Yaxchilan

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The river makes the city. The Usumacinta runs broad and green through the rainforest of the Chiapas lowlands, and at one point it doubles back on itself in a tight loop, a horseshoe that the water all but closes. On the tongue of land inside the bend the Maya built Yaxchilan, so that the river guards it on three sides and only a narrow neck of ground to the south gives a way in by land. To reach it now one still comes by boat, downstream from the last road, the limestone temples rising out of the trees as the launch swings around the meander. The Usumacinta here is the border between Mexico and Guatemala; in the eighth century it was a highway, and Yaxchilan sat astride it, watching the traffic pass beneath the terraces.

The stones of the city were carved more thickly with writing and image than almost any other Maya place. Over a hundred and twenty inscriptions have been read from its lintels, its stelae, and its stairways, and from them the line of its kings has been recovered name by name and date by date — a dynastic record set down in a script that for a century could not be read, and then, in the lifetime of scholars now recently dead, was read. Among those carvings is one that has become, more than any other single object, the image by which the world pictures the rite at the center of Maya kingship: a queen kneeling before her king, drawing a thorned cord through her own pierced tongue.

A city of the Usumacinta

The recorded history of Yaxchilan opens with an accession. A king named Yopaat B’alam I took the throne, most likely on 23 July 359, and from him a dynasty descended that would hold the city for some four and a half centuries. The early reigns are thin in the record — names and dates carried forward by later kings who wished to anchor their own legitimacy in a long ancestry. For most of those early generations Yaxchilan was a modest place, one polity among the many that crowded the Usumacinta drainage, its great rival the city of Piedras Negras some forty kilometers downstream, its near neighbor Bonampak a short distance to the southwest.

The city became great late. Under the king the inscriptions call Itzamnaaj B’alam — Shield Jaguar to the English-speaking world, after the war-shield and the jaguar’s head that compose his name-glyph — Yaxchilan rose from a minor seat to a regional power. He reigned for some sixty years, from 681 to 742, an extraordinary span, and in the last third of that reign he turned the center of his city into a stage of carved stone. He raised temples on the terraces above the river and along the ridges behind, and he set above their doorways the sculpted limestone lintels for which the place is famous, and before them the standing stelae and the inscribed stairways that record his accession, his wars, and the captives he took. The numbering of the kings is unsettled — scholars write the name Itzamnaaj B’alam now with one Roman numeral, now with another, as the count of earlier namesakes is revised — but the reign and the works are not in doubt.

His son, Yaxun B’alam IV, whom the older literature calls Bird Jaguar IV, came to the throne in 752 and held it until 768. His succession was not smooth. The monuments he commissioned go to unusual lengths to assert his right to rule, naming his parents, rehearsing his ritual acts, recording his captures of enemy lords — the labor, the epigraphers note, of a king who was not the obvious heir and who had to build his legitimacy in stone. Under him the great Structure 33 was dedicated, probably in 756, a temple of the central acropolis whose roof-comb still stands above the trees and whose three doorways carry their own carved lintels; its stairway includes the inscribed step known as Hieroglyphic Stairway 2, thirteen carved blocks of which ten show rulers at the ballgame, the sacred contest the Maya played against the powers of the underworld.

The city the two kings built followed the lay of the land the river had given it. There was no grand grid, no single processional avenue; the terraces and plazas step up from the riverbank in tiers, the temples set along the natural rises, the whole arrangement shaped by the meander rather than imposed upon it. A long building the explorers numbered Structure 19, the so-called Labyrinth, runs back into the slope with vaulted passages, one of the few Maya structures one can walk through in the dark. From the higher terraces of the central acropolis the temples look out over the plaza to the water, set to be seen from the river — to announce, to the canoes passing beneath, whose city this was. The carving was concentrated where it would be read: on the lintels spanning the temple doorways, where a person entering passed beneath the image; on the stelae standing before the buildings; on the steps of the stairways, trodden underfoot. The Maya did not separate the building from the text. The temple was the inscription’s frame, and the inscription was the building’s voice.

The dynasty outlasted Bird Jaguar by two more reigns. As late as 808 a Yaxchilan king, K’inich Tatb’u Skull III, captured the last ruler of Piedras Negras and brought the centuries-old rivalry to its end — a final triumph carved into the record not long before the record itself stops. Within a generation or so the monuments cease. Across the Maya lowlands in the eighth and ninth centuries the great Classic cities fell silent one after another, their kings no longer raising dated stones, their courts dispersing; the causes are debated still — drought, war, the exhaustion of the land, the failure of the divine kingship to deliver what it promised — and Yaxchilan went the way of the rest. The river kept its bend; the forest closed over the terraces.

Yaxchilan Lintel 24, limestone, c. 723–726 CE, recording a bloodletting dated 709; British Museum, London. Photograph by Michel wal, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The cord through the tongue

Set above the doorways of Structure 23 — a building Shield Jaguar raised and dedicated to his principal wife, the queen the glyphs name Lady K’abal Xook — was a series of three carved lintels. The first of them, the panel cataloged as Lintel 24, is among the finest reliefs the Maya ever cut, and it shows what a Maya king and queen did to feed the gods.

The king stands at the left, holding a great torch above his head to light the night. The queen kneels before him. She has drawn through a hole pierced in her tongue a rope set with thorns — obsidian blades, in the usual reading — and the rope coils down from her mouth into a woven basket on the ground before her, a basket lined with strips of bark-paper that the falling blood has soaked. Scrolls of blood curl from her lips. Her clothing is rendered with a precision rare in Maya art, the woven patterns of her huipil, the jade at her wrists and throat, the great headdress; the background is cut deeply away so that the figures stand almost free. The relief was once painted, the red and the Maya blue still faintly traceable. A panel of glyphs across the top gives the event and its day: the rite fell on 5 Eb 15 Mak in the sacred count, a day in October of the year 709. The carving names its own maker, a sculptor called Mo’ Chaak — a rare signature, the artist claiming his hand.

What the panel shows is the costliest thing a ruler could give. The Maya understood the world to run on a reciprocity with the gods and the ancestors: the divine powers had given their own blood to make the first people — in the older creation it is from blood and ground maize that humankind is shaped — and the living owed blood in return, to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, the maize rising. Of all blood, the most precious was the king’s own and his queen’s, drawn from the most sensitive flesh — the tongue, the ear, the genitals — with a stingray spine or a blade of obsidian, the thorned cord pulled through the wound so that the blood ran down onto the paper. The paper, soaked, was then burned, and in the rising smoke the offerer might see what the next lintel of the set, Lintel 25, depicts: a great serpent rearing up out of the smoke, its jaws gaping, and from its mouth the figure of an ancestor or a god emerging — the vision called up by the offering, the door between the worlds held open for as long as the blood burned. The queen who kneels on Lintel 24 is shown on Lintel 25 conjuring that serpent. The two panels read together as a single act: the wound, and the vision the wound buys.

It is easy, from outside, to recoil from the image, and the conquerors who first saw such rites recoiled and called them by ugly names. But the act has a logic, and the logic is the whole of it. The king did not spill another’s blood here cheaply; he and his queen spilled their own, in public, at the great turnings of the calendar and the dynasty, because the order of the world was not thought to maintain itself. The gods had bled to make the world; the rulers bled to keep it. That a queen performs the rite on the most celebrated of the lintels is itself worth marking — the women of Yaxchilan stand on its monuments not as ornaments but as ritual actors, conjurers of visions, named and dated like the kings. Lady Xook holds her own place in the stone.

Structure 33, Yaxchilan, probably dedicated c. 756 CE under Bird Jaguar IV. Photograph by Arian Zwegers, CC BY 2.0.

How the stones were read

For most of the time since outsiders first came upon Yaxchilan, the writing on its lintels was a closed book. The British explorer Alfred Maudslay reached the site in the 1880s and made the careful photographs and casts that first brought its sculpture before the world; he had two of the Structure 23 lintels, the bloodletting panel among them, cut out and shipped to London, where they remain in the British Museum’s Mexican gallery to this day — a removal that is itself part of the history of how these stones came to be studied, and of where they now are and are not. The German archaeologist Teobert Maler worked the site soon after, recording monuments that have since weathered or vanished. But the glyphs themselves stayed mute. The script was widely held to record only calendar and astronomy, the names of gods and the counting of days, with nothing of history in it — no kings, no reigns, no human events.

The reading came in two strokes, and Yaxchilan was central to one of them. In the early 1950s the Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov argued, against the reigning consensus, that the Maya script was in part phonetic — that its signs spelled words in a Maya language, syllable by syllable, and could be sounded out. Then, in 1960, working not with the language but with the pattern of the dates, the Russian-born American scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed that the inscriptions of Piedras Negras recorded human lives: that the dated monuments grouped themselves into reigns, each opening with a birth and an accession and closing with a death, a sequence of rulers across two centuries. She turned next to Yaxchilan, across and up the river, and read its dynasty the same way — the accessions, the captures, the deaths, the glyphs for “he was seized” and “his captor.” History had been in the stones all along. The pattern she found gave the later decipherers, building on Knorozov’s phonetics, the context to begin sounding the names: Itzamnaaj B’alam, Yaxun B’alam, K’abal Xook. The silent dynastic record of a jungle city became one of the founding triumphs of the long reading of the Maya script. Her work is honored as a foundational chapter in that recovery.

There is a particular justice in Yaxchilan’s place in that recovery. The city had been, in a sense, designed to be read — its kings had filled it with text precisely so that their names and acts would outlast them, would be there for someone to take up. For more than a thousand years no one could. The conquerors who came to the Maya world in the sixteenth century did not read the script; the bishop Diego de Landa, who left the fullest colonial account of Yucatec Maya religion, also presided over the burning of the Maya books, and of the libraries of bark-paper codices only four survive anywhere. The chain of reading the glyphs was broken so thoroughly that scholars came to doubt there had ever been a history in them at all. What Proskouriakoff restored was not merely a set of dates but the original purpose of the stones — to remember particular people. The kings had written to be read; the reading came, late, and found them waiting.

The decipherment changed what the bloodletting panel is. Before, it was a striking and obscure image of an unknown rite. After, it was a dated act of named persons — a queen called Lady K’abal Xook, drawing the cord on a particular October day in 709, in a temple her husband would build for her — set within a history that could be told. The stones stopped being relics of a “lost” people and became the documents of a remembered one.

For the Maya are not lost. The Classic kingdoms fell, but the peoples did not vanish; some six to seven million Maya live today across Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, speaking some thirty Mayan languages, keeping in many communities the old day-count alongside the calendar of the church. Yaxchilan itself sits within the lands of the Lacandon and other Maya groups of the eastern Chiapas forest. The site is administered as an archaeological zone by Mexico’s national institute of anthropology and history; together with its stretch of the Usumacinta and its rainforest it stands on Mexico’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage, valued for the carved record and the living jungle alike. To come downriver and climb the terraces is to stand in a place where the stones can now be read — where the line of kings, the wars with Piedras Negras, the day a queen knelt with the cord in her hand, are no longer guesses but a documented past. The river still closes its loop around the city it made, and the smoke that once rose from the burning paper has a name now, and a date, and a hand that carved it.

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