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.

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