The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, ...
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The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, which makes them a crucial source of information about ancient Maya spirituality and political practice within a specific historical context. Using epigraphic, iconographic, and stylistic analyses, this study explores the integrated political-religious meanings of Quirigua's monumental sculptures during the eighth-century A.D. reign of the city's most famous ruler, K'ak' Tiliw. In particular, Matthew Looper focuses on the role of stelae and other sculpture in representing the persona of the ruler not only as a political authority but also as a manifestation of various supernatural entities with whom he was associated through ritual performance. By tracing this sculptural program from its Early Classic beginnings through the reigns of K'ak' Tiliw and his successors, and also by linking it to practices at Copan, Looper offers important new insights into the politico-religious history of Quirigua and its ties to other Classic Maya centers, the role of kingship in Maya society, and the development of Maya art.
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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.?
