Link to enlarge Masculine head from Palenque Chiapas after Michel Zabé WHO'S WHO IN THE CLASSIC MAYA WORLD
Peter Mathews
 

Other Maya Who's Whos

There have already been several compilations of Classic Maya individuals and some of their biographical details, but most of them have been limited to a single site, and most have concentrated on the rulers. Of course it can all be said to have begun with the ground-breaking articles by Heinrich Berlin (1959) and Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1960), who were the first to demonstrate the presence of historical individuals in Maya inscriptions. Proskouriakoff's 1960 article focussed on the rulers of Piedras Negras, but she included comments on rulers from 12 other sites. A few years later, Proskouriakoff published an important discussion of the rulers of Yaxchilan (Proskouriakoff 1963; 1964), and Berlin (1965; 1968) published two articles on rulers of Palenque.

Following in the footsteps of Proskouriakoff and Berlin, numerous other scholars have compiled data concerning kings of various Maya realms. In 1962 David Kelley applied Proskouriakoff's techniques to the inscriptions of Quirigua, and in the process identified a number of Quirigua rulers (Kelley 1962). Later Kelley published a book in which he detailed the dynastic sequences of a number of sites (Kelley 1976:213-243). In 1974, Linda Schele and I presented biographical data on the later kings of Palenque (Mathews and Schele 1974). I have also written about the dynasts of Naranjo, Bonampak, Tonina, and Yaxchilan (Mathews 1975; 1980; 1982; and 1988, respectively). Bonampak has also been the subject of a book by Mary Miller (1986), and Yaxchilan by Carolyn Tate (1992). Christopher Jones (1977) published an excellent article on three of Tikal's greatest rulers, and Genevieve Michel published a book that gives brief biographies of about two dozen kings of Tikal (Michel 1989). In 1985 Andrea Stone, Dorie Reents, and Robert Coffman wrote about the Middle Classic rulers of Caracol (Stone et al. 1985). In 1985 Stephen Houston and I published a monograph on the rulers of Dos Pilas (Houston and Mathews 1985), and Houston later presented an expanded study of the same site in his doctoral dissertation (Houston 1993). Meanwhile, sites in the northern lowlands were not left out: Kowalski (1985) published a study of Uxmal inscriptions, and Davoust (1977; 1980), Schele and Freidel (1990:346-376), and Erik Boot (2003), among others, have written about historical individuals at Chich'en Itza.

In 1991 I was invited to present a weekend workshop on Maya hieroglyphic writing in Cleveland, Ohio, at Cleveland State University (Mathews 1991). In many ways the workbook I prepared for that hieroglyph weekend was instrumental in spawning this Who's Who. For the central theme of the workshop I thought that I would present the evidence for the dynastic sequence at Palenque ruler by ruler. This involved the compilation of all the texts and images of the various kings and queens, their dates, and even a listing of the various names that had been given to them by researchers over the years. The result was a kind of embryonic Who's Who of Palenque.

Long-running excavations at Copan have seen advances in our understanding of the Copan inscriptions. An excellent series of studies on Copan, including many details of various of the Copan kings, is available in the Copan Notes series. Another series that needs to be mentioned here is the series of workbooks published to accompany the annual Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at the University of Texas at Austin, for many years led by Linda Schele. A number of these weekend workshops have concentrated on the dynastic sequences of particular sites: Copan (Schele 1989), Tikal (Schele 1990), Yaxchilan (Schele 1991), Palenque (Schele and Mathews 1993), Quirigua and Copan (Schele and Looper 1996), Tikal and its Neighbors (Grube and Martin 2000), Palenque and its Neighbors (Grube et al. 2002), Chichen Itza and Ek Balam (Grube et al. 2003), and Naranjo and Caracol (Grube and Martin 2004).

Excellent discussions of the kings of Copan, Tikal, and Quirigua have recently been published (Fash 1991; Harrison 1999; and Looper 2003, respectively). Finally, by far the most ambitious study on the subject so far has been the brilliant book Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube (2000). This book provides excellent discussions of the rulers of eleven of the most important Maya kingdoms: Tikal, Dos Pilas, Naranjo, Caracol, Calakmul, Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, Palenque, Tonina, Copan, and Quirigua. While Martin and Grube concentrate on the kings and queens of these great Maya kingdoms, they also provide important discussions of other people and places from the Classic Maya World. This brief list of publications is by no means exhaustive, and I apologise to those scholars whose works are not mentioned here.

In this Who's Who in the Classic Maya World, I shall provide biographies of individuals from all walks of life in Classic Maya times. While most of the biographical information that we have from the Classic Maya world concerns the kings and their immediate families, we also have records of courtiers and lesser nobles, and also of captives. In some cases we have portraits of these individuals as well as a large amount of historical detail on them; in other cases we just have a single short reference. However brief the references may sometimes be, we now have some knowledge at least of hundreds of individuals from the Classic Maya world.

Incidentally, this Who's Who is not the first to be compiled for an ancient Mesoamerican culture. The great Mexican scholar Alfonso Caso devoted much of his life to studying the Mixtec culture of southern Mexico, and in 1949 announced the preparation of a study of the Mixtec rulers and their kingdoms (Kelley 1980:7). His monumental two-volume study Reyes y Reinos de la Mixteca was not published until 30 years later (Caso 1979), almost a decade after Caso's death. The second volume of this work is sub-titled 'Biographical Dictionary of the Mixtec Lords', and presents brief biographies and codex sources for several hundred Mixtec lords and ladies. I should like to pay homage here to Caso's pioneering work.

Reference

Berlin, Heinrich
1959 Glifos nominales en el sarcófago de Palenque.
Humanidades
2(10):1-8.
Guatemala City: Universidad de San Carlos.
1965 The inscription of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque.
American Antiquity 30(3):330-342.
1968 The Tablet of the 96 Glyphs at Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico.
in: Archaeological Studies in Middle America (Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, Publication 26):135-150.
New Orleans.
 
Boot, Erik
2003 The Inscriptions of Chichen Itza.
PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.
 
Caso, Alfonso
1979 Reyes y Reinos de la Mixteca. 2 volumes.
Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
 
CMHI
1999 Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Volume 6, Part 3: Tonina (by Ian Graham and Peter Mathews).
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
 
Copan Notes
1986- Short reports on the inscriptions and archaeology of Copan. On file for copying from Kinko's.
 
Davoust, Michel
1977 Les chefs mayas de Chichén Itzá et Glyphes de Filiation. Étude Épigraphique 2. Unpublished typescript.
1980 Les premiers chefs mayas de Chichén Itzá.
Mexicon
II(2):25-29.
 
Fash, William L.
1991 Scribes, Warriors, and Kings.
London: Thames and Hudson.
 
Grube, Nikolai, Alfonso Lacadena, and Simon Martin
2003 Chichen Itza and Ek Balam.
in: Notebook for the XXVIIth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March, 2003:II-1 – II-84.
Austin: Maya Workshop Foundation.
 
Grube, Nikolai, and Simon Martin
2000 Tikal and Its Neighbors.
in: Notebook for the XXVIth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March, 2000:II-1 – II-78.
Austin: Maya Workshop Foundation.
2004 Patronage, Betrayal, and Revenge: Diplomacy and Politics in the Eastern Maya Lowlands.
in: Notebook for the XXVIIIth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March, 2004:II-1 – II-95.
Austin: Maya Workshop Foundation.
 
Grube, Nikolai, Simon Martin, and Marc Zender
2002 Palenque and Its Neighbors.
in: Notebook for the XXVIth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March, 2002:II-1 – II-66.
Austin: Maya Workshop Foundation.
 
Harrison, Peter D.
1999 The Lords of Tikal: Rulers of an Ancient Maya City.
London: Thames and Hudson.
 
Houston, Stephen D.
1993 Hieroglyphs and History at Dos Pilas.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
 
Houston, Stephen D., and Peter Mathews
1985 The Dynastic Sequence of Dos Pilas, Guatemala.
Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 1.
San Francisco.
 
Jones, Christopher
1977 Inauguration dates of three Late Classic rulers of Tikal, Guatemala.
American Antiquity 42(1):28-60.
 
Kelley, David H.
1962 Glyphic evidence for a dynastic sequence at Quirigua, Guatemala.
American Antiquity 27(3):323-335.
1976 Deciphering the Maya Script.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
1980 Mixtec Chronology.
The Quarterly Review of Archaeology. (Dec. 1980):7, 11-12.
 
Kowalski, Jeff Karl
1985 A historical interpretation of the inscriptions of Uxmal.
in: Fourth Palenque Round Table (Merle Greene Robertson and Elizabeth P. Benson, eds.):235-247.
San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
 
Looper, Matthew G.
2003 Lightning Warrior: Maya Art and Kingship at Quirigua.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
 
Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube
2000 Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens.
London: Thames and Hudson.
 
Mathews, Peter
1975 The Monuments of Naranjo, Peten, Guatemala.
Unpublished typescript.
1980 Notes on the dynastic sequence of Bonampak, Part I.
in: Third Palenque Round Table, 1978, Part 2 (Merle Greene Robertson, ed.):60-74.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
1982 Épigraphie.
in: Tonina, Une Cité Maya de Chiapas (Pierre Becquelin and Claude F. Baudez, eds.) II:894-902, 917-918, III:1380-1383.
Paris: Mission Archéologique et Ethnologique Française au Méxique.
1988 The Sculpture of Yaxchilan.
PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Yale University.
1991 Maya Hieroglyphic Weekend, October 26-27, 1991.
Cleveland: Cleveland State University.
 
Mathews, Peter, and Linda Schele
1974 Lords of Palenque—the glyphic evidence.
in: Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Part I (Merle Greene Robertson, ed.):63-76.
Pebble Beach, California: The Robert Louis Stevenson School.
 
Michel, Genevieve
1989 The Rulers of Tikal.
Guatemala City: Publicaciones Vista.
 
Miller, Mary E.
1986 The Murals of Bonampak.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 
Proskouriakoff, Tatiana
1960 Historical implications of a pattern of dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.
American Antiquity 25(4):454-475.
1963 Historical data in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, Part I.
Estudios de Cultura Maya 3:149-167.
Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México.
1964 Historical data in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, Part II.
Estudios de Cultura Maya 4:177-201.
Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México.
 
Schele, Linda
1989 The Dynastic History of Copan.
in: Notebook for the XIIIth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March 11-12, 1989:65-127.
Austin: Art Department, University of Texas at Austin.
1990 Tikal: The Early Dynastic History.
in: Notebook for the XIVth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March 10-11, 1990:68-174.
Austin: Art Department, University of Texas at Austin.
1991 Yaxchilan: The Life and Times of Bird-Jaguar.
in: Notebook for the XVth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March 9-10, 1991:80a-200.
Austin: Art Department, University of Texas at Austin.
 
Schele, Linda, and David Freidel
1990 A Forest of Kings.
New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
 
Schele, Linda, and Matthew Looper
1996 The Inscriptions of Quirigua and Copan.
in: Notebook for the XXth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March 9-10, 1996:90-226.
Austin: Department of Art and Art History, and the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin.
 
Schele, Linda, and Peter Mathews
1993 The Dynastic History of Palenque.
in: Notebook for the XVIIth Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March 13-14, 1996:90-165.
Austin: Department of Art and Art History, and the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin.
 
Stone, Andrea, Dorie Reents, and Robert Coffman
1985 Genealogical documentation of the Middle Classic dynasty of Caracol, El Cayo, Belize.
in: Fourth Palenque Round Table (Merle Greene Robertson and Elizabeth P. Benson, eds.):267-275.
San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
 
Tate, Carolyn
1992 Yaxchilan.
Austin: University of Texas Press.



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