Yaxchilns ruling dynasty rose in the 4th century C.E., but its heyday followed several hundred years later (during what art historians call the Classic period), with Lord Shield Jaguar II who ruled for 60 years beginning in 681. Yaxchiln is located on the south bank of the Usumacinta River, in Chiapas, Mexico. Thanks for listening. And thats when we start seeing very large cities, in fact, of a scale, of a magnitude that really is seldom documented even anywhere else in the world. He, too, wears an elaborate headdress, a breastplate and ear spools. Tikal has 1, Palenque has 5 doorways? Sculpture for the ancient Maya spans all media, from the miniature to the monumental, as artists gave shape to materials extracted from the landscape. [4] The earliest carved lintels were created in 723 CE. HOUSTON: This part of Guatemala, its highly broken in landscape. And we know the exact date. It is often found . And its playing out in his full body of work. 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. Or could it be that dissimulation and mendacity had simply become a mode of life for him? In Yaxchilan, structure 23 is seen as the place of Lady Xoc's. We now know that it was a rope studded with obsidian blades used in the ritual, and may have the very physical shards depicted themselves. It existed, in part, in Guatemala in the sense that if a project might excavate material remains, most would remain in Guatemala, but a few might be sent abroad for storage or display in US universities. Elaborately carved lintels of sapodilla wood, some 1,000 years old, are still seen in some Mayan ruins. But Dana also wanted to do a movie. Now, on the carvings that we studied, the blue rims of the glyphs are probably referring to the idea of preciousness. Now the other thing that, to me, is fascinating about even considering the problem of time, the way we might conceptualize it with respect to this carving, is that the carving itself, as we studied it, tends to prefigure later carvings by this very same sculptor, so theres a rich oeuvre, we know, of his work over a ten-year span. Bird Jaguar ascended the throne ten years after his father died, suggesting that there was perhaps a conflict about who was to become Yaxchilns ruler. 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. An example from the Mycenaean Greece cultural period (c. 1600 1100 BCE) is the Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae, Greece. The lintel has traces of Maya blue, turquoise and red pigment. Now, we also know from from the work of my colleagues with whom I did this book, Charles Golden and Andrew Scherer, that the Guatemalan part of Yaxchilan, which as you may know, sits in Mexico, across the Usumacinta River, is the bread basket of Yaxchilan. And at the same time, concurrently, there was, I would also say, a mounting or growing interest, in places like New York City or in Europe, in what was then called primitive art, a term, of course, we eschew completely at this point. Very few examples survive to the present because of the humid tropical environment. She kneels in front of Shield Jaguar who holds a great torch described in the text as a "burning spear illuminating a ritual that was probably held at night or set in the dark recess of a private chamber. Near the Usumacinta River in Chiapas (photo: Floating down the Usumacinta River in southeastern Mexico and northwestern Guatemala, various Maya sites materialize out of the dense jungle, some rising above the canopy and others subsumed by a tangle of green growth. And what were those pigments made of? We know, for instance, hes coming from an enemy dynasty. To become a master, a journeyman has to submit a master piece of work to . Lintel 25 made the journey in 1883. The Dharma at Big Sur Sri Moonshine and A New Day. Music written by John Adams and licensed with permission from Hendon Music. HOUSTON: This lintel was first seen by an adventurer named Dana Lamb. Such Maya rituals as bloodletting were only enacted on slaves. Lintels 24 and 25 are on permanent display in the British Museum's Mexican Gallery. It displays the typical Yaxchiln architectural stylea rectangular vaulted building with a stuccoed roof comb. He is shown wearing a pectoral with a representation of the sun god depicted. It can be a decorative architectural element, or a combined ornamented structural item. The site of Yaxchiln was only rediscovered in the 19th century as it stood in the midst ofthe dense tropical forest, and Maya glyphs only began to be translated in the 1960s. Then there was the time of quarrying, in which the limestone is taken out of a stone bed. And Dana eventually wrote a book about that trip called Enchanted Vagabonds, which was published in 1938. HOUSTON: The area is well endowed with carvings. It does have a descendant language that is spoken on the border of Guatemala and Honduras, but its, at this point, only used by about 30,000 people. Structure 33, Yaxchiln (Maya) (photo: Graham Duggan, CC BY-ND 2.0). And they are shown in the lintel as Atlantean beings who are literally supporting the sky itself, in which the king and his magnate appear. The sculpture Chibinda Ilunga, made by the Chokwe people of Central Africa, depicts a king as a powerful hunter. But why focus on Lady Xook rather than Shield Jaguar II exclusively? This limestone lintel is one of a series of three panels commissioned by Bird Jaguar IV for Structure 21 at Yaxchiln and was once set above the right-hand (north-west) doorway of the central chamber. 1 : to work out in detail : develop elaborate a theory. In fact, their canoe for these trips, The Vagabunda, is on display in the lobby of a mens club in Los Angeles called The Adventurers Club. It has been logged and given over to cattle farming or to intensive agriculture. These prestressed concrete lintels and blocks are components that are packed together and propped to form a suspended floor concrete slab. Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress, The blog has moved! It is odd that the men didn't have to "pull a thorned rope" through. Not a conventional way of getting from one place to the other. And its not so much in details, but its what you might say have to do with rituals, with covenants of duty, with relations to land, and indeed, to time itself. But as we discovered, the book is full of almost laughable fabulations. And so these arent just random aesthetic choices, but the colors applied to the stone are going to be carrying a lot of different meanings that were vitally important to the Maya. The figures on top correspond to the local ruler, whose name we know, Cheleew Chan Kinich. 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. The image and the inscription both reinforce the reign of the ruler and his dynastic ties, in this case via his wife. Olowe created this veranda post, one of several, for the exterior courtyard of a Yoruba palace. Now, what we know about Lamb, Dana Lamb, is that he comes across as a blundering neophyte in this deep jungle. And in addition to that, we are laying out the kind of cultural parameters for what will become Classic Maya civilization, which is the period I study. Ancient Maya limestone carving from Yaxchilan in modern Chiapas, Mexico, The lintel as displayed in the British Museum, Museo Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, Colossal quartzite statue of Amenhotep III, Amun in the form of a ram protecting King Taharqa, Kition Necropolis Phoenician inscriptions, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yaxchilan_Lintel_24&oldid=1109549671, Ethnographic objects in the British Museum, Artefacts from Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the British Museum, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2016, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 10 September 2022, at 14:44. 250-900), kings and queens of powerful city . But what we also know about Lamb is that he was notoriously reticent about where he found and photographed the carvings. Scrolls of blood can be seen around her mouth. It weighs 120 tons, with approximate dimensions 8.3 5.2 1.2 m,[2] one of the largest in the world. onwards, and an essential part of rulership and of all public rituals. Other stone, however, is almost crystalline in hardness. CUNO: So help us understand the topography and vegetation of the area and how consistent it is across Guatemala. Lintel 24 is the designation given by modern archaeologists to an ancient Maya limestone sculpture from Yaxchilan, in modern Chiapas, Mexico.The lintel dates to about 723-726 AD, placing it within the Maya Late Classic period. But each one of them is intensively looted. And in this is limestone, which the carvings made out of. So in all of these, what you do see is a kind of theme that threads through them, which is the stories had to be often rather desultory, like life itself. Draw two lines under each verb or verb phrase. A fearsome full-bodied portrait (66.181) shows Chac grimacing and holding a double-bladed axe as if to threaten the beholders. A carved bowl (2000.60) shows a feathered serpent, and a masterpiece double-chambered vessel (1978.412.90a, b) depicts an anthropomorphic character offering something to a giant mythological avian creature. This particular lintel (referred to by current day archaeologists as lintel 25) was located above the central doorway of a palace structure (structure 23) in Yaxchiln. And that is where a lot of these lintels come from, are these small communities that were under the thumb of Yaxchilan. HOUSTON: The next part of the project is to get back to the jungle. JIM CUNO: Hello, Im Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. A lintel or lintol is a type of beam that spans openings such as portals, doors, windows and fireplaces. And in fact, we know these limestones are literally millions of years old. There seems to be a very context-specific use of genre designs. 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. ", u-ba-ti-CHAB-li IX-CHAK?-ku-na-XOK-ki IX-k'a[ba]-la-XOK-ki IX-KALOM-TE In Lintel 24, he is depicted holding a torch above his first wife, Lady Xoc. Intricate latticework covers the symmetrical roof-comb and the buildings overall style is reminiscent of buildings found at other important Classic Maya city-states like Palenque. The civil war tended to suppress it; it tended to stop the more brazen acts of criminality. HOUSTON: The stone itself is a depiction of four figures, and probably a mythological being, as well. all of these were propagandistic artworks, Recognition of Neurological Progression/Deter, The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric, Lawrence Scanlon, Renee H. Shea, Robin Dissin Aufses, Eric Hinderaker, James A. Henretta, Rebecca Edwards, Robert O. Self, Byron Almen, Dorothy Payne, Stefan Kostka, Coastal ecosystems - coral reefs (Edexcel iGC. And therere also many, many devastations. Only the carver is, through his name glyphs, as it is expressed in the orbits of the lintel being lifted. Are there pigments left on the stone still? Bloodletting was a common ritual among elites and it is one of the most frequent subjects in Maya art. Ian tried hard to get to the bottom of that story, but he was never able to do so. It was April 7th, 1950. The carvings, however, are of a different sort. How many Olmec colossal heads have been discovered? What event is portrayed in the elaborately carved lintel showing the Maya ruler Shield Jaguar and his wife Lady Xoc (4.6.6)? Maya art was born from the interaction between societies in the Yucatan Peninsula and those of the Mexican Gulf Coast, known as the Olmec civilization. The lintels are a little bit complicated in another way, in that of course, they are difficult to look at, in that once you get into one of these, or pass through a narrow doorway in a Maya building, you have to arch your back and bend your neck. It was removed to the Museo Nacional de Antropologa e Historia in 1964. CUNO: Now, thats extremely interesting. This limestone lintel, considered one of the masterpieces of Maya art, is one of a series of three panels from Structure 23 at Yaxchiln, where it was set above the left (south-east) doorway. Approximate dimensions 8.3 5.2 1.2 m, [ 2 ] one of several, for exterior. Probably a mythological being, as it is odd that the men n't! And it is one of the Usumacinta River, in which the carvings, however, are seen! ) shows Chac grimacing and holding a double-bladed axe as if to the. 723 CE stuccoed roof comb only the carver is, through his glyphs. Wears an elaborate headdress, a journeyman has to submit a master piece work... 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