\n <\/p>\n
The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya David Stuart Princeton Univ. Press (2026)<\/p>\n
Before the 1970s, ancient Maya history was impenetrable. The civilization\u2019s grand ceremonial buildings and striking art, created in parts of Mesoamerica during the Classic Maya period (ad<\/span> 150\u2013900) had tantalized foreign visitors since the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. But no one, including several million twentieth-century speakers of Maya languages, could read the ancient Maya hieroglyphs.<\/p>\n Epigrapher David Stuart embraced this challenge while still a child, living with his archaeologist parents in a small village in Mexico\u2019s Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula, where he learnt to speak the local Yucatec Maya language. He began working with Mayanist Linda Schele to understand the inscriptions of the ancient city-state of Palenque in Chiapas, on the peninsula\u2019s western side.<\/p>\n Ancient DNA from Maya ruins tells story of ritual human sacrifices<\/p>\n<\/p>\n At 12 years old, he presented his first paper at an international conference in Palenque in 1978. At 18, he became the youngest person to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Today, he is a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing based in the United States and one of the world\u2019s leading specialists on the ancient Maya.<\/p>\n In The Four Heavens, Stuart relates the history of the Maya civilization for non-specialist readers, more than two decades after the last book to attempt this demanding task. To do so, he draws on fresh archaeological discoveries and translations of Maya writings from the twenty-first century. The book\u2019s title is a reference to Maya cosmology, which divided the sky into four \u2018sides\u2019, determined by the Sun\u2019s daily and annual movements.<\/p>\n Stuart takes aim at outdated views of the Maya as \u201cquintessential noble savages living in remote cities in the jungle\u201d under the control of impersonal rulers and priests who were \u201cmore interested in esoteric knowledge than the concerns of the real world\u201d. Instead, he portrays the Maya as living in a world that consisted of numerous vivid royal courts intertwined by marriages, temporary alliances and warfare, in addition to religion.<\/p>\n For example, in the early 1950s, leading scholar Eric Thompson \u201cidealized\u201d the Maya, Stuart notes, and regarded them as a theocracy: time worshippers with an immensely sophisticated calendar and a deeply spiritual outlook. In Thompson\u2019s view, stated in 1972, their puzzling inscriptions were not \u201csyllabic, or alphabetic, in part or in whole\u201d \u2014 unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had been deciphered in the 1820s.<\/p>\n Thompson might have been influenced in part by cold war politics. He rejected the pioneering 1950s theory by Russian linguist Yuri Knorosov that the ancient Maya script was partly syllabic \u2014 an idea that Knorosov had gleaned from a sketch of symbols made by a Yucatec Maya in the 1560s in a confused conversation with a Spanish friar.<\/p>\n Sarcophagus lid from the tomb of Pakal.<\/span>Credit: Fine Art Images\/Heritage Images\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n From the 1980s onwards, however, the assessment of the ancient Maya civilization as mainly theocratic changed radically. By then, the Maya script was beginning to be deciphered \u2014 partly through phonetic elements. Scholars such as Michael Coe, author of The Maya (1966) and Breaking the Maya Code (1992), observed that these inscriptions showed their rulers to be obsessed with war. \u201cThe highest goal of these lineage-proud dynasts was to capture the ruler of a rival city-state in battle,\u201d wrote Coe, \u201cto torture and humiliate him (sometimes for years), and then subject him to decapitation following a ball game which the prisoner was always destined to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n Wars and shifting political alliances are a substantial part of Stuart\u2019s book, too, along with religion. \u201cMaya history is a narrative of many localized \u2018fits and starts\u2019 within dynasties, usually instigated by a disruptive war,\u201d he writes. Also prevalent in the book are the names of many Maya settlements, such as Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1, Cop\u00e1n, Palenque and Yaxchil\u00e1n, and rulers, such as Pakal the Great (of Palenque) and Shield Jaguar (of Yaxchil\u00e1n). Some of these names will be familiar to modern visitors to Mesoamerica, but Stuart also includes many that are not as well known.<\/p>\n Maya bones bring a lost civilization to life<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Dates are another theme, deciphered using the complex but well-understood Maya calendar. It is made up of three interlocking circular systems. The centre ring contains the numerals 1 to 13, which are then linked to two further rings of 20 named days and 19 named months. The full cycle takes 52 years to complete. Many of the dates on Maya inscriptions are surprisingly precise for records of the ancient world: for example, \u201ca certain royal individual\u201d died on 25 October 726, was buried in his pyramid on 28 October and his heir succeeded him to the throne on 7 January 727.<\/p>\n Although Stuart admits that some readers might find such details \u201ca bit dry or tedious\u201d, on balance the Maya synthesis of down-to-earth facts with fantastical elements in their buildings, art and hieroglyphs should intrigue us all. Interpreting these details will ensure decades more work for Mayanists.<\/p>\n Consider the sarcophagus lid of Pakal at Palenque in present-day Mexico \u2014 perhaps the most famous of all Maya inscriptions. Excavated in 1952 by archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier from the crypt of the Temple of the Inscriptions, the sarcophagus was gradually deciphered over the course of several decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya David Stuart Princeton Univ. Press (2026) Before the 1970s, ancient Maya history was impenetrable. The civilization\u2019s grand ceremonial buildings and striking art, created in parts of Mesoamerica during the Classic Maya period (ad 150\u2013900) had tantalized foreign visitors since the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[11038,23489,2345,17150,4644,6574],"class_list":{"0":"post-45711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-catastrophic","9":"tag-civilization","10":"tag-collapse","11":"tag-infighting","12":"tag-led","13":"tag-maya"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Warring dynasties<\/h2>\n
Cosmic perspectives<\/h2>\n