Stephen Houston on Maya Kingship

From an article about the Maya city of El Zotz by anthropologist Stephen Houston, MacArthur winner and professor at Brown, these two paragraphs say a lot about what kingship was and why it endured:

Cross-cultural comparison suggests that only five elements were required for a Maya court: 

1. a monad (a human pivot to which others defer); 
2. others that seek contact with, and control over, the monad (courtiers and servitors); 
3. the resources, symbolic and real, to make this striving worthwhile and to support such extravagance; 
4. an acute understanding of hierarchy—of how to behave in socially asymmetrical encounters that characterize courts; and 
5. a physical setting for such encounters. 

A vast literature documents these elements, allowing the possibility of broad generalizations about courtly behavior and its recurrent patterns (e.g., Adamson 1999; Brown and Elliott 1980; Costa Gomes 2003; Elias 1983; Geertz 1977, 1980; Howes 2003; Ladurie 2001; Steane 1993, including models from Mesoamerica, Inomata and Houston 2001). For example, as a concept, “court” blurs the distinction, rarely evident in most societies, between bureaucrats and courtiers, administrative duties and the person and spiritual role of the ruler (Inomata 2001:31; Vale 2001:298-299). And it makes clear that, without the monad—the ruler—the system must wither until another monad is found. Against this is a demonstrable predisposition: the physical mass of the court and the many needs it serves create an impetus to maintain the court system and its many practices (Webster 2001:131-132). Logically, a system sustains itself if participants “buy into” its predicates. A firm blow must occur, as it did during the so-called Maya “collapse,” to neutralize such a node of joint self-interest.

The “human pivot” of Maya courts is the “holy lord,” k’uhul ajaw or, rarely, the “lady holy lord,” ix k’uhul ajaw (Houston and Stuart 2001:59-61). Around that pivot operate: family members, near, far, even fictive; courtiers, including “favorites”; servants and those generally in attendance; slaves and purveyors of goods and services; allies of varying fidelity; and, in replications across the landscape, the smaller courts of magnates and lesser nobility (Miller and Martin 2004:23-27, passim; see Waterfield 2003:10-12; Woolgar 1999:8-29). Whatever its scale, the court contains many features of a household, a place of procreation, production, pleasure, and consumption (Fowden 2004:64-84). Among the Classic Maya, scholars now know, some goods and services came from tribute (Houston et al. 2006:244-248), but other economic underpinnings remain unclear: did rulers rely on personal estates for their foodstuffs or on plantations of exportable plants such as cacao and tobacco? The answer to this question is not easily resolved, but courts did at least embody the good life, indulging whim yet allowing displays of exemplary piety (Brown and Elliot 1980:193-199).

El Zotz

El Zotz is a medium-sized Maya city just 23 kilometers from the great city of Tikal; it was named in modern times for the bats that nest at the site in huge numbers. Its Maya name appears to have been Pa'Chan, meaning "Divided Sky." According to lead excavator Stephen Houston, the city "bears all the marks of a founded city," that is, it was built all at once by outside powers rather than growing organically from a village.

It had a troubled existence with only brief periods of prosperity. It is so close to Tikal that you can actually see the site from the top of Tikal's tallest pyramid, but it was founded by Tikal's enemies during a period when Tikal was weak, presumably to be a thorn in Tikal's side. Houston says it was an example of "elite-centered communities of rapid origin that were often unstable and short-lived." Not exactly a formula for a quiet life.

El Zotz has a normal sort of Maya city center with temples and palaces, but the truly exciting finds were made at a subsidiary site on a nearby ridge known as El Diablo. At El Diablo there is a pyramid devoted to the sun god. A major program of excavation was carried out at the site in 2008 to 2010.

Maya pyramids often grew over time. When the city had entered a wealthier and more glorious stage, its leaders might decide that their temples were not grand enough so they would just erect a new one over the top of the old one. Above is the exterior of the El Diablo pyramid in 2008.

Archaeologists love to get beneath the temple's outer layer, which has usually been badly mucked up by time, looting, tree roots, and so on, and find older, smaller pyramids that have been protected by later layers of stone. But these days the pyramids are too valuable as tourist attractions to dismantle them. So, they tunnel in. At El Diablo they entered through this opening, originally dug by looters.

Once beneath the stone of the last, outer layer they found two extroardinary things. First, they found a row of huge plaster masks representing the sun, beautifully preserved. This narrow tunnel was all the space they had to work with, so it was of course impossible to get a photograph of the entire frieze.

Instead what we have is various kinds of scans and stitched-together panoramas. The masks have been dated to between 350 and 400 AD. They depict the sun in the various stages of its daily progress, beginning with a shark-toothed mask that probably represents the sun emerging from the Caribbean Sea. "The noonday sun is depicted as an ancient being with crossed eyes who drank blood, and a final series of masks resemble the local jaguars, which awake from their jungle slumbers at dusk."

The masks were originally painted red, with black details; in fact the whole pyramid may have been painted red. What a site these must have been, glowing red in the morning sun.

Delving deeping into the pyramid, the archaeologists found what they hoped to find at the center of it all: the tomb of the founder of the town's ruling dynasty. This goes by the oh-so-archaeological name of Burial 9. The tomb is believed to contain the remains of a king named Chak who ruled in the late 4th century AD. The ruler was aged in his fifties or sixties at the time of his death and was accompanied in his tomb by the remains of six sacrificed children aged between 1 and 5 years old.

The first hint that they were getting close was some typical Maya gruesomeness:

When we sunk a pit into the small chamber of the temple, we hit almost immediately a series of 'caches' blood-red bowls containing human fingers and teeth, all wrapped in some kind of organic substance that left an impression in the plaster. We then dug through layer after layer of flat stones, alternating with mud, which probably is what kept the tomb so intact and airtight.

As you might imagine, this tomb was full of wonderful stuff.

Of the stuff that survives well, the ceramics are particularly wonderful. Love these howler monkeys.

Fabulous.

Article and 3-minute video about El Diablo here.

Article by Houston about the political history of El Zotz.