From the Myth of Kings to the Math of Kings: Art, Science, and the Ancient Maya

thank you all very much for coming I'm James Brooks president of SAR and this is a continuing in our membership lecture series for this year where we wanted to look back and try to demonstrate to our members just how broad the the range of research that SAR has supported over the last 42 years at least in the in the resident scholar program we've had more than 200 resident scholars over those those decades and we went back and tried to find some people who were crowd favorites in the past when they were here how many of you were at Bill saturos first lecture in 2005 now you remember that yeah it's this is quite a way to wrap things up so before we get started I want to thank the series sponsors for this this lecture series the William H Donner foundation Betty and Luke Portman endowment fund Thornburg investment management the lanin Foundation and the Pikes Peak Community Foundation Bill's bill Souter knows lecture is sponsored by George Wilson and George are you with us somewhere yes there's George thank you very much and I think Betty Ford but is here as well I bet Thanks thank you both so much and a special thanks to Georgia and Sheila Gummer Minh for sponsoring the after lecture dinner over at la cocina George is a longtime participant in si RS programs was our first neh Fellow in 1974 he was very very young at that time he had just it just got his doctorate and and Sheila has put up with us all for many years so thank you for doing that I'm bill Souter no took his PhD from Harvard University in the year 2000 he was with SAR as in 2005 and six as an neh and Weatherhead resident scholar well with us he was working on it on a book called let there be Kings creation mythology and the origins of my divine rule he's currently a sister assistant professor of archeology of Boston University from 1994 to 2000 dr. Saturno served as a field director of the Rio amarillo archaeological project in western Honduras examining ancient socio-political relationships between large and small Maya cities around the site of copan in march of 2001 and some of you who heard his first lecture will remember this while exploring in northeast Guatemala for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and ethnology he discovered the remote archaeological site of son Bart below and the oldest intact murals ever found in the Maya world since then he has directed the son Bartolo regional archaeological project dedicated to the excavation and conservation of these spectacular murals and understandings and bartholow role in the largely unexplored region of the Maya area during the period when Maya civilization itself was just beginning to form now ten years later in 2010 Saturno and Franco rosy discovered what they believed to be a work room of a short dune record keeper the murals actual dune are separated by more than 900 years nearly a millennium of Maya history from those at San Bartolo and reflect very different relationships between this and the cosmos dr. bill Saturno explores the most recent finds in this lecture tonight and paints a picture of Maya society driven by royal figures who exploited art and science to establish and maintain their place as symbol and center of Maya urban life so please join me in welcoming dr. bill Saturno thank you well that about does it I mean the introduction was spectacular thank you all for coming I am going to talk tonight about these two very different sets of Maya paintings they're separated by those 900 years but they're also only separated by about eight kilometers right so that having such a sort of condensed geographical area but this really broad temporal expanse makes for some sort of very interesting comparisons as to really how we get from A to B in this part of the Maya world now specifically which part of the Maya world is this this that I'm showing you is sort of just a general map of the Maya area of Mexico Guatemala Belize Honduras and El Salvador and zooming in you'll see that I have some Bartolo and she'll tune really as a single entity and I have them as a single entity mainly because at the scale that this map is drawn two separate eight kilometers between them it really just looked like a you know sort of a Bactrian camel in the middle of the Maya lowlands and so it made more sense to just have one hump instead of two so some of our toll is a little bit further to the north altogether it's a much smaller site than that of showtune of course in 2001 while exploring well essentially just by good fortune we ended up at the site of some Bartolo and discovered the first part of a mural program that we would spend the next 10 years excavating and conserving and it began really with this very simple little scene of the my amazed God that we have here he's in this great dynamic pose he's at the center of the north wall and his arms reach out in front of him but his face looks behind to a series of kneeling figures he's actually sort of passing offerings out of the underworld on his journey to the surface of the earth now as we continued excavations in this chamber and it really is really an odd little chamber architectural II this is a very strange building it's strange for a number of reasons one is that this is this sort of nice big platform there's a big pyramid on top of it there's a temple at the top of that pyramid and there are paintings inside that temple very fine paintings unfortunately that temple is very close to the modern surface and the paintings that the Maya left in place in that room were destroyed by time the walls of that room that the Maya knocked down ironically those paintings have been preserved so that we have a sense of what's going on up top and it's a very fine painting but it's very restricted in terms of its audience now the murals at some are told that I'm going to talk about come from down here they are not at the top of the temple they're not even on the front side of the pyramid they're at the bottom and at the back there is no great staircase that someone has to ascend in order to get into this room there's a single step there's a very wide but low doorway and once you enter this space you're essentially surrounded by the paintings you actually have to duck a little bit to get into the room even I have to duck a little bit to get into the room but once you get in you stand up and the murals began their feet are all at eye level and you're surrounded naaah nine and a half meters of paintings on the west wall four and a half meters of paintings to the north the east wall and the south wall were unfortunately destroyed in antiquity again left only in a fragmentary State a puzzle of more than five thousand pieces that we're currently trying to put back together the quality of the painting in this room is spectacular it's even more remarkable to say that this isn't the good mural right the idea that the one up top was actually the important one painted with a brush with only three hairs the hieroglyphs are more fine the lines themselves tiny minuscule details painted and then to see this and say okay this was the one that was essentially downstairs important but for more mass consumption this isn't a public painting it's not on a wall in the middle of town but at the same time it is not a restricted access space this is at the bottom at the back the story that's told combines this myth of creation right sort of each wall contains various chapters of this epic tale of creation different characters different gods the eat some not the Creator God the the principal bird deity as we call him mood to eat some not the Avatar the avian avatar of the Creator God the false son that we know from later Maya mythology from the Popol Vuh these are characters that we see this individual the patron deity of Maya Kings we see repeatedly on the west wall of this room he's identified by the single black spot on his cheek in the Popol Vuh from the 17th century he was known as una poo in classic period we see him on Maya vases his name slightly different who know how that hoon is the number one that's the spot on his cheek what he was called in this painting we don't know this is from the first century BC centuries earlier than the images we have of him in the classic period but what he's doing on the murals at San Bartolo these are recognizable actions these are things that we see or expect who napoo or who know how to be doing essentially defining the space doing what Kings do establishing the kingdom we see him repeatedly on the west wall and I won't show all four of his appearances but we see him repeatedly performing self-sacrifice in front of a series of trees and in in those trees is this great monstrous bird and see his great tail feathers hanging down his talons his wings spread out all right this isn't a normal bird if you're walking through the forest and you what when you saw this bird you'd probably say oh crap and run out of the forest right this bird has spear points in his wings he wears a crown not common among normal birds he's also a little bit portly not that I'm you know have anything I can say but he's caused the branches of this tree to splay out under his great weight in front of him are who know how right the single spot on his cheek offers his own blood the blood offered from his genitals right I will not be duplicating this this evening even at the dinner so don't don't worry it's not like one price of admission gets me and then another price gets me running a spear through my genitals we don't have that price of admission what he has tied to his back is a deer in this case and you see he stands just along the ground line here a sacrifice of that same deer right bent backwards over this tripod tied with this great knot his belly has been split open stones have been piled up and his essence his life force and smoke rise up as an offering to this monstrous bird the other sacrifices that we see because again we see him four times the first time we see him he's standing in a field of flowers offering his own blood and the scent of those flowers the next time we see him as though we've turned the page in a great Maya book we see him offering his own blood again this time floating just above the ground line Birds tied to his back offering the sacrifice of a turkey we sent see him sacrificing a deer and then finally we see him walking in a current of water the fish in a net on his back sacrificing that great catfish right all to this monstrous bird essentially in front of four of these trees the trees of the four corners of the world he's essentially creating a bounded space if we think about this monstrous bird as a symbol of the wilds of those forests right and how that's the exact opposite of what we expect of civilization right civilization is the creation of man man-made creations are creations of four sides right the four-sided house plaza temple cornfield these are all artificial creations brought about by us their invasions into the forests wild what Hoonah how is doing is he's defining the space offering these sacrifices this bird is essentially descending from this floral paradise of the east where he begins into the underworld of the West he's clearing the way for the coronation of kings now this isn't actually the only time we see these four sacrifices these exact for sacrifices occur at the bottom of four pages in The Dresden codex right a book that was written at some point maybe in the 13th or 14th century these pages discuss ceremony that's taking place at the new year essentially renewing the world through sacrifice the sacrifice is being conducted in front of four trees those trees are named with the cardinal directions the tree of the east the tree of the West the north of the south they're also named as the tree of that monstrous bird right the tree of MU to eat some nom and the sacrifice is being offered we have the scattering of blood actually coming from a sacrificed bird right this is not wound up who or who know how doing it it is a priest right is it there's a ritual specialist that is using the blood of a sacrificed animal and offering that on top of the hock of a deer a fish a turkey and incense a great incent sorry oh the smell of flowers so that fifteen hundred years later after the paintings at San Bartolo show a God essentially creating the four corners of the world creating that bound space of civilization you have priests re-enacting that thing doing the same ceremony in order to renew the world at the new year now at some Bartolo the point of this this establishment of four corners it really revolves around what goes on between the four corners once you have the four corners of the world here sort of represented by these four babies and this guy bursting forth it's like a happy birthday right the surprise he's just bursting out of this gourd and he's surrounded by blood and life force he's just coming out of this this is coming out party we actually have an image of this gourd on one of the the walls it's before this in time essentially the gourd is in the hand of the Creator God he's handing it out of the cave mouth right of the underworld we can't see who he's handing it to but what we can see is that it is labeled with three Maya hieroglyphs those hieroglyphs the first one is blood the second one is man and the third one is gourd right they've essentially labeled this thing blood man gourd like later in this story you'll see this thing explode with blood and men right a happy for direction pinata with at the very center this guy with a jade belt and a helmet an ear spool he's different than the other guys around him well who is he well on the west wall we see him we see him seated upon a scaffolding right here is his belt his ear spool it's got the same helmet he's being crowned king right we have an attendant here climbing up a ladder passing him a headdress that headdress is the same headdress that Maya Kings wear for the next seven hundred years right the texts ends in the glyph a how for Lord hurricane so here at the site of San Bartolo arguably a very small site in the pre-classic right in the 1st century BC in a painting that is intended as a message right this is the doctrine essentially that demonstrates not only the acts of gods in creation but relates all of those acts ties them all together to a single event which is the crowning of the king the king at San Bartolo is not claiming the right to rule through an extensive dynastic line he's in fact showing himself in the same guys as gods right I am King because I do the things that gods do I'm your intermediary I am the representative of God on earth do you have any questions I'm the one to ask how do you know did you see me pop out of the gourd did you see all the babies in the blood I'm standing on the scaffolding I look just like the maize God right these are the things that I do now it was great seeing all of those little sort of trivia things about Morley coming up to this talk because this is of course a sign posted by Sylvain is morally he posted these signs all over the patan essentially saying to cheek letters to guys heading out into the rainforest looking for gum resin on the next season that you go out into the forest take note if you see any archaeological sites especially those with carved hieroglyphic monuments because if you find some and you can bring me to them on my next visit I will pay you twenty five dollars in gold that's a great deal by the way I'd still take it just so you know these signs no longer exists but nonetheless this sign led to the discovery of the site of Shelton in 1915 a guy by the name of Elio Aguayo achi Claro responding to this sign produced good coordinates to bring more Lee and his team back to the site in the 1920s Morley visited the site named the site shul tuned after one particular monument at the site which was at the time thought to be the most recent of all Maya monuments sure tune means-end stone the monument dated to 889 ad was essentially as far as Morley was concerned the last monument erected by the Maya of the old Empire now of course at this point we know there are some monuments that date to more recent than that only a few and some that date to that exact same date of 889 ad but nonetheless what was going on at shield tune at the very end of the ninth century was very much business as usual now that was all fine and good we have show tune that was known some Bartolo unknown now we know about both of them they're separated by eight kilometers and we know that show tune starts out as far as you know in the early classic there are monuments at shal tune that date to around four maybe 300 AD so from 300 AD to almost 900 AD shal tune is going strong San Bartolo in comparison is very active from around the 4th century BC until the 1st or 2nd century AD so it very much seems like show tune picks up right where San Bartolo leaves off now that may or may not be the case and our current research is about trying to figure out what exactly is going on in that middle time but in 2010 the very day that I finished the conservation work in San Bartolo the very day the last stone was put in the ceiling and by putting that last stone in the ceiling there's a large conservation crew and this was the last day there was really just a couple of stones left but they called me and they said there's this stone we have to get it up there but we can't put it up there because you know we need to excavate a little bit more up into the ceiling in order to have space to maneuver it into place and I looked up at the ceiling and I said I can't do that that stone will fall like I know it if I move this one that one's falling down and I actually don't know how many stones above it will fall down but that's the one I can see and I guarantee it will fall but I don't know what else is above we could have a huge collapse I don't know what's gonna happen but we sat there and we sat there and the fact of the matter remains we could not finish the work that we were doing 10 years of work could not be finished unless that one stone could be removed so I went up and I held my hands on the stone that I was certain would fall when I removed the other stone can I held my hand on it I didn't feel any weight I thought huh and I pulled my hand away nothing I put my hand back on it I pulled my hand away when I turned the conservator and I said I really thought that was gonna wham and it fell right on my head two rocks actually one and the one above it I of course caught them so as not to have them fall back on the mural we were able to put that stone in place but I did give myself quite a nice concussion a lovely reminder really from the Maya gods that you're not really in charge of the situation thanks for visiting wacko on that very day as I'm nursing my dizzy skull back in camp arguing with my wife who's telling me I should really go out to the hospital and he's saying oh totally fine oh I'm sure it'll just pass I'm just gonna kill me I'd have died already it's fine I was wearing a hat after all not a hard hat but a hats cushioned the blow at least on that day one of my undergraduate students very excited comes back to camp a student by the name of max Chamberlain now max Chamberlain had actually said when we headed down to Guatemala well bill I'm really thrilled I'm gonna get to go to Guatemala with you I know you found that mural that's awesome I'm gonna find one I was like that good luck max I mean murals don't it's not that the Maya didn't paint them they certainly painted lots of murals it's that they don't really preserve very well in a tropical environment that's why there haven't been a lot of them found Bonampak was found in 1946 then some Bartolo was found fifty five years later in 2001 there have been some other ones found since then so max had an argument I'm pretty sure I'm gonna find one go ahead max have at it max came into camp that day bill I found a mural said no I don't think you did max didn't know I I found it it's really cool he showed me the picture he drew of it I found I was really excited about it and I feel bad about this now because what I said to max was no max you didn't find a mural and we've never had this conversation first you should find about a million dollars then come and tell me you found a mural but certainly don't tell me you found a mural on the day we finished with the last mural that took us 10 years to deal with I have no time for a mural I have no money for a mural you found nothing thanks for coming I calm down the next day I started to feel a little less nauseated a little bit better I looked at the pictures max it strong and eventually I agreed to go out and look at Max's mural there it is and uh I felt a lot better about it I can tell you but it's not gonna take me 10 years like there's there's a line there it's another little line sort of circle max had imagined this brilliant thing this was for max in ear spool there was a face in here somewhere there was this great headdress the drawing that he had was spectacular he had actually found five of them that day he took me to a hole but what he found were a number of walls it's like those are walls they don't actually have paint on them this one does have paint on it but unfortunately it's about a meter below the surface but it's a very small mount it's a house mount this is not a temple this is not some pyramid some Bartolo is 15 meters underground it's buried by an enormous later construction this is a meter below the surface I said max it's really very cool that you found a painting here you know this is essentially a household painting this is part of an elite residential complex you know it's not some enormous palace and here you have painting in it now unfortunately we're never gonna know what it looks like you know the fact is that it's just too close to the surface it simply won't be served but at the very least been uncovered by looters this part was clearly decayed more than it would be underneath the fill I thought well at the very least max we can at least find out how big the room is said I'll just excavate looks like the looters tunnel almost hits the back wall it didn't quite get to the back wall but you know if I just continue maybe 20 30 centimeters I should be able to hit the back wall the room can't be much wider because I've had a vault clearly wouldn't have been too wide and I said and it doesn't look like the looters tunnel tried to get to the center of the room there wasn't a lot of mound left on either side it's about we know where the west wall is this is the west wall that max had uncovered a piece of or it's seen uncovered I said if I just dig perpendicular to the tunnel maybe a meter maybe half a meter I'll find the east wall then we'll know what the dimensions are we can go home happy say there was a painting you found it it's great would have been nice see what it was but alas that'll never happen so I dug the 20 centimeters and that's what I found it's like max okay so that's the face of a Maya King and he's wearing this great blue headdress this big red feather across he's got feathers coming out of his ear spools he's carrying this little white staff in front of him and I thought okay that's that's not ten years but it's something that's really wild that why is this here why do we have why's it preserved hey there shouldn't be a portrait of the King in this house why do I have a portrait of a king in a house this is in the king house it's just a house so why is he here who invited him here and who left him painted on the wall and then excavated a little bit as I had planned the east see what I'd see and I found that very small very poorly eroded badly damaged section of painting the east wall is really very close to the exterior surface of the mound but it was covered in numbers I thought I don't know what those are that's a lot of numbers well we'll figure it out after the following year we were posed we sort of faced a real dilemma because the fact of the matter is is I didn't know how long it would take to go from a painting like this to a painting like Max's I know that Max's painting had been uncovered by looters but I don't know when did it I don't know how quickly it dissolved to the state that it's in did that take five years did it take one year and then take 30 years I have no idea so all of a sudden what I don't know is how long is this gonna last we've documented this part as best we can clearly the rest of the room is painted clearly the east wall is very damaged the north wall is in better shape because it was the back wall of the room the west wall I'm assuming gets in better shape the farther the north we go but there's a lot of questions to be answered what we did was we returned the following year myself my graduate student Franco Rossi Heather Hearst the artist that had drawn the murals at San Bartolo as well as the murals at Bonampak Angela and bass Rivera who had been our wall painting conservator at some Bartolo from the beginning resident here of Santa Fe Angela bass she came out as well and this very small crew to try and do as quickly as possible excavate document conserve record and hope for the best in terms of this painting that expedition was put together very quickly and funded entirely by National Geographic as part of that they sent down their photographers this is the mound now you can see it's there's another one right there I mean this is just a house mount and as we excavated the rest of this room we found that the north wall was spectacular the west wall got better the further north we went and though the east wall was in the worst condition of the three had actually proved to be the most interesting we were able to heather was able to do architectural reconstructions this is the king who sits in this niche in the back of the room and I'll talk a little bit about the east wall first now you can see the east wall doesn't look like much right it doesn't look much different than Max's wall there is some detail that we can make out see this black here and with the wonderful eye of Heather and you can see this is actually the face of a Maya guys wearing particular headdress and we recognize him best because there are three of him on the west wall so that he's fairly easy to see the rest of this wall is really a mystery to us but what we noticed was that in the areas that weren't covered by the figure there are these texts some look absolutely minuscule texts well painted hired lifts about a centimeter by a centimeter some of them half a centimeter by half a centimeter all painted in black or red line very similar to the kind of things that we would see in codices now normally a Maya text follows a particular syntax a pattern right in which you're given a date and then after the date you were given an action after that action you're given the object the action was enacted on and then in the end you're given the subject he who did the thing but in this instance we don't get any event we actually just get a number in a date and then a number in a day and then a number in a day it's just days it's just counts of days and when we look at the whole wall we see that there are tons of these texts that in fact all the available space on the wall between existing figures is covered with these minut texts and those texts themselves were not permanent fixtures in the room because we see where plaster has been covered over in a pre-existing text in order to write a new one on top of it right this is very much being used like a blackboard now I'll focus first on this text using a little processing the image what you have is a series this is actually the very spot that my little test excavation to the east wall hit I hit those numbers there we go now when we uncovered the whole thing we realized that we had actually a fairly long array of numbers each of which had a column with three numbers in them and at the head of each column was a glyph now those numbers are quite telling because in reality what they represent we could identify a pattern here we had thirteen five four how the Maya write numbers this is actually the number four thousand seven hundred and eighty four the way Maya units work these are ones these are 20s and these are three hundred and sixty s so you have thirteen times 360 plus 100 plus four gives you four thousand seven hundred and thirty-four forty-seven 84 now this column here we see they have twelve at the top then a fourteen and a six that's four thousand six hundred and six now these numbers are probably not jumping out at you and saying wow that's an incredibly significant number 4606 well of course Eureka forty-seven eighty-four aha we've uncracked the code no no of course not but the importance between those two numbers is that they're separated by a hundred and seventy-eight and four minus a hundred and seventy eight or one hundred and seventy seven those are very important numbers because those are the numbers the Maya used keep track of the moon why well the period of the Moon is 29 and a half days more or less well 29 and a half sucks mathematically right that's just the basics of it adding 29 and a half's you're not getting anywhere how do you calculate that what they did was they group them in periods of six they took six lunations twenty nine and a half times six is a hundred and seventy seven now if you add a hundred and seventy sevens over and over and over and over again right eventually you start to get farther and farther away from the actual reality of the Moon not unlike our leap here right our leap year we know the year is 365 days every four years we have that extra day except for every hundred years you don't add the extra day except for every 400 years you do add the extra day ok these are probably parts of this equation that you don't know or don't need to know because who lives that long nobody but the fact of the matter is is it's this dance trying to use right sort of whole numbers to try and estimate what is a not perfect period right 365 and not quite a quarter days we estimate with our little dance of leap here not leave here leap here not leap here well the same thing is going on with this table that in fact what the Maya are doing and this column if we reconstruct the numbers if we reconstruct the numbers all the way back what they do is they add 177 177 177 177 178 every fifth or sixth time they need to add a 178 so that in the end after 162 lunations four thousand seven hundred and eighty four days their estimated period of the moon is off by about three minutes per year that is a good system now why is it painted on the wall of this room initial tune and it has nothing to do with the other paintings of the room right there's an image of the King right what does this have to do with the king in reality we see that all of the writings small writings in the room and one of the things David Stewart also noticed he was the one that said well and at the top of each of these columns by the way is the glyph for the moon and in fact each of these columns there's a patron of the moon where the patron is either a woman a skull or corn god it just goes back and forth between the three of them just alternate alternate alternates between these lunar patrons and what you get is a table that can actually be used so that if you have one date you know where the moon is you know what the patron god of the moon is you know what lunation in that patron god six lunations you're in and you add a number of days you then calculate so we go forward this many days you end up later in the table and you can tell where you're supposed to be so then if you're writing a monumental inscription this is the table you use to calculate the right days after the right amount of time we see this in one place we've never seen this type of table anywhere in the Mayan world during the classic period the only place we see these are in the codices in The Dresden codex we see tables very much like this in that instance adding not 178 days every fifth or sixth time but adding a hundred and forty-eight because by that point that's what they're using to calculate when you're going to have an eclipse because they realize that an eclipse happens during that particular lunation that if you shorten that other lunation from 177 if you use five nations instead of six to 148 then you get in a period where you're going to have an eclipse one of the other things we have written on the wall here which you've never seen anyplace else other than my codex is what we call a ring number this is actually incised into the wall and it starts with ten key me and it gives long count of days right actually a thirty four thousand three hundred and fourteen days but this ring the circle around the last number means that this doesn't function like a normal Maya date normally what we would do is we take the number of days listed and we would add them to their zero day that circle in fact means you subtract them from the zero day you actually go back in time to a period before the current zero day so that this date being recorded is actually the 25th of September 3207 BC right now why do they do that what they'd like to do is they're going back in time to an event that takes place sometimes a celestial event at least that's what it is in the codices a celestial event that takes place in the previous era and they're connecting it to the event that's taking place in the current era alright those are the calculations that they're doing and we see them in two places now the codices from around the fourteenth or fifteenth century and here on the wall it shall tune from the beginning of the ninth century sickle early the north wall here we have Heather's reconstruction painting over the top makes everything a little bit clearer we have our king and his glorious headdress seated on his throne holding the sceptre in his hand there's actually a text in front of him that describes what he's doing that he's impersonating a Maya God he's appearing as the image of that god on this day we have this individual in front of him this large medallion on his chest he's well dressed as got a little jade wristlets he actually extends his hand it looks like he holds a stylus in his hand like he himself is a scribe his title is given right here his title is eat scene taught and it's not a title that were terribly familiar with it means little brother obsidian or the younger of sitting or junior obsidian and we don't know what an obsidian is but this is the title that all the individuals on the walls in showtune bear they are all called an obsidian of one rank or another now there's some other sort of interesting details right here you have just a sketch of a head just painted disembodied head floating in the air behind this individual you have this guy here kneeling behind the king essentially holding up his headdress there's another text above him as well that actually gives the King's name and titles the name part is unfortunately damaged but his titles identify him as the holy Lord of showtune but importantly there's this little bit here just a little bit it's painted in red if I process it for you you'll see it's another series of numbers now these numbers are much larger than those numbers that we saw in that lunar table right that lunar table was one series of numbers these ones have five digits so that these count days 20 days 360 days 7,200 days and a hundred and forty-four thousand days now the largest of these is 17 of those 144,000 day periods 17 boxes these are all huge numbers some of them to Bach Tunes 17 12 8 right they all just do these large numbers but what do they have in common they're not an additive sequence like that other table right they're not adding up series of days but what they do is they're all each one of them individually is a multiple of important periods of Maya time each of them is a multiple not only of the 260 day ceremonial calendar but also of the 365 day solar calendar each of them is also a multiple of that combination of that 18 thousand nine hundred and eighty day cycle that 52 years cycled the calendar round each of them is also a multiple of five hundred eighty four day period of Venus each of them is also a multiple of the seven hundred and eighty day period of Mars in fact the largest visible number for all these like fifty three thousand something or other which happens to relate the period of Mars to that fifty-two year period it coordinates those two these are all just large commensurate numbers what does that mean it means we're in a room full of geeks that's what it means for those of you that unfortunately dozed off at the third number that I gave good reason I look that was like yeah I am NOT the number guy but there are number guys and those number guys crunch these numbers and this is like asking someone to figure out a problem and say what I need are numbers that all of these numbers can be factored into go and they're just painted up on the wall now again the only place we see stuff like this is in The Dresden codex it's in fact a table very much like the one we're just looking at it happens to be also right next to one of the versions of the Ring number it's fun to show you that this is actually this page has a whole series of these little numerical tables these tables of multiples that's what the Maya were about during this time they're about understanding their connection to these cyclical patterns in time and space especially being able to predict when things like Venus will appear as the morning star where it will vanish as the evening star that period of time between those was a warning cycle that the buyer were very focused on what these numbers do is that they sort of tie in to all of these important cycles in Maya life but why are cycles important well throughout the classic period those cycles those kalindra chol cycles are used really for one thing and one thing only and that is to anchor the events in a King's life to mythic time right what I do happens on this date this date happens to be the anniversary of an event that happened long in the past when that event happened Venus was in this place Mars was in this place the moon was in this place right that's what these numbers do that's what these tables do now what we're looking at in this room is really the first time we get to see the production of this knowledge the use of this knowledge during the classic period because essentially what we're looking at are often things that are sort of discontinuous we see these calculations of all of these cycles in the codices but we don't see them during the classic period we have all of these classic inscriptions in which these calculations clearly had to have been done but we don't get to see how they did them here at showtune we finally have a space in which the tables are being recorded at the time that these dates are being used and manipulated and projected by Maya Kings now that's a very different statement than the one being made by the Kings at San Bartolo the Kings at Shelton are saying I am King because I am at one with the world around us right I can demonstrate my knowledge of the world through this interaction I have a crew of specialists holed up in a room on the edge of town even as we speak calculating cycles millions of days from now right so who are these guys who are these guys that are providing the data that supports the rain of a Maya king now and that's supporting the reign of a Maya king in the ninth century right the dates of the events on the wall right the event of the king portraying that that God that happens in 815 ad many Maya cities have gone dark at this point there are no longer writing inscriptions but actual tune our king is appearing on the wall of a house of geeks those geeks are not terribly well-dressed weeks as geeks often aren't here we have on the west wall this is the guy that max found that's the circle that I was talking about earlier we now know that it's connected to a guy whose face goes the other way but they wear this single medallion on their chest they're all painted in black they wear this loincloth medallion on the chest medallion in their headdress a single red feather coming up he's named as Sehun top he's the senior obsidian these are youths right the youthful obsidians we have this core of people this isn't a normal court scene for the Maya either right if you see a Maya court scene on a Maya vase from the classic or the murals of Bonampak everyone's dressed differently they're all dressed in their finery they're all there to be seen to be recognized these guys are all wearing the same outfit this is a cohort this is a group of people a class in Maya society that's being represented in this space repeatedly and related to both the king and these calculations these are my geeks now Franco Rossi excavated under the floor of this space and under the floor of this space there's a burial they're actually a whole series of burials in the courtyard near this place and those burials aren't filled with tons of facts these are not wealthy burials that we're looking at this guy is buried with a single pot that you see here but he's also buried with two objects which are the medallions one Pierce for suspension around his chest the other unpierced for being hung in his headdress they're just ceramic they're not bone or shell or anything else they are ceramic discs that are covered in a thin white layer of plaster and on that plaster is the remnants of black and red paint the paint used by scribes this is that room this is that class of people and in fact one of the things that Franco is looking at now is is this a house at all are we in fact looking at a house or are we looking at the workshop where these people work are we looking at the place where they're trained are we looking at a college how is it tied to residential structures at the site of showtune we have all of these burials what are those burials look like is that household burials are there men are there women are there children or in fact we have a very different population being buried in this space that will all be addressed in his dissertation now I wanted to finish up by saying what happens between these two things what happens between our murals at some Bartolo of our divine king painted on the wall as the maze God and our mathematical kingdoms that we have at showtune at the end of the classic period what are they doing between there and there's one monument on the north end of show tune that dates to the period in the early classic I just wanted to show a couple images those because I think that this monument will answer a number of these questions now the whole thing it's actually a huge this an elevation drawing it's all series of buildings all of which are in tensional II buried they were preserved in their entirety it's about 35 meters long and 15 meters high and 60 meters deep they are all covered in painted mottled stucco masks all of their vaults are preserved the ends tell a story of myth we have here this crouching feline someone's like a sphinx right he actually that's part of his face he actually sits on top of this great stucco facade this is just a four meter expanse which shows in the middle an individual being sacrificed his eyes are slits he's upside down he doesn't have any legs his belly has been bit in half by that large feline there's blood squirting out everywhere and down the side of him but more importantly than that is that these things on the ends they're not just decoration Dave Stewart actually recognized them as hieroglyphic writing they are one meter tall one meter wide Maya glyphs in stucco and what they say is this is just the number nine and this is a location an image place but those particular locations are known throughout Maya Classic Maya inscriptions as this sort of bizarre place two paired location between a nine e Miche in a seven black this is the number seven in his ear he wears the glyph for black and Conn would have been there destroyed and destroyed by looters when they originally uncovered this structure those mythical locations of sacrifice are just the pillars on the ends of this enormous building right with these huge masks the front those masks are about five meters wide and five meters tall and they show this tree sprouting out of this big skeletal head that tree has a little Jaguar that jumps out of a hole in it the head below is the patron deity of Shelton Kings the deity on which Sultan Kings stand on the Stila throughout their reign that deity is crowned by a series of jewels how jewels the whole thing is framed by birds and descending gods on the sidelines there's the face in the middle the tree you can see its branches coming out to the side a little Jaguar sprouting out here it is these are the guys descending the sides now what's going on is that even though the corners of this building right how these great jaguar these mythic scenes these mythic locations right of sacrifice or creation the sprouting of a sort of ancestral tree the monument of the very center is covered in portraits of kings so that inside what they've done with these structures is they have framed a monument covered in matte signs symbols of kingship pictures of kings themselves on all sides and at the very center a seated full round King on his throne with the names of his ancestors in his belt right this is that transition in which we're looking at our king this be King being framed essentially then all around him are these ritual locations these sacred locations of myth but between them is a monument to him and his ancestors - dynasty combining the same types of things that we would see it's on Bartolo a few hundred years earlier and the things that we're moving towards at shal tune of four or five hundred years later remarkably when they bury this structure they bury it in two phases the first thing they do is bury the dynastic Monument and build a new one over the top but they leave the mythic stuff exposed that stuff stays it's permanent that doesn't need to be changed with the coronation of a new king the stage is still the stage the King simply has to appear a little higher up a little bit taller and on top of a base that encapsulate snot just those myths but his ancestry as well so that in the early classic Etzel tune that's when we're moving we're moving from this notion of simply defined Kings to define dynasties engaged in mythic action in the mythic past and those actions need to be tied together not just with a portrait of a myth but with the calculations of the date and the place where those events happened what we're looking at is a transition between the pre classic and the classic period that transition is really being characterized by the development of dynasties and the incorporation of calendrical cycles the importance of kalindra chol cycles into the daily lives of those kings because without that history without those cycles of time they can no longer justify their position simply by being descendent from the gods because 400 years in there are simply too many of them yeah you're all descended from the gods we've heard this before which God and when and they've got the guys to tell them thank you

Channel: SAR School for Advanced Research

Views: 22,429

Rating: 4.7142859 out of 5

Keywords: William Saturno, SAR, School for Advanced Research, Maya, San Bartolo, Xultun

Id: v1UxTxtxz5E

Length: 62min 21sec (3741 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2013

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From the Myth of Kings to the Math of Kings: Art, Science, and the Ancient Maya William Saturno

Membership Lecture, The New Mexico History Museum Auditorium Thursday, January 24, 2013, 6:30 to 7:30 pm

The murals of San Bartolo and Xultun are separated by more than 900 years of Maya history and reflect very different relationships between society and the cosmos. Dr. William Saturno explores the most recent finds and paints a picture of Maya society driven by royal figures who exploited art and science to establish and maintain their place as symbol and center of Maya urban life.

Sponsored by Betty and Luke Vortman Endowment Fund and George Watson