Four Heavens

David Stuart the Mayanist has a book out, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. American Scholar has hosted Ilan Stavans' review. Nature since has posted Andrew Robinson's, but since it is not open access I'm not linking it.

Personally I had a problem with Dr Stuart turning his classmates out for Obama in 2008; which I saw in light of minority populations in central America not least the Chorti of western Honduras. I didn't think Obama would be good for them. I didn't think Stuart was good for our discourse (also see, McGaugh's "Triton Station" 2020 - or, indeed, Nature itself). But hey. For Stuart it's been eighteen years.

By this book Stuart has stepped forth as Michael Coe's heir. Although as Stavans points out, Stuart doesn't touch sociology - or, more worryingly, the economy. Coe, revising a 1966 text, initially started with material culture, since he simply could not then read the elites' words.

For sociology, I must be more lenient than Stavans. It might be that Stuart is not the man to do it.

I am unsure what Stavans wants from terms like "race" in a Maya context. One can imagine a local response to foreign leadership. The Maya endured a lot of that, starting with Striking-Owl from that land of reeds which Aztecs will name the "Teotihuacan". Some of Palenque's ahauob were Yucatec, from its north. Later classic-Maya kings are also western and depicted in foreign trappings, of course not then Teotihuacano. The true Maya in the north are, later, famously depicted like Toltecs. And as they all sometimes bore foreign lords, the classic- and postclassic-Maya all had neighbours, starting with Maya cousins whose languages may or may not be depicted in the hieroglyphs. We would love to know how the Chorti understood closely-related Tzeltal, or the more distant Mam up the hills. Or, for Copan, the Honduran Lenca, or what happened to the Xinca after the Ilopango eruption. Can foreigners be depicted as slaves?

Sex relations (we're not just talking the bedroom) might also be of interest. We have a real literature on that for Assyrians, Greeks, Hittites, Romans... Chinese, arguably the Aztecs if only via Gary Jennings. Can such an essay be written for the Maya? Hittites and Muslims have given us law-codes. The Spanish related one for the Aztecs. I don't know we have that for the Maya.

I'll throw in, the animal kingdom, as well. They raised dogs and rabbits, and tamed monkeys, and respected the jaguar; the owl, perhaps, was held in honour more elsewhere.

Such might have to come to us via the myths. Again, though, I am unsure to what extent we have those myths. It is like reconstructing the old Arabic creation-myth from graffiti-references, architecture and statuary. A "Popol Vuh" exists; but I see this as a reaction to the classic myths, like the Quran is to the (then mostly-Syriac) Bibles. Or, heavens, like our Bible reacts to... itself, and to the Canaanites before it.