Maya Creation Myths: Words and Worlds of the Chilam Balam

2: Aspects of Ancient Maya Intellectual Culture

13 As with traditions of knowledge everywhere, the creation myths written in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel were composed in dialogue with the voices past and present, even (or especially) with those voices that conquistadors and missionaries attempted to appropriate or suppress. In this chapter I provide a brief orientation to some aspects of ancient Maya civilization, with special reference to what is documented in pre-Hispanic hieroglyphic texts regarding Maya intellectual culture that served as discursive resources at various stages in the dialogical emergence of Classical Yucatecan Maya creation myths. ancient maya societies The area in which ancient Maya societies emerged encompasses territory in what is today southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and western parts of Honduras. This ecologically diverse region consists of Pacific coastal plains, volcanic highlands, and tropical lowlands. Yucatecan-speaking Maya peoples have long occupied the relatively flat and dry northern subdivision of the lowlands. Surrounded by Caribbean Aspects of Ancient Maya Intellectual Culture c H a P t e r t w o Aspects of Ancient Maya Intellectual Culture 14 seacoasts, the karstic landscape of the Yucatán peninsula is characterized by shallow topsoil, with the principal sources of surface water being large natural wells called cenotes (Yucatec: dzonot), near which human settlements are frequently located. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence establish that by AD 250–300 (the beginning of the Classic period), Maya peoples were organized in numerous independent city-states sharing certain aspects of elite culture. Individual states were ruled by hereditary kings (ahau), or more rarely queens (ix ahau) (Martin and Grube 2000:81). Textual evidence surviving on carved monuments at the remains of Classic period cities at Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras indicates the presence of a double-descent kinship system among the nobility like that later attested for colonial Yucatec Mayas (V. Bricker 2002a). Although these kings were the predominant subjects of those monumental inscriptions that survive, the Classic Maya political structure was also populated by a number of lesser officials such as the sajal (provincial governor) and the ah kuhun (possibly a royal clerk; see Jackson and Stuart 2001). Furthermore, in the shifting alliance system of ancient Maya city-states, kings could be the clients of other kings. An expression often occurring in the surviving inscriptions identifies historical personages as y ahau ‘his (client) king’ (for a detailed account of the dynasties of several individual Classic Maya city-states, see Martin and Grube 2000). In the Late Classic period (AD 600–900), literate Maya civilization was mostly concentrated in the southern lowlands. Politically balkanized, lowland Maya city-states nonetheless shared a common hieroglyphic writing system that may have expressed a Ch’olan Maya prestige language unifying peoples speaking numerous vernaculars (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 2000; Mora-Morín 2009). During the Late Classic period, political and ritual functions appear to have coalesced in the person of the kuhul ahau ‘divine king.’ Monuments were frequently erected commemorating rituals in which these divine kings, sometimes along with their wives or other political officials, participated with gods or as gods (Houston and Stuart 1996). The civic monuments erected by the divine kings utilized numerous calendrical systems of historical, divinatory, astronomical, and other timekeeping concerns. In one of the most elaborate calendrical commensurations in world history, these were combined into a single “Initial Series” calendar. The space devoted to this Initial Series commensuration makes up a large portion of a given text on numerous ancient monuments. Given the great amount of space and intellectual labor involved, the motivation behind the Initial Series calendar was much more profound than those of us in the contemporary West attribute to timekeeping today. Aspects of Ancient Maya Intellectual Culture 15 In ancient Maya civilization, belief in calendrical divination meant that proper timekeeping was essential not only to tracking astronomical and seasonal phenomena but to the very success of all those human activities, episodic or quotidian, necessary for subsistence, material production, and social reproduction. For multiple reasons whose relative importance is still debated among scholars, the traditional polities of the Maya lowlands unraveled during the Classic to Postclassic transition (AD 750–1050) (Demarest, P. Rice, and D. Rice 2004). The concentration of lowland Maya population and its civilization shifted from the southern to the northern lowlands, a transition completed during the Late Postclassic period (AD 1200–ca. 1540). First the Terminal Classic city of Chichén Itzá (A. Andrews, E. Andrews, and Castellanos 2003; Kowalski...