The Apotheosis of Janaab' Pakal: Science, History, and Religion at Classic Maya Palenque

Introduction

Introduction Just before dawn, a Maya king sat ready with his troops, awaiting the sighting of Venus as morning star before consenting to engage his enemy in warfare—or so a number of studies would have us believe. According to conventional interpretations, Chak Ek’ (the Maya name for Venus) would have to show his celestial face in order to generate an omen favorable for entering battle. Thus, the astronomer’s grave responsibility was to make accurate predictions of Chak Ek’s visibility so that his king and the king’s army would not have arisen early for nothing. Such a practice—that of preparing for what recent studies have called the “star war”—represents a type of labor often attributed to the ancient Maya astronomer.  Introduction  Indeed, numerous studies have attempted to show that ancient Maya kings set their political and ritual events according to celestial periodicities (Aveni and Hotaling 1994; Closs 1994; Dütting 1985; Martin 1996; Schele and Freidel 1990; Tate 1985; against the “star war” interpretation , see Aldana 2001b, 2005a). These studies begin by choosing a correlation between the Christian calendar and the Maya Long Count.1 They then attempt to reconstruct the night skies observable to the ancient kings on the dates of the recorded ceremonies or events. Although straightforward in approach, these studies produce results that cannot be accepted unequivocally at least until a day-for-day calendar correlation is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Several competing studies, however, show that the validity of the calendar correlation most often invoked is still in question.2 At some level, then, we must be wary of the specific findings and eventual interpretations produced by methodologies that are utterly dependent on the accuracy of the calendar correlation utilized.3 A different approach to revealing the work of the ancient Maya astronomer avoids the calendar correlation entirely. Popular during the early twentieth century when computers were not available to reproduce hypothetical historical night skies (making the search for correlations between astronomical events and historical records excruciatingly tedious), this method holds the potential for more stable interpretations since the results would not change with a change in calendar correlation. In the 1930s, John Teeple (1931) used this method effectively to show interesting patterns within the lunar records of the Classic period. Almost fifty years later, Floyd Lounsbury (1980) used a similar approach to reveal an astronomical component to hieroglyphic treatments of mythology. Both of these studies (covered in detail in Chapters 2, 3, and 4) suggest a more sophisticated job description for ancient Maya astronomers by revealing their concern with mythology and political rhetoric alongside their purported appointment-making duties. Moreover, Teeple’s and Lounsbury’s studies will remain relevant regardless of any future calendar correlation revisions. Despite the value of these studies, they, too, have left out what I consider to be a critical aspect of analysis. Like many others, they rarely refer to specific historical individuals or their social, religious, Introduction  and political contexts with regard to the theories proposed. At some level, these omissions may result from the relative scarcity of scholars trained both to read the hieroglyphic inscriptions and to understand the ancient practice of astronomy. On another level, however, the oversight has been methodologically intentional, following an effort to create direct associations between hieroglyphic records and natural phenomena. Rhetorically, such an approach might be considered a revelation of the science of astronomy, intentionally leaving out the human agents who enacted it, but in this book I take precisely the opposite approach. In the pages that follow, I argue for a very specific role of astronomy to the reign of K’inich Kan B’ahlam, tenth4 ruler of a Classic Maya city then known as B’aakal (now known as Palenque). In doing so, I take an approach inspired by recent studies in the history of circumMediterranean -derivative (cMd) science.5 These studies demonstrate that the practice of science and the developments that derive therefrom are best understood by examining the historical context—physical , political, social, religious, and economic—in which they were enmeshed. The point is only accentuated, I argue, because we still are coming to an understanding of the type of sciences under study. That is, the discipline of archaeology has revealed much about the social structure and general development of Maya culture, but we are only just beginning to use hieroglyphic decipherment to understand the intellectual history of these people. Through...