of the same bench-throne, depicting a seated K’inich Ajaw, or Sun God (see figure). Here I present my drawing of the sculpture, based on a field drawing I  made from the original stones in 1990 while working as part of Vanderbilt University’s Proyecto Arqueológico Regional Petexbatun. This drawing has not been published before now.

K’inich Ajaw is shown seated within or in front of a nice example of a solar cartouche, adorned with bony serpent or centipede heads at its corners (only one is visible, at upper left). All in all, it is one of the finest portraits of the Sun God I know from Classic Maya sculpture. He has k’in glyphs on each arm and leg, as well as on his forehead. In his left hand the Sun God holds the head of an animal, probably a deer.  Although missing a few details, this is almost surely an example of a particular deer that appears elsewhere in Maya iconography, showing a footprint design over its eye. The “footprint deer,” as I call it, is nearly always paired with a certain old-looking human god in both iconography and in inscriptions, and I suspect the latter was depicted on the whatever image must have accompanied this Sun God on the N5-21 bench.  Their meanings remain obscure, but there’s good reason to think the two have some sort of opposed or complementary meanings, perhaps associated with solar phenomena.

I hope I will be able to track down my drawings of the two Wind God supports of the throne and post them sometime in the future.

* * *

Reference

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. 1990. Operación DP14: Investigaciones en el Grupo N5-6. In Proyecto Arqueológico Regional Petexbatun, informe preliminar no. 2, segunda temporada, 1990, edited by Arthur A. Demarest and Stephen D. Houston. Nashville: Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University.

UPDATE (April 14, 2009): As Oswaldo mentions in his recent comment (see below), photographs of this sun god carving were published in two European exhibit catalogues, and his own drawing appeared in an article he published in 2006. Thanks to Oswaldo for the information (and of course for finding the sculpture!).

Here’s an interesting news tidbit, from a recent Times article on new chemical evidence of cacao usage in the American Southwest, at the famous site of Chaco Canyon. The tall cylinder vessels found there bear a striking resemblance to the common form of Late Classic Maya cacao pots, and in fact I’ve long wondered if they could indicate a connection to Mesoamerica. Seems they do.

Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars is Solved, New York Times, February 3, 2009