The Ancient Maya authored thousands of texts on carved stone monuments, painted ceramic bowls, and modeled stucco panels. The hieroglyphic inscriptions record historical and mythological events, chronicle courtly life, and commemorate victories in battle. This project visualizes moments of Maya political history. It graphs the rise and fall of rulers, maps the distribution of their titles, and links conflicts between dynastic lines. In doing so, it makes the case for visualization as an essential tool for understand Maya history.
GRAPHING MAYA LORDSHIP
In “Peopling the Classic Maya Court,” Stephen Houston and David Stuart (2001, 9–69) list several titles that royal family members held during the Classic period (300 and 800 CE). Of these titles, ajaw occurs most frequently and translates readily to ruler or lord (Houston and Stuart 2001, 59). Occasionally ajaw comes affixed with the prefix k’uhul or “holy,” signaling a lord held in greater esteem. The authors also note numerous prominent women holding ajaw titles, which is established by adding an ix prefix. Data filtered through the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD) captured all ajaw glyphs (n=1211) known within the corpus of Maya hieroglyphs and removed those not found in dateable inscriptions. Figure 1 documents the occurrence of the ajaw title over time, stacking within the graph the number of “holy rulers” and “queens” that appear within this more general category of lordship.
The graph features the Indigenous dating system that uses units of roughly 20 years called a k’atun (e.g., 9.1.0.0.0, 9.2.0.0.0, or 9.3.0.0.0). The above figure shows that instances of “lord” exponentially increase beginning in 9.10.0.0.0. Furthermore, the ajaw figure reflects the lagged introduction of queens within Maya hieroglyphic writing – at least writing with calendrical dates – around 9.13.0.0.0. The occurrence of ajaw titles plummets around 9.19.0.0.0, a timespan generally associated with the Maya “collapse” (Houston and Inomata 2009, 288–295). This “collapse” is most visible in the Central Maya Lowlands, an area overlapping with the jungled areas of Peten, Guatemala, and Campeche, Mexico. During this time, people abandoned their homes within once thriving cities like Tikal or Calakmul (Houston and Inomata 2009, 295–300). However, the “collapse” of the Central Lowland Maya parallels the meteorite rise of Chichén Itzá located in an area referred to as the Northern Maya Lowlands (Houston and Inomata 2009, 310–319). Regional filtering of the ajaw title helps explain the second – although smaller – wave of ajaw mentions starting around 10.1.0.0.0. Figure 2 shows a clear shift in titles northward following the “collapse” in the Central Lowlands.
MAPPING MAYA DIPLOMACY
Individuals within the royal courts of the Ancient Maya held a variety of titles other than ajaw. One particularly enigmatic title is the baahkab, translating to “head earth” or “first earth” (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 62–63). Although long recognized as a royal status (Kelley 1962, 306–307), the specific roles associated with this position remain poorly understood. Simon Martin (2020, 94) suggests a diplomatic role for baahkab title-holders, citing an instance in which an individual held this title alongside the diplomatic title lakam. Martin (2020, 85) alternatively proposes that baahkab figures oversaw land resources, pointing to the title’s explicit emphasis on land. The roles of baahkab are further obscured by the term’s semantic shift later in Maya history, when it came to denote wind spirits supporting the corners of the earth (Roys 1933).
Mapping instances of the baahkab title shows their widespread distribution throughout the Maya world (see Figure 3). The site of Yaxchilán yields the highest concentration of baahkab references (n=44), followed by nearby Toniná with roughly half that number (n=22). As Martin (2020, 84) observes, the title appears with surprising infrequency at Tikal and Calakmul, the two largest royal courts in the Maya world.
Scribes wrote baahkab in a variety of ways. One way scribes wrote baahkab is using only syllabograms – ba-ka-ba (Martin 2020, 84). Unlike Latin script, Maya hieroglyphic writing allows for multiple signs to carry the same phonetic meaning. Multiple hieroglyphs can therefore represent a single syllable like ba. Data drawn from the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD) indicate that scribes favored two signs in writing baahkab. The most frequently attested spelling (n=130) uses the XE1 syllabogram for ba, whereas the second most common (n=16) employs the logogram AP9a, signifying BAAH, in place of the title’s initial syllable. These labels come from a Maya script cataloguing system used by the MHD (Macri and Looper 2003, 17-21). Figure 4a illustrates these two different spellings of baahkab as ba-ka-ba and as BAAH-ka-ba using the XE1 and AP9a hieroglyphs respectively.
The AP9a sign also appears in the spelling of other words beyond its circumscribed use in the baahkab title. In fact, baahkab is one of several prefixed titles that include the BAAH logogram, which expresses an elevated status within a particular category (Martin 2020, 84). For example, some rulers carry the epithet baahajaw or “head lord,” where the BAAH-sign iterates a leader within a common group (Houston and Stuart 1998, 79; Martin 2020, 70). It is also frequently used in the phrase ubaah, or “their image/body” (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 64). As Figure 4b illustrates, the Late Classic distribution of AP9a extends well beyond its occurrence in baahkab. For example, while the AP9a sign appears 39 times in the hieroglyphic corpus at Palenque, it is entirely absent from the site’s seven attested baahkab titles — suggesting a deliberate scribal preference for the ba-ka-ba spelling over BAAH-ka-ba.
NETWORKS OF ROYAL CONFLICT
Classic Maya monuments record a multitude of different events. Some of these texts describe local events, such as the accession of an ajaw into lordship. Other texts document diplomatic relations, familial ties, or conflict between dynasties at different sites (see Martin 2020, 309). For example, a wooden lintel at Tikal celebrates the victory of Jasaw Chan K’awiil over his political adversary Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ of the Snake dynasty based at Calakmul (Martin 2020, 167). The text states how in 695 CE, the Calakmul king’s “weapons [were] knocked down” (Schele and Freidel 1990, 205-207; Martin 2020, 167). This victory marked a resurgence in Tikal’s political prowess within the Maya lowlands, which had for a century-and-a-half been stunted under a series of attacks coordinated by Tikal’s rival polity, Calakmul (Martin and Grube 2008, 39). Texts like these offer an unparalleled glimpse into the evolving social networks and complex state interactions that defined the ancient Maya political landscape over several centuries.
Simon Martin (2020, 309) created a visualization of these inter-polity relations in the Maya Lowlands. The visualization has undergone several revisions (see Figure 5a; Martin and Grube 2008, 21) and now maps 40 polities connected through 282 links, categorized as hierarchical, diplomatic, familial, or adversarial relations. Martin (2020, 309) openly confesses two major shortcomings of his network map. First, it includes only sites whose dynasties recorded conflicts – usually victories – with other polities. Second, it conflates centuries of Maya history, drawing predominantly from Late Classic period (600–900 CE) texts, when scribal activity in the Maya Lowlands was at its height. What the network clearly reveals is a concentration of relationships gravitating toward the Snake dynasty at Calakmul and its earlier seat at Dzibanché, alongside networks tied to Calakmul’s principal adversary, Tikal (Martin 2020, 309). Figure 5b highlights conflict within Martin’s illustration.
Martin’s map prioritizes the relative positions of sites over strict geographic accuracy, compressing space to produce a cleaner visualization. Figure 6 adds geographic precision to adversarial relationships. Mapping sites geographically better captures the spatial dimensions of warfare. For instance, plotting the nodes geographically reveals that the Snake dynasty was capable of coordinating attacks on polities as far as 370 km away, as in the case of Dzibanché’s campaigns against Palenque. In fact, the Snake dynasty (at both Dzibanché and Calakmul) coordinated multiple long-distance attacks at sites like Yaxchilán, Tonina, and Dos Pilas. It also reveals that geographically proximate polities engaged in frequent conflict – not just Tikal and Calakmul but also Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan.
One limitation of both maps is that it remains difficult to readily identify which polities are in conflict with others. An interactive radial network graph affords users easier access to understanding sites are in conflict with one another.
REFLECTION
Visualization offers a powerful tool for understanding Maya history. Graphing Maya politics shows a clear rise and fall of ajaw titles, with a dip corresponding to the “collapse” and a second wave showing Chichén Itzá’s rise. Mapping baahkab titles reveals the extent of diplomacy in the Maya area, as well as scribal choices in how titles were written. Networks show the extent of relations between polities and charting them geographically illustrates how far royal courts were willing to travel for battle. Visualization’s potential for Maya history extends well beyond these examples and remains largely untapped. Future work will explore this potential more fully, expanding both the scope of the data and the questions it can answer.
REFERENCES
Houston, Stephen, and Takeshi Inomata. The Classic Maya. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Houston, Stephen, and David Stuart. “Peopling the Classic Maya Court.” Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, Volume One: Theory, Comparison, and Synthesis. Edited by Takeshi Inomata and Stephen D. Houston. Westview Press, 2001.
Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. University of Texas Press, 2006.
Kelley, David H. Deciphering the Maya Script. University of Texas Press, 1976.
Macri, Martha J., and Matthew G. Looper. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs: The Classic Period Inscriptions. University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
Martin, Simon. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. Thames and Hudson, 2008.
Roys, Ralph L. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933.
Schele, Linda, and David Freidel. 1990. A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. William Morrow, 1990.