Scholarly drama
In times past, visitors to the ancient Maya sites Quirigua and Copan, in modern Guatemala and Honduras, typically have come away with ineradicable visions of the awesome, intricately sculpted monoliths at those places ? stelae, as they are called by archeologists ? which are not only icons representing kings, or lords, of those monarchical capitals and ceremonial centers, but also registers of history, astrological junctures, and religious mantras in glyphic texts. And visitors may remember being told or having read that one Cauac Sky, notable lord of Quirigua, captured and decapitated 18-Rabbit, notable lord of Copan.
In his sometimes recondite ?Lightning Warrior?, focused on Quirigua and K?ak? Tiliw (otherwise Cauac Sky), but also drawing on much from Copan and other Maya sites, Prof. Matthew G. Looper elucidates in minute detail what iconography, epigraphy, and monumental architecture reveal about the history and culture of this area at the apogee of the Classic Maya, leading up to a collapse around the beginning of the 10th century A.D.
Reading out what the mute monuments cryptically record (and reading between the lines as only a steeped Mayanist can), Prof. Looper tells us in scholarly fashion a creditable story of incarnate gods, hegemony, rivalry, intervention, alliance, revolt, war, mesmeric ceremonial theatrics, intoxicating dance and drink, kingly autosacrifice in the form of blood-letting, and outright human sacrifice on bloody alters with drains. This is not fictionalized history, nor is the text artificially dramatized; it is a serious and academic book, but nevertheless fascinating to the interested layman.
?Lightning Warrior? alludes to K?ak Tiliw (a transliterated, abbreviated name with currency among scholars) and is copiously illustrated with Looper?s own precise drawings; it is based not only on his own eminent researches, but also on the cumulative scholarship of many other accomplished Mayanists. In his concluding pages, Looper writes, ?The monuments and other material remains of Quirigua seem still to preserve additional secrets [about one-third of Maya glyphs remain undeciphered; K?ak? Tiliw?s tomb has not been found]. The better we are able to read the inscriptions and decipher the complex iconography of K?ak? Tiliw?s monuments, the more keenly we feel the pull of their rhetoric?.But, of course, this is precisely the intention of the sculptures ? to seduce the viewer with the spectacle of an active patron invested with divinity.?
The weighty book itself is a monument.
