by David Keys
Another similarly dismembered victim was found nearby, and a third was in the south palace. The small number of skeletons discovered so far suggests either that much of the elite had succeeded in escaping in the days immediately before the insurrection, or that they had been seized by rebels and murdered elsewhere.
After hunting down and killing the last remaining members of the ruling elite, the mob set about the systematic destruction of the politico-religious heart of the city. The presumably wooden (and perhaps textile) constructions at the bottom and sides of temple platform staircases, and the partly wooden temples themselves, were set afire. Archaeological excavations have revealed evidence of intensely destructive burning in these particular locations in most temple complexes.
In the temple in the Ciudadela Palace complex, a structure closely associated with traditional government, archaeologists discovered that five statues had been deliberately removed from the sacred area and smashed. Dozens of fragments were then equally deliberately thrown in every conceivable direction. The shattered remnants of one of the figures—a two-foot-high statue of a goddess—were found scattered over nearly a thousand-square-foot area!
In the same governmental complex, at the spectacular seven-tiered pyramid temple of Quetzalcoatl, sacred sculpted stone heads were hurled down into adjacent passageways and even into the patios of one of the neighboring palaces. In the palaces themselves, six smashed images of the discredited and now presumably hated rain god, Tlaloc, were found among the ash and the debris.
The rebels had systematically torn apart and shattered the objects of their anger. The depths of vengeful hatred that must have driven this wave of destruction can hardly be imagined, but must have reflected the sufferings endured prior to the revolt by the mass of Teotihuacan’s population.
As the flames consumed one part of the city center, angry mobs surged into other central areas. At the pyramid temple of the Mother of Stone (now known as the Pyramid of the Moon) the huge stone blocks that flanked a great staircase adjacent to the pyramid were hurled down and ended up a hundred yards away. The homes of priests or nobles associated with the temple were ransacked. Twelve massive carved pillars, adorned with military insignia, were pulled over.
And at a temple in another part of the city—in the Puma Mural group of buildings—archaeologists again found evidence that stone blocks had been deliberately removed and tossed down into a plaza. The force of each impact was so great that the blocks literally bounced across the surface of the square, leaving a trail of telltale impact marks. There too a sacred statue—a valuable green onyx figure of a god—had been violently smashed. The temple was then torched; 1,500 years later, archaeologists even found where the burning beams had fallen.
As Teotihuacan destroyed itself—or in the run-up to the final crisis—a huge 200-ton statue, probably depicting the god Tlaloc, was being carved—perhaps on the orders of the doomed Teotihuacano government and priesthood—far away from the metropolis, on the slopes of a sacred mountain15 associated with the god. The statue, one of the largest in the world and certainly the largest ever made in Mesoamerica, seems to have symbolized the religious conflict that must have raged as the Teotihuacan endgame unfolded. Traditional Tlaloc loyalists—the government and members of the ruling class—may well have ordered the creation of this unprecedentedly huge idol in a last, desperate bid to persuade the god to produce rain.16
But the rains didn’t come, insurrection broke out, the Mesoamerican Jerusalem destroyed itself, and Tlaloc’s two-hundred-ton bulk was abandoned for one and a half millennia on the slopes of his own holy mountain—a fitting symbol for the end of the greatest civilization ever to have flourished in the ancient New World.
24
T H E D A R T S O F
V E N U S
Sometime in late 561 or early 562, the enemies of one of Mesoamerica’s greatest cities, Tikal, began to plan to destroy its power.
To bring down Tikal, a city of some thirty thousand people, would require nothing less than the fiercest form of conflict known to the Maya, namely, cosmic war. It was the job of the priests, with their deep astronomical knowledge, to enlist the support of an appropriate divine cosmic body. So in late 561 or early 562, the priests of Tikal’s great rival, the city of Calakmul, recruited no less an ally than Venus himself.
For the Maya, Venus was no Old World goddess of love, but a very male god of war and disaster. They were confident that he would rain down cosmic darts and destruction on their Tikali enemies. But to ensure the deity’s support, Venus had to be in precisely the right place at the right time so that he might strike down the enemy and guarantee victory.
The Calakmul soldiers would simply be the instruments of the god—not independent human beings dependent on chance, but warriors implementing a divinely ordained destiny. For fate to smile on Calakmul’s cosmic plan, just one human choice had to be made absolutely correctly: the selection of the day for the attack. It had to be one that would enable Venus to strike with all his power, and so the Calakmul priests chose 29 April 562—the only day in the planet’s eighteen-month cycle on which it actually appeared to stand stock-still, ready to pounce.
And so it was that Calakmul and its allies attacked and humbled the great city of Tikal. Backed by his divine Venusian war patron, the ruler of Calakmul—the appropriately named King Sky Witness—took control and appears to have installed as the city’s ruler a puppet king, a young boy called Animal Skull, who could not have been much more than nine years of age at the time.¹
For the Tikal elite, the aftermath of conquest was a time of ignominy and bloodstained suffering. The attack had almost certainly not been a purely external event. A fifth column of disgruntled members of the ruling family probably collaborated with the conquest of their city, and it is likely that Animal Skull was the son of one of the members of this alienated group. Indeed, it was probably this fifth column that was responsible for deliberately and very selectively smashing up the intricately carved royal commemorative monuments in the city’s great plaza. The four previous monarchs who had ruled successively from 511 until the 562 conquest appear to have been absolutely loathed by the incoming Animal Skull regime, for it was their monuments that were selected for destruction. Their two predecessors’ monuments (covering the period 458 to 511) were ostentatiously left untouched.
A disproportionate share of this dynastic hate seems to have been reserved for the first of the post-511 rulers—a woman known to Mayanists as the Lady of Tikal. Female succession was very rare in the Maya world, and it has to be assumed that her accession was the result of a major political crisis—perhaps a sort of coup d’etat in which powerful nonroyal figures sought to gain power by placing her on the throne.
It seems likely that the change of regime in 562 was the violent denouement of a dynastic sequence of events that had started in 511 with the presumably irregular accession of the Lady of Tikal. The splendidly ignominious aspect of this pivotal year would have been symbolized by the enthronement of the boy king. A powerless puppet in the hands of Calakmul, his accession nevertheless would have been typically flamboyant.
A jade mask would have partly obscured his face, while an intricate wood and jade headdress composed of further mask images and topped with rare green quetzal feathers would have towered above his head. Large jade pendants decorated with intricate floral designs would have hung heavily from his ears, while lying across his bare chest would have been a ten-inch-long rectangular jade ceremonial plaque. Attached to an intricate belt would have been three jade skull masks. And around his middle, above his loincloth, he probably sported a jaguar-pelt skirt, open at the front, while his royal feet would have been clad in leather sandals decorated with small masks and feathers.
The moment of accession would have been symbolized by his acceptance of the royal scepter—a bizarre sculpture of a god whose long left leg, transformed into a serpent, would have been grasped by the new king in his outstretched hand. The ceremony would have been carrie
d out as Animal Skull sat on a jaguar-fur cushion upon a great stone (or possibly wooden) throne draped with a profusion of puma, deer, and jaguar pelts.
If the scant evidence from other Mesoamerican sites is any indication, the enthronement probably took place at the summit of one of Tikal’s major palace platforms. Shielded from the direct heat of the sun by a series of beautifully crafted cotton canopies, the newly enthroned puppet king would have gazed out over a landscape of red-painted palaces, pyramid temples, and dazzling white plaster plazas, and beyond it almost endless suburbs stretching as far as the eye could see. Although Tikal’s monumental city center covered only a little over one square mile, its often quite densely populated suburbs covered up to fifty times that area.
But it was against this backdrop of urban architectural splendor that the bloody suffering of 562 also took place. For as the boy-king was being enthroned, his predecessor, the fifty-four-year-old King Double Bird, having presumably been captured by Calakmul’s soldiers, was almost certainly offered as a high-grade human sacrifice, quite possibly to Calakmul’s cosmic ally, the war god Venus.²
The fate of Double Bird and other captured Tikalis would have been gruesome in the extreme. It’s likely that the former king of what was then the greatest city of the Maya world had his back broken as his body was bent backward to form a sort of living human wheel, which was then rolled down a small flight of steps into a courtyard used for ritual ball games. It is also likely that he was then taken to the adjoining temple where, if Mesoamerican sacrificial tradition was followed, his heart would have been extracted from his body with a razor-sharp obsidian knife.
It’s probable that large numbers of Tikali prisoners were sacrificed at Animal Skull’s enthronement. Stripped naked or clad in scraps of tree-bark paper, their traditional Maya gestures of submission—hands in the mouth or across the chest—would not have saved them from painful torture prior to final death. They would have been disemboweled, their fingernails would have been ripped out, and their jaws would have been removed before the actual moment of sacrifice itself.
The conduct of Maya power politics, war, and religion were integrally linked, as in so many other parts of the world. Human bloodlust and sadism merged with Maya theology to create a murder machine that was evil by any human standard, yet also theologically just in Maya cosmic belief. For, from the Maya point of view, the gods provided sustenance to mankind, and rightly deserved prompt and appropriate gratitude and payment.
It should be added that it was not only captives who were offered as sacrifices. Members of the religious and political elite often performed painful autosacrifice, with women passing thorn-adorned cords through their tongues, while men mutilated their own private parts. Indeed, it is very likely that such autosacrifice, as well as full human sacrifice, took place on a fairly lavish scale at the installation by Calakmul of the boy-king Animal Skull at Tikal in 562. Venus must have been well satisfied.
It was a change in the geopolitical situation as a whole that had persuaded King Sky Witness of Calakmul to opt for war in the first place. The choice of date might have been up to Venus, but the strategic decision to conquer Tikal was almost certainly prompted by what must have been the increasing weakness of Tikal itself.
The great city had been Teotihuacan’s main protégé in the Maya region, and the drought-induced decline in Teotihuacano power in the mid–sixth century (leading very rapidly to complete collapse) had left Tikal without a superpower patron.
From the first half of the fourth century onward, Teotihuacan had maintained a presence—probably a colonial one—in the Maya world. At first, it had been the city of Kaminaljuyu, merely a foothold used to secure sources of vital raw materials: obsidian, jade, copal (incense), cotton, cacao, and bird feathers. Near this first colony in the Maya area were one of the very few sources of obsidian in Mesoamerica and one of the even rarer sources of that most valued of commodities, the pre-Columbian stone of life, jade.
Then, having established a center of influence and probably a military base at Kaminaljuyu, the Teotihuacanos seized political control of at least two more Maya cities, either through conquest or more likely through dynastic marriage and geopolitical pressure. Teotihuacano dynasties were established in Uaxactun (pronounced “washak-toon”) and in Tikal itself in January 378—and over the next half century Teotihuacano influence and/or control seems to have been extended from Tikal to several other Maya cities: nearby Yaxha; Becan, in the north; Copan, two hundred miles to the south; and even possibly the great riverside trading city of Yaxchilan, on the Usimacinta River. Some evidence—mainly architectural—suggests that Teotihuacano influence spread even farther in the fifth and early sixth centuries A.D., three hundred miles north of Tikal to the northern Yucatan towns of Dzibilchaltun, Acanceh, Oxkintok, and Uxmal, and to the small but exquisitely rich eastern town of Altun Ha, not far from the Caribbean coast.³
The key to this expansion seems to have been heavy Teotihuacano political influence and/or control at Tikal itself. After 378 Tikal appears to have been Teotihuacan’s proxy in the Maya world. The man behind the 378 Teotihuacano takeover of Uaxactun and Tikal was a Teotihuacano general called Fire Born, and it was this military figure who then installed as king of Tikal a man called Nun-Yax-Ayin (Mystical Green Alligator), who was the son of a king called Spear Thrower Shield, who was himself almost certainly the ruler of Teotihuacan at the time. Whether the previous Tikali monarch, King Jaguar Paw I, had been violently removed or whether his natural death had caused a dynastic power vacuum is as yet unresolved.
As Teotihuacan’s main client/protégé in the Maya area, Tikal had become the linchpin of Maya geopolitics. So when Teotihuacan went into rapid, drought-driven decline in the mid–sixth century, Tikal felt the backdraft a thousand miles to the east. Teotihuacan’s cataclysmic collapse had to have had a profoundly unsettling effect on its culture’s religious and political credibility. The chaos at the great metropolis had also no doubt paralyzed it militarily.
Economically, the rapid decline of Teotihuacan and its empire must also have had a heavy impact on the Mesoamerican economy. As we have seen in Chapter 23, the great metropolis had been for centuries a massive trading machine, sucking in vast quantities of raw materials and other imports while spewing out substantial quantities of manufactured goods. In the Maya world there would almost certainly have been a drop in external demand for cotton textiles and copal. And the collapse of long-distance trade routes that accompanied the decline of Teotihuacan would also have impacted heavily on Tikal as the dominant Maya power. These reductions in external trade robbed Tikal and its dynasty of tax-in-kind revenue—precisely because as top dog in the Maya world, it would have been milking the trade system more than its not-so-powerful competitors. What is more, any reduction in inbound luxury goods would have deprived Tikal of the very items it needed to maintain its political patronage system.
As Tikal’s regional control began to disintegrate, its ability to extract tribute from other cities would have declined, and it would have become more vulnerable to internal dissent and external aggression. And that is precisely what appears to have happened in the fateful year 562.
The long-term significance of the decline and fall of Teotihuacan and the change of regime at Tikal becomes apparent only some three hundred years later, at the time of the final collapse of the major Maya civilizations. For centuries—especially since the mid– to late fourth century—the pace of political and demographic evolution within the Maya world had been to a substantial extent conditioned by the political, religious, and economic influence of Teotihuacan. Then, after the metropolis collapsed in the mid– to late sixth century, the pace of Maya political, economic, and demographic evolution was no longer constrained by Teotihuacan’s semicolonial hand.
Teotihuacan had boasted a population of between 125,000 and 200,000—some five to eight times larger than the biggest Maya city of the period. What is more, it directly or indirectly controlled a territory dozens of ti
mes bigger than any Maya city. And in religio-cosmic terms, it was the center of the Mesoamerican world. Thus its presence distorted the whole of the rest of Mesoamerican history for much of the first five centuries A.D. Conversely, its rapid disappearance from the scene created a huge political vacuum and freed up the entire Maya world in political and economic terms. Within the Maya sphere, existing cities evolved rapidly into regional powers, chief among them Calakmul, Caracol, and Copan.
Caracol, an ally of Calakmul against Tikal in 562, experienced a huge increase in population—from twenty thousand to anything between forty thousand and a hundred thousand in the late sixth century and the first half of the seventh. During this expansion period, a superb radial road system was constructed within the city, the monumental buildings were refurbished and enlarged, and hundreds of miles of stone agricultural terraces and scores of water reservoirs were built. It became extremely wealthy, and the archaeological evidence suggests that the entire population shared in this prosperity. A large middle class appears to have developed, probably among the first occasions on which this occurred in the Maya world.
