And it shall come to pass that when the 13th baktun comes to an end, so will the world. Everything, even the entombed red-cinnabar-coated kings, shall be destroyed in an apocalypse. So it has been foretold — and many believe — by the ancient Maya calendar; even Maya deities like the jade-haired maize god and the goggle-eyed storm god must submit. In Arabic numerals the final date would be represented this way: 13.0.0.0.0.
Talk about bad luck. According to the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, which has mounted a major exhibition that manages to be at once tantalizing, illuminating, and frustrating, that day is close at hand. Though many experts calculate it to be 21 December 2012, the museum curators believe it is 23 December 2012. And this show, Maya 2012: Lords of Time, opens with a teasing potpourri of tabloid headlines, movie disasters and television news reports invoking the imminent catastrophe (though the exhibition is expected to remain open after the world ends, until mid-January 2013).
It’s a setup, of course, because we soon learn that the Maya civilization (which once extended over modern-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador; built major cities by 500 B.C.; and reached its peak before A.D. 900) had no such idea.
In fact, the Maya Long Count Calendar, the focus of the show’s first part, has no end (and no real beginning). Maya kings erected monuments to themselves using that eternal calendar, combining an immense sense of centrality with an immense sense of immensity.
In the exhibition the apocalyptic premise is so easily overturned that it seems like a straw man, a pretext to draw crowds. The theme is also resurrected at the end: the Maya didn’t believe that the world would end in 2012, we are reminded. And we are asked to vote: “Do you?”
Other questions had nothing to do with the end of the world, but with a civilization that left behind ruins of pyramids, sculptured monuments called stelae, and populations scattered over Central America whose languages and cultures can be traced back a millennium to when the Maya reigned supreme.
The overall sensation created here, though, is of mystery. Given the length of time that the Maya thrived— their classic period was AD 250 to 900, predating the Aztec and Inca empires— it is astonishing how little is known about them. It is also surprising how much has been pieced together only in the last fifty years, with University of Pennsylvania scholars and the Penn Museum playing central roles, excavating Copán, Honduras (along with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History).
That involvement is the reason that the exhibition is mounted here, though many of its objects are copies, the originals being too heavy or fragile to travel. The show’s main curator, Loa P. Traxler, is co-author, with Robert Sharer, of an essential history, The Ancient Maya. One of her co-curators, Kate Quinn, the museum’s director of exhibitions, has introduced clever interactive displays. One touch screen translates familiar dates into the exotic Maya calendar; another lets you explore the extraordinary Copán ruins.
As for artifacts, one jade carving almost tenderly shows the maize god nestled in a seashell (photo), as water and earth join to yield fertile promise. A mysteriously etched pig’s skull from the seventh century shows two lords engaged in an unexplained “calendar ritual”. Most powerful are the hieroglyphic carvings, in which human faces, weapons, and ornaments seem manically compressed to fill rectangular molds, saturating available space with bulbous images.
Some of the figures are fearsome. Others seem almost comic: when we see a seventh-century image of the Copán dynasty founder wearing a mask of goggles and a set of fake teeth, we are told that this is meant to invoke Tlaloc, the storm god of central Mexico, but we suspect some whimsy at work. Did the Maya have a sense of humor?
If so, it’s not apparent elsewhere. Stingray spines here, found in fifth-century tombs, were used for bloodletting ceremonies. Blood-colored cinnabar was used to coat the dead, and is found throughout the royal tombs. And, perhaps because of the hieroglyphs, the sense here is of taut compression and not a little ruthlessness.
One altar (a reproduction) pictures an entire dynasty of kings, created for Copán’s last ruler. A dead jaguar was interred to represent each ruler. The kings used that creature’s fearsome persona as well, perhaps to command the human chattel who created the pyramids that archaeologists have been excavating in the Honduran jungles.
Partly because of the show’s theme, the emphasis here tends to be on Maya culture’s rational aspect. We learn that the Maya are best known for their calendar. But nothing revealed here about it is particularly astounding, and an astronomer interviewed in a video kiosk, Anthony F. Aveni, points out that the Maya did not even have a telescope.
Yet the result is intriguing. The Maya typically used a base of twenty for counting (as we use a base of ten). Their numerals have a systematic simplicity: a vertical bar was a sign for five and dots adjacent to it added one each— the bar representing, perhaps, a flat outstretched hand, and the dots extended digits for counting. And just as we use days, weeks, months, and years, the Maya used cyclical calendar categories (like baktun, kin, winal, tun).
What happens this December is that the 13th baktun in this cycle of history comes to an end, and since a baktun lasts about 144,000 days (just under four hundred years), this turn of the odometer is fairly dramatic. That’s about it. The calendar’s importance turns out to be, not that it predicts the future, but that, with its patterns and repetitions, it was crucial in deciphering Maya glyphs and their account of the past.
But even the written record has a limit. After the ninth century the historical narrative breaks off. Royal monuments stopped appearing. The population dropped significantly, perhaps as a result of drought, disease, or warfare. There was “evidence for the complete breakdown of the political system”. It came to be called the Collapse.
Then, some six centuries later, when the Maya were no longer a force to be reckoned with, they were dealt another blow with the arrival of the Spanish. Smallpox epidemics broke out. Several thousand bark-paper books were burned; only a few survive, some shown here.
Yet once we pass through this historical account, we feel as if we had still been left with too little, when we were promised so much. What were Maya religious beliefs? How did the Maya wield political power? How did they wage war? How did they transmit knowledge? What was the nature of their rituals?
Those questions aren’t really raised, and we are not sure why, except perhaps that some might have unsavory answers. There seems to be a persistent eagerness at the exhibition to spin Maya culture, exaggerating its accomplishments and ignoring shadows.
Maya script, we read, for example, “is now revealed as the world’s most complex writing system.” Really? On what grounds?
And what about human sacrifice? “Though the Maya practiced human sacrifice, there is no evidence of mass killings, as attributed to the Aztecs, or as depicted in the Hollywood movie Apocalypto.” Not terribly illuminating for the only mention of the subject: the Maya practiced human sacrifice, but less often than Mel Gibson thinks. Yet what did human sacrifice entail, and what beliefs were behind it? (We learn elsewhere that it often involved cutting out the victim’s heart.)
And the Mayan Collapse, we are informed all too quickly, should not be considered a collapse because Maya descendants still live in the region today. “Like other Native American groups,” we read, “they seek social justice, prosperity and political participation in the modern countries in which they live.”
Perhaps, but, like other institutions that show artifacts associated with American Indians, the Penn Museum here invokes platitudes in discussing them, as if repaying some debt, and worrying about portraying a negative image. A large concluding part of the exhibition is devoted to contemporary Maya culture; in interviews Maya recite almost formulaic comments about efforts to reconstitute their lost identity.
The Penn Museum shouldn’t bear the brunt of this criticism; this approach has become the norm. But, if the end of days really does turn out to be imminent, shouldn’t we be better prepared to encounter what the ancient Maya deities have in store?
Maya 2012: Lords of Time is on view through 13 January 2013, at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; (215) 898-4000, pennmuseum.org.
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