Horizons: Tikal

For the Maya, time was a succession of cycles, spinning on and on to the end.

Since the mid-19th century, ancient Maya ruins have been well known, but only recently have we begun to know the Maya.

Although the earliest Maya settlements date around 1000 B.C., Maya civilization did not come into full bloom until about 250 A.D., when large population centers began to appear throughout northern Central America and southern Mexico—in the heart of the jungle.

Until the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, beginning in the 1970s, the Maya were widely considered a peaceful, childlike people—contentedly agrarian, artistic, enchanted with nature and the heavens. The hieroglyphic texts, however, tell a different story; often carved on stelae, these texts are devoted to the reigns of the kings who erected them, especially their conquests. According to Yale University scholar Michael Coe, the texts indicate that the Maya were not so much “peaceful theocracies led by priest-astronomers” as “highly warlike city-states led by grim dynasts obsessed with human sacrifice and the ritual letting of their own blood.”

These city-states, nonetheless, were often spectacular. One of the best-known is Tikal, in northern Gautemala, where archaeologists have uncovered a 6-square-mile area that functioned as a kind of central city. This central city has some 3,000 structures, ranging from huge pyramids (the largest, Temple IV, is 230 feet high, with 150,000 tons of rubble and stone) to small platforms for tiny huts. As many as 90,000 people lived in the immediate vicinity of Tikal in the eighth century A.D.

Like other Maya cities, Tikal grew helter-skelter over the centuries, as kings constructed temples and connected them to other complexes through causeways. The city’s Great Plaza, however, was created as a coherent whole by the ruler Ha Sawa Chaan-K’awil (682–734 A.D.). The complex consisted of two temples just south of the North Acropolis (one of Tikal’s four acropolises). Between the temples was an open plaza surrounded by altars with stelae, administrative buildings, residences and a ball court. One of the temples (Temple 1) stood 144 feet high and housed the tomb of Ha Sawa Chaan-K’awil, breaking a 700-year-old tradition that reserved kingly burials for the North Acropolis. In 1962 archaeologists discovered this tomb and its burial goods, including shells, pottery and jade carvings—and the skeleton of the 6-foot-tall king.

Maya religion included ancestor worship and a seemingly endless multiplication of deities—bird gods, serpent gods, cave gods, maize gods. Rulers were buried in the center of temples—or, as at Tikal, on an acropolis—from which they could mediate between the gods and their people. Gods and rulers were represented in exquisite works of art in jade, ceramic, limestone, bone and shell. The Maya, too, made observations of the sun, moon, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, and they were able to predict eclipses. And they developed calendars, so they could date precisely the reigns of their kings. The earliest Maya calendar, the Short Calendar of 260 days, consisted of 13 20-day months (the Maya were sophisticated mathematicians and used a base-20 numerical system). In the first century B.C. they developed the Long Calendar of 360 days (with five extra ill-omened days), made up of 18 months of 20 days. A period of 20 years constituted an era (katun), and 20 katuns made up a greater era (baktun). The Great Cycle was 13 baktuns long (about 5,130 years), lasting from the creation of the world in August 3114 B.C. to a world-ending flood that is to occur in December 2012.

Maya civilization, however, died out well before the end of this Great Cycle. During the tenth century A.D., the Maya centers were abandoned for good (Tikal was abandoned around 900 A.D.). Although scholars give various reasons, no one knows what happened.

Besides being a vastly creative people, the Maya, it appears, were intensely aware of change, renewal and death. They used cyclical calendars to record the cyclical reigns of kings; they were fascinated by the cyclical movements of the sun, moon and stars; they knew that conquerors came and went, that human beings lived and died (their tolerance of human sacrifice may have been a kind of fatalism). Whether inspired by repeated patterns of rains, or rapid cycles of jungle life, or something entirely different, they seemed to feel that good and evil, revolving around and around, were inextricably bound to one another.

For the Maya, time was a succession of cycles, spinning on and on to the end.

Since the mid-19th century, ancient Maya ruins have been well known, but only recently have we begun to know the Maya.