The Maya force us to think differently. Maya, Revelation of a Time without End, at the Quai Branly in Paris, describes a society where time and the stars interact with the underworld. The classical Mayan civilisation flourished on the Yucatán peninsula from the third century to the end of the first millennium, when it went into decline probably due to a major climate change and subsequent drought.
The Paris show features 385 items loaned by 20 Mexican museums. Mayan culture, however, extends in what are now five different countries, from southern Mexico to Honduras. The exhibition has reached France by way of the National Palace in Mexico City, where it opened in 2012, via the Palacio das Artes in São Paulo, Brazil. It is the work of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Inah), the state organisation that promotes and preserves Mexico’s pre-Columbian past. Established in 1939, its 7,000 staff work at 179 sites.
The curator of the Paris show, Mercedes de la Garza, the former head of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, wanted to highlight the golden age of Mayan civilisation (300-900). She included many items from Toniná, southern Chiapas, a site investigated in the 1970s by several Franco-Mexican teams.
The exhibits are divided into eight sections, including people and nature, community and daily life, the governing elite and sacred powers. One obvious attraction is a throne found in 2004 in the Temple Of The Dying Moon at Palenque, Chiapas. “The temples were in fact political structures,” says Dominique Michelet from Paris University-I, who spent a decade supervising the digs at Rio Bec, Campeche, and produced the exhibition catalogue. “The decor of the throne was carved out of extremely fine limestone, with no impurities, in the year 736.”
It was commissioned by K’inich Ahkal Mo’Nahb, then ruler of the Palenque city-state. He asked for the frieze to centre on his grandfather Pakal; he is on the right-hand side, his younger brother and appointed successor to the left. They are surrounded by anthropomorphic deities with powerful paws like jaguars. “If we do it this way, time overlaps,” Michelet explains, leading us straight through to the Humanity, Time and the Stars section, to look at three large earthenware artefacts from Toniná, including a great calendar wheel, used to mark out the field for a popular Mayan ball game.
“The Maya were fascinated by cycles. There were 365 solar days, then a cycle for the planet Venus (584 days), Mars (780 days), Mercury (117 days), as well as arithmetical cycles, such as the 63-day cycle, obtained by multiplying seven by nine, both powerful numbers.”
The Olmecs (1200-500BC) invented zero, but the Maya created two zeros, one for duration, the other for dates. They developed a symbolic mathematical system, a complex script and the concept of the underworld, home to moisture, seeds and their decay, a place where contrary forces opposed one another.
The third symbolic spot in the exhibition features two ceramic censer-stands found in Tabasco state that represent the sun god of the underworld. The first one is intact, the second partly destroyed by a stalactite. “It is a metaphor for human fragility,” says José Enrique Ortiz Lanz, an Inah curator. “A shaman can adjust balances; often he himself is a survivor, for instance a baby born with its umbilical cord round its neck. There is no such thing as a good or bad god. The mist god, for example, can bring moisture, but, in excess, upset harmony.”
The Maya grew maize on terraces and indulged in human sacrifice. They warred with rival cities to renew their stock of prisoners to supply the “mortar of society”: blood. A stucco artefact in the recent classical style (600-800), loaned by Campeche Regional Museum, represents a naked sacrificial victim, legs pulled in, penis erect and heart torn out. This offering of vital energy was a way to pay back the nourishing deities. In the jungle of “time without end” life must go on.
The Maya thought that everything – humans, animals, stones – had a soul. “According to the Maya, the world works thanks to sacred forces,” Michelet explains. “They had no sense of a dichotomy between nature and culture.” Among the items at Quai Branly is a terracotta brick in the form of a crocodile, from Comalcalco, Tabasco, where there was no stone, just clay. “The Maya represented the Earth as a great crocodile floating on the primeval ocean. They placed themselves in the middle, which corresponds to actual fact: they lived on a peninsula surrounded by water – the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean and the Atlantic,” he adds.
With seven sites protected by Unesco and two more due to be designated, the Mayan civilisation “is a laboratory for human evolution. The diversity of political structures is fascinating. Mayan city states were organised in very unusual, decentralised ways. Deciphering Mayan script is equally intriguing.” The open-mouthed terracotta crocodile symbolises the cave, the gateway to the underworld, one of the three fundamental elements alongside the sky and the surface of the Earth.
This article appeared in the Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
Maya: Revelation of a Time without End is at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until 8 February 2015
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