Photo Collection of Stephanie Wood |
Kislak Collection -- Maya Objects |
This
image contains 4 magnifiable sections. Click a section to view the larger
image. |
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FRAGMENT
OF HIEROGLYPHIC MONUMENT The Maya carved their victories, their defeats, their marriages and births, and the celebration of rituals on stone stelae and lintels. These events were placed in time according to the Maya calendar which recorded the great epochs of their history, as well as the individual days on which a prominent person participated in a ceremony. This monument records an event that took place at the end of fifteenth katun or in our calendar, sometime in the tenth century. A katun is a span of twenty years, marked with ceremonies at the end of the period. The rite recorded here is a bloodletting self-sacrifice that calls the vision serpent Na Chaan (Sky Snake) into existence. In
many Maya cities, before an important undertaking such as a war or
at the end of a specific time period, one of the members of the royal
household would let blood from the tongue or other parts of the body,
dripping this blood onto strips of paper which would be burned. The
smoke of this sacrifice rising to the sky, would call forth the mythological
serpent, a conduit to the otherworld, who spews forth the image of
an ancestor from whom auguries might be expected. The text relates
the date, (the verb is eroded), the name of the sky serpent, the place
of action, and the names or titles of the participants. |
| The Jay I. Kislak Collection of pre-Columbian cultural heritage materials is owned by the Library of Congress. Photograph shot and presented here with permission. |
| Photo,
©2004, by
Stephanie Wood. |