Royal visions; art of the Maya courts

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Anna Blume

On one shell plaque, a conch fragment, a man sits alone enjoying a long cigar, elegant smoke glyphs rising in incised cross-hatched marks. Inscriptions, written in a manner echoed in the calligraphic lines of the man's body, visually frame and identify him. He wears a deer head and gestures to a small creature emerging from a conch shell at his feet. The scene is incised on the fleshlike inner surface of the shell, itself doubled in its own representation. The shell, used by the Maya to mark zero as well as to symbolize both the ocean and the Void, is speaking with the man, in a conversation the hieroglyphic text records. Such works provide traces not only of Maya beliefs, but of their inner lives as well. This is Maya lyric poetry, or at least what we have of it: a subtle, lovely dance of line connecting words and beasts, gods and people.

"Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya" is more an immersion in the tactile immediacy of Maya objects than a didactic explanation of the culture. Even without the scent of strong tobacco or the effects of arcane hallucinogens, enough of the Maya is present in this extraordinary show to intoxicate us with the particular beauty and strangeness of a people who will, perhaps, always defy the limits of our imagination.

TRANSLATING THE TEXTS

For hundreds of years, from the Spanish conquest onward, Maya hieroglyphic writing was a mystery to those attempting to read it. In the 1950s, linguists and Mayanists began to crack the code, opening the way to deciphering the abundant inscriptions present on Maya objects and ruins.

Previously, scholars had believed that Maya writing was either pictographic or ideographic and had not "advanced" to representing phonetic elements of any kind. This misconception was maintained in the 1930s by Eric Thompson at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C., who was for decades the world's reigning Mayanist. Ironically, it was the Russian linguist Yuri Knorosov, working in Cold War isolation, who challenged Thompson's domination by proposing that Maya hieroglyphics were made up of several facets including phonic elements, signs for spoken syllables and whole words. In 1952, Knorosov (who had never traveled to Central America) published an article in Sovietskaya Etnografiya that led to the reading of the inscriptions. (After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, Knorosov finally traveled to Guatemala to visit the ruins he had done so much to explicate.)

Another Russian scholar, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Art, first identified the hieroglyph for "woman" in 1961. Since then, as further translations have identified specific historical figures, we have been able to recognize the central position of Maya women in court life. A strength of the current exhibition is the section titled "Women at Court," which precisely focuses on this issue. Proskouriakoff was also responsible for the identification, in 1960, of the Long Count, a series of numbers the Maya used to measure historical time (as opposed to the many cyclical Maya calendars, following the movement of the sun and moon, for example, which was important for agriculture, or that of the planet Venus, which helped to predict auspicious times for war and sacrifice).