The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities

5. Regimes

c h a p t e r 5 Regimes You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game. For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treated them all as a single State. But if you deal with them as many, and give the wealth or power or persons of the one to the others, you will always have a great many friends and not many enemies. Socrates in Plato, The Republic The urban precincts of Chichén Itzá, the first major post-Classic period (a.d. 925–1530) political center in the Yucatecan Maya lowlands, mark a significant departure from the Classic period Maya political landscape. Whereas the Classic period cities bore the personal imprint of individual rulers and dynasties in the form and aesthetics of major constructions (see chapter 3), Chichén Itzá bears the traces of a more plurally sited governmental apparatus (Stone 1999: 299). None of the pivotal events in the life of a ruler (birth, accession, death) that provided major narrative foci for Classic period monuments are recorded in early post-Classic hieroglyphs. Nor do we find at Chichén Itzá the sort of built dynastic genealogies that were recorded on the lintels at Yaxchilan (Schele and Mathews 1998: 234–39;Tate 1992). Much diminished are the pyramidal temple complexes (now represented only by the Castillo) that, during the Classic period, had so profoundly located authority in isolated rulers who mediated the 184 terrain between earth and cosmos. Instead, what we find at Chichén Itzá is an urban fabric framed by novel architectural forms, such as the Temple of theWarriors, that instantiated political practices across multiple horizontal relationships rather than a singular vertical axis. Andrea Stone (1999: 314) has argued that this transformation in the physical space of the post-Classic urban landscape was a critical element in the expansion of Maya political practices to focus on institutions constituted as “common ground” on which factional shared governance took shape.1 The lines of this factional competition and collaboration were likely drawn between rival “houses” whose membership was described in terms of kinship and lineage (Gillespie 2000: 467). At the center of this transition from Classic to post-Classic political authority lies a profound reshu›ing of the relationships constituting governing regimes, marked most conspicuously by the depersonalization of rule—what T. Patrick Culbert (1991: 327) has described as a separation of political o‹ces from the charismatic personalities of o‹ce holders. This shift in Maya political regimes seems to have its origins in the terminal Classic when hieroglyphic inscriptions, once a guarded prerogative of the k’ul ahau (hereditary king or divine lord), began to record a proliferation of titles for other political leaders, such as the sahal (secondary lord). This expansion in the o‹cially recognized members of Maya regimes is particularly pronounced at sites such as Copan, Yaxchilan, and Piedras Negras , where sahals erected their own monuments or appeared with the k’ul ahau on shared monuments. The built environment of Chichén Itzá can thus be understood as an integral part of a shifting alignment within Maya urban-centered political regimes that entailed both an ebbing of the power of the k’ul ahau and a broadening of authority sited in a number of factional leaders of powerful houses.2 The transformations in the cities of the Maya lowlands from the terminal to the post-Classic emphasize the close association between the constitution of the authority of political regimes and the form and aesthetics of urban political landscapes. A similarly close association between political authority and city spaces has been described for numerous other early complex polities.When provincial rulers were empowered under the REGIMES 185 1. This is to suggest not that there was no factional competition during the Classic period but that the constitutive interests within this competition had changed rather significantly. 2. My thanks to Cynthia Robin for pointing out to me the profound spatial and political shifts that accompanied the Classic to post-Classic transition. Zhou kings of early first millennium b.c. China...