Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  Coe wasn’t the first to surmise. Ever since Alexander von Humboldt had brought his eponymous celt back to Europe in 1804, people had speculated on where the raw jade had come from. Was it, as Edward H. Thompson suggested, excavated on the lost continent of Atlantis? Or could the first settlers in the New World have migrated from the Far East, somehow bringing stores of stone? More than a few, including nineteenth-century explorer John Lloyd Stephens, believed that the jade had come, via some prehistoric overseas trade route, from China.

  The supposed Chinese connection did enjoy a certain logic. Jade had been carved in China since at least 2000 B.C., and there were striking similarities in Chinese and Mesoamerican attitudes toward the stone and the uses to which it was put.

  In China, as in Mesoamerica, ornaments fashioned from yu (literally “precious stone”) were worn by nobles as a badge of rank. The association between jade and royalty was so strong, in fact, that the stone’s Chinese character is the same as that for “king,” with the addition of a single extra dot, sometimes said to represent a piece of jade nestled in the monarch’s pocket. Just as the emperor was “the son of heaven,” jade was “the stone of heaven.”

  For the Chinese, jade was the bridge to immortality. The emperor communicated with heaven by speaking through an exquisitely carved jade disk called a bi, and his body might be put to rest in a spectacular armor-like suit of carved jade plaques. After death, a bit of jade would also be placed in his mouth. “He who swallows jade,” it was said, “will exist as long as jade,” which is to say forever.

  In China, it was jade that was awarded to champion athletes, while gold was relegated to runners-up (a tradition honored at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where first-place medals were plated with gold, as International Olympic Committee rules dictate, but their reverse was inlaid with white jade).

  The stone was considered nothing less than virtue incarnate. As Confucius wrote around 500 B.C., jade’s “polish and brilliancy represent the whole of purity; its perfect compactness and extreme hardness represent the sureness of intelligence; its angles, which do not cut, although they seem sharp, represent justice; the pure and prolonged sound, which it gives forth when one strikes it, represents music. Its color represents loyalty; its interior flaws, always showing themselves through the transparency, call to mind sincerity; its iridescent brightness represents heaven; its admirable substance, born of mountain and of water, represents the earth. Used alone without ornamentation it represents chastity. The price that the entire world attaches to it represents the truth. . . . The Book of Verse says: ‘When I think of a wise man, his merits appear to be like jade.’ ”

  In Europe, black jade hatchets were used two thousand years before Christ, when they were prized for their hardness and ability to hold an edge. But from the start, Europeans didn’t understand decorative jade. Marco Polo had come across the stone in China in 1272; however, he mistook it for a type of quartz and didn’t pack any among the treasures he brought back at the end of his travels. The first Europeans to see American jade were Spaniards exploring the Gulf Coast of present-day Mexico with Juan de Grijalva in 1518, but they confused it with emeralds or turquoise and failed to grasp its value to the indigenous people.

  Bernal Díaz del Castillo, chronicler of the conquest of Mexico, tells how Grijalva’s men were approached near the mouth of the Río Tonalá by some local people offering to trade copper hatchets, which the Spanish thought were made of low-grade gold. In exchange, the Indians craved the Europeans’ green glass beads, which they apparently believed to be jade. Acquiring six hundred of the hatchets, the Spaniards congratulated themselves on their shrewdness, while the Indians celebrated their own windfall. When the two groups later learned the reality of their bargain, they were doubtless disappointed. But, as Díaz says, “In the end it turned out to be an even deal. Both sides were equally cheated and wound up with nothing of value.”

  The jade that the conquistadors later shipped from the New World was the first of its kind to be seen on the Continent. It was Walter Raleigh who brought American jade to England, along with tobacco and potatoes. In his 1596 Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, he wrote: “These Amazones have likewise great store of these plates of golde, which they recover by exchange chiefly for a kinde of greene stones which the Spaniards call Piedras Hijadas, and we use for spleene stones, and for the disease of the stone we also esteeme them: of these I saw divers in Guiana, and commonly every King or Casique hath one, which theire wives for the most part weare, and they esteeme them as great jewels.”

  When Chinese yu was finally imported to Europe in the early seventeenth century, it was called jade because of its similarity to the American piedra de la ijada. But the stone that Marco Polo had seen in China was not the same as the one that Raleigh and the conquistadors sent back from the New World. In fact, the term jade refers to two different stones with unique chemical compositions.

  Chinese jade is technically known as nephrite, a name coined in 1780 by the German Abraham Gottlob Werner, the preeminent geologist of his day (and mentor to Alexander von Humboldt). A silicate of calcium and magnesium, nephrite has crystals woven into a tight fiber, making it uncommonly dense and tough. On the standard Mohs scale of mineral hardness, where talc is 1.0 and diamond 10.0, nephrite rates about a 6.0 to 6.5. Besides China, the largest deposits of nephrite are found in British Columbia and Australia, with other sources in New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Alaska, California, and Wyoming. Because Chinese nephrite has been mined continuously, its historic source was never lost; for centuries, the emperor’s jade came from the Kunlun Mountains in western China, on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

  The other mineral known as jade is jadeite, a name conferred by French mineralogist Alexis Damour in 1863, after he peered into a microscope at a piece of jade from Burma and saw that it was different from the Chinese type. A silicate of sodium and aluminum, jadeite has a more crystalline, less fibrous structure than the other kind of jade. This makes it slightly harder than nephrite (about 6.5 to 7.0 on the Mohs scale) but also not quite as tough, which means that a thin slab of jadeite will shatter more easily when dropped. Like nephrite, pure jadeite is white; however, it almost always incorporates trace amounts of other minerals, which lend it its various colors—a bit of iron, green; a little chromium, brilliant green. (The chromium replaces some of the aluminum in the stone—the same substitution that transforms the mineral beryl into emerald.) Jadeite is found in a wider spectrum of colors than nephrite, including red, yellow, lavender, and even so-called rainbow jade, which combines several different hues in one stone. Jadeite also holds a higher luster due to its crystalline structure.

  Since jadeite and nephrite require different geologic conditions to form, they are not found together. Jadeite is the rarer of the two, having been discovered in only a few places around the world, with the largest source being Myanmar (formerly Burma). Today, only jadeite is considered of jewel quality, and after the first jadeite was imported to China in 1784, from Burma, it quickly replaced nephrite as the carving stone of choice, a distinction it holds even today. Jadeite’s most desirable color, a brilliant, translucent shade called “imperial green,” is the most expensive gem in the world, valued more highly than diamonds. In November 1997, a necklace of twenty-seven imperial-green jade beads sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for 9.3 million U.S. dollars, prompting the quip that some people must still believe in jade’s power to confer immortality.

  By the time Matthew Stirling arrived at Tres Zapotes, then, it was understood that not only did Mesoamerican jade not come from China, but also that the two weren’t even the same stone. Could the Olmecs’ jade have come from Burma?

  “The Olmecs move like shadows across the pages of Mexican history,” George Vaillant wrote in 1932; only “a handful of sculptures out of the known artistic traditions comprise the testimony of their existence.” And t
heir spectacular carvings, which seemed to spring fully formed from the Gulf Coast swamps, only enhanced their creators’ sense of mystery. How did they develop their technical mastery and their unique style? Where did they find their precious jade? And what means—prospecting or trade or military force—did they use to procure it? Clearly, our understanding of the Olmecs—their history, alliances, economy, technology—wouldn’t be complete until the jade’s source was discovered. By pushing back the chronology, by showing that reverence for the stone had blossomed in a time and place even more remote than had been thought, Matthew Stirling hadn’t solved the enigma of New World jade; he had only deepened it.

  “There are people who know where precious stones grow,” an Aztec man told the Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagún. “Any precious stone, wherever it is, gives off a vapor or breath like a delicate smoke. This smoke appears at dawn, and those who search for such stones position themselves in a likely place and look toward the rising sun, and when they see the delicate smoke ascending, then they know that there are precious stones, which have been born there or were hidden there.” Sometimes, in the years following Stirling’s spectacular discoveries, it seemed that our knowledge of American jade hadn’t advanced during the past five centuries, that the stone’s source had evanesced like ancient smoke.

  THREE

  Maya Green

  In Mexico City, ensconced in the cavernous Museo Nacional de Antropología, hangs a cultural icon. Created more than a millennium ago, it was fashioned from over two hundred pieces of jade and other stone, painstakingly fitted into a mosaic mask. The cheeks shimmer with shades of green so intense they don’t seem to have come from nature. The nose is long and hooked, the slender lips slightly parted. But it’s the eyes that draw my attention—narrow, faintly crossed, stark-white ovals with round brown irises and pupils of obsidian. Peering into those eyes, I can almost see back to the day in A.D. 683 when the mask was laid over the lifeless features of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I, “Lord Sun Shield,” Pakal the Great, the most celebrated of all Maya kings.

  The iconic funeral mask of Pakal the Great.

  Courtesy of Herbert Eisengruber/Fotolia

  Though the Olmecs witnessed the birth of Mesoamerican civilization, it was their successors the Maya who traced its apogee. But these Maya were not the founders of Chichen Itza, who would begin to construct their capital only about A.D. 800. These Maya had started transforming their settlements into real cities some fifteen hundred years earlier, as the Olmec capitals to the west were prospering. Then, from A.D. 250 to 900 (more or less corresponding to the Dark Ages in Europe), they presided over the greatest cultural flowering ever seen in Mesoamerica. Constructing great urban centers such as Palenque, Tikal, Calakmul, Copan, and Tonina, they spread their civilization over more than 125,000 square miles, reaching from present-day Mexico to current El Salvador. It’s not for nothing that archaeologists call this golden age the Classic period.

  Unlike the Aztecs to the north and the Incas to the south, the Maya never united in a single empire but remained a mosaic of more than fifty city-states, jostling for territory, wealth, labor, and prestige. Sprawled over a wide area, the cities formed complex trade networks to obtain items they couldn’t find locally, including goods such as hematite (a form of iron), obsidian, and jade. So vital was this commerce that it was entrusted to high government officials, who grew wealthy in its practice.

  The Maya’s population swelled, until some of their cities boasted more than a hundred thousand people. This meant more farmers and artisans, more laborers to construct their temples and palaces. But it also heightened competition among the city-states for access to the all-important trade routes and increasingly scarce cropland. Inevitably, greater tension led to more wars.

  The Maya lived in a perilous, punitive world. To sustain their huge populations, they stretched agriculture to unheard-of limits, breeding more-productive varieties of corn, beans, squash, and other crops. But there was little margin for error, and a single failed harvest could spell starvation and civil upheaval. In fact, every aspect of the Maya’s being, from the most exalted to the most mundane, was governed by an intimidating array of deities. If supplicated and sustained, the gods would mete out good fortune and the essentials of life—bountiful crops, prosperity through trade, victory in battle—but if offended, they could dispense hardship and death.

  Guiding the Maya through this grueling existence were their kings and priests, who mediated between the mortal and supernatural realms and sought to gain the favor of gods and spirits. To aid in their divinations, the holy men recorded the movements of the planets Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and especially Venus (sometimes known as Xux Ek’, the “Wasp Star”), a malicious deity invoked in warfare. To fix the days of their religious ceremonies, they predicted solar and lunar eclipses and seasonal equinoxes and solstices, and they kept an intricate calendar reflecting their appreciation of time as both cyclical (as in the Calendar Round) and linear (as in the Long Count). It’s even been suggested that, to the Maya, time was a living being, like everything else in their animistic world, and that each day was imbued with its own personality, its own strengths and weaknesses, apt purposes and hazards. The priests’ “awesome knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies must have been a source of tremendous power to them,” as the great American Mayanist Sylvanus Morley wrote. “It proved to the ignorant masses that the priesthood held close and intimate communion with their greatest deities and it must be obeyed.”

  The supreme ruler was the king, the k’uhul ajaw, or “holy lord.” Though the king’s right to rule derived from his divine ancestors, his tenure hung on his ability to provide for his people and to defend them from threats both supernatural and temporal. For this, he needed not only force of personality, diplomatic skill, and military prowess, but the ability to sway the spirit world to his cause. In the words of scholars Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, “The king was not only a religious authority, but also the manifestation of the divine in human space. . . . Through his ritual actions, the fruits of the earth grew, mankind on earth could contact and speak with the gods and the ancestral dead. The existence of the king demonstrated the supernatural order of all things within the Universe.”

  To nourish and placate the gods, the king conducted public rituals with music, dancing, and feasting. During these rites, he would also take a stingray spine or a needle of jade, pierce his penis, spatter strips of paper with his blood, and burn them in offering to the gods. Particularly important occasions, such as the accession of a new monarch, would be marked by the torture and sacrifice of a noble taken captive in war, his still-beating heart carved from his chest with a stone knife.

  To prove their legitimacy and buttress their authority, Classic Maya kings, like the Olmec rulers before them, erected monuments to commemorate their forebears and to advertise their own triumphs. It has even been suggested that the Maya’s elaborate writing was invented to broadcast their rulers’ worthiness. And to display their supremacy, kings surrounded themselves with headdresses of bright feathers, mirrors made of hematite, and other items that were, said German scholar Nikolai Grube, “of great material and symbolic value, often inherited and passed down through generations, and . . . laden with spiritual energy that gave the wearer special powers.”

  But no substance was more awe-inspiring, more potent, or more coveted by these monarchs than jade. As American scholar Karl A. Taube points out, “In Classic Maya art, jade is so inextricably linked to images of Maya rulers that it is difficult to conceive of them without this precious stone. In fact, one of the more common ways of portraying the abject and pathetic state of captive elites is to have them stripped of their jade finery.” The ruler wore jade pendants, collars, necklaces, ear ornaments, chest plates, even nuggets of jade implanted in his teeth. When he died, a bit of jade was placed in his mouth, and his jade figures, masks, plaques, and other artifacts were sealed in his
tomb. A jade headband and belt were essential badges of his office; indeed, it was impossible to crown a monarch without them. To quote Linda Schele and David Freidel, “These kingly jewels assert[ed] the inherent superiority of their wearer within the community of human beings, transforming a person of merely noble rank into a being who can test and control the divine forces of the world.” Jade was the stone of kings.

  Although they created other works of high art—architecture, ceramics, paintings—the Maya lavished perhaps their greatest talent on jade, shaping the obdurate stone into every conceivable ornament—jewelry, masks, headdresses, belts, chest plates, figurines. Whereas the Olmecs preferred bluish jade, the Maya favored brilliant shades of green. Though the people differentiated between the two colors, their language didn’t: In Mayan, what we call “blue” and “green” have only one equivalent: yax.

  As explorers and archaeologists excavated royal Maya tombs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their spades seemed to strike jade wherever they touched ground. But perhaps the most startling discovery of all was made in the modern Mexican state of Chiapas, on the western fringe of Maya civilization. The city had been called Lakamha’ (“Great Water”) by its ancient inhabitants, for the ample creeks running through it. Centuries later, it was known as Otolum, Mayan for “Strong Houses.” In 1567, priest Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada freely translated the word into the Spanish for “stockade,” giving the place the name by which we know it today: Palenque.

  It was May 1949, forty years since Edward H. Thompson first descended into the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza and a decade since Matthew Stirling spied the colossal stone head at Tres Zapotes. At Palenque, a slender man was crouching atop a high, stepped pyramid, inside an elegant building graced with five doorways and a mansard roof. It was known as the Temple of the Inscriptions, after the great carved tablets discovered there. Taking up three of the inner walls, the inscriptions comprised one of the longest Maya texts ever found—though no one had the slightest idea what they said.