Three Reviews of Maya-Related Things I Wrote Last Night

Cracking the Maya Code is a 2008 one-hour PBS NOVA episode about the history through the 19^th and 20^th centuries of reading the hieroglyphic writing system the Maya used. Based on the 1992 book “Breaking the Maya Code” by Michael D. Coe (who is one of the interviewees in the documentary,) it’s also interesting enough that I want to track down the original book, and the two-hour-length documentary some time, to get more detail. This documentary is interesting in that it traces the history of our modern understanding of Maya civilization, rather than the history of ancient Maya civilization itself. “History” more or less means “that which is written,” so it makes sense that the story of what we know about the Maya is tied to what we know about their writing: we had these hieroglyphs we couldn’t decode, so we had no history of this civilization until we figured out how to read the writing, or indeed realize that there was anything interesting to be read there beyond astronomical observances.

Deciphering these glyphs was 100% the obstacle between us and understanding this ancient culture, but the ironic thing is that when we (Europeans) got to America, all this history was still intact, but then we were the ones who wiped it all (or mostly) out. In the name of religion, too, which makes it even more frustrating. It’s fascinating that that’s not the only time politics has delayed/set back our advancement in understanding of the Maya code; how much faster would these hieroglyphs been cracked if Knorozov’s “Soviet” advancements hadn’t been discredited, or if Thompson hadn’t had half the ideas that he did? I think that ancient and modern history reflect each other in interesting ways. Ancient history isn’t the only epoch with its intrigues and its dynasties rising and falling, and we can see that here in modern times as well (with some flexibility in using the word “dynasty.”) It’s the work of many people who carry the work forward, some doing a lot of work by themselves but nobody able to advance alone. David Stuart wouldn’t have been able to make his breakthrough without the work of Yuri Knorozov, and he wouldn’t have been able to make his advancements without those before him, including even Thompson and de Landa, so nobody’s a total villain, and everybody did what they thought was right, even if they were mostly or just partly wrong. So that’s interesting too.

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Tikal is a Spiel des Jahres-winning game with mechanics of worker placement, area control, and action point allowance, designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer and first published in 1999 (forgive me if I get kind of technical with the description of board game mechanics; my family are pretty heavy board gamers.) In it, you play the roles of archeologists, searching for glory through the discovery of artifacts and the control of temple spaces. There's only two ways of scoring in Tikal: when the volcano tile is drawn and the scoring round begins, you get points for treasures owned (with bonus points for having multiples/a complete set) and you get points for having the most workers at a temple site. But majority is a slippery thing, and treasures can also swap hands, and you need to consider carefully what you'll be doing with your 10 action points allowed, especially on scoring rounds. I’m used to games with more ways of scoring, so I wasn't really prepared for how intense a game it actually turned out to be. I took photos as we went along, and you can just tell, the expression on everyone's faces just grows more and more and more serious as the documentation goes along. I played it with my brother Ryan (who’s a roommate of mine,) his friend, and her fiancé. You can also play it with three or two people, and I hear that it scales down well, but I wanted to play with more people. Ryan won, but you can pretend I won if it makes you think higher of me (I did come in second.)

Did I learn anything about Maya culture from it? I wasn’t sure about the theme being about archeology at first; I was expecting more about ancient culture itself, but there are also novels and movies we can review for points that are about archeology, and archeology is how we find out about these civilizations, how we interface with them, so it’s important. As far as thematic accuracy goes, there’s three of each treasure and I’m not sure how much sense that makes- maybe if you pretend that they’re three similar pieces, the museums and collectors would go gaga over a set like that, so they’re worth more points, but the game art has the pieces all identical, not that you can blame them. I don’t recognize any of the individual artifacts, but I wouldn’t doubt them to be based on real finds. Also, there aren’t any volcanoes in Guatemala as far north as Tikal is, or in Mexico as far east, but there are Mesoamerican volcanoes.

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I watched the 2006 History Channel documentary “The Maya: Death Empire,” from the “Engineering an Empire” series. It uses modern Maya people to reenact ancient Maya, sometimes on location (though that is pretty weird because those are clearly ruins,) and it’s hosted by Peter Weller, who is one of my top underrated actors and apparently a history major at Syracuse University, so that’s neat.

The documentary moves through the history of the Maya civilization pretty quickly, with focus divided between the history of the empire and the engineering behind some of its greatest monuments- presumably all episodes of this show are like that, giving a blitz overview of the history of the empire they’re discussing, before going into something more specific where they can talk about engineering. In this case, it spends a few minutes on a few hundred years of the history of Tikal, though it dedicates more time to Palenque and the reign of Pacal the great (who commissioned a lot of buildings with a lot of engineering, and the documentary loves him for it), and Pacal’s son as well, before moving onto some of the engineering at Chichen Itza at the end.

The engineering details they provide are a little basic, upon a re-watch, and I wish they’d gone into more science on that, but their history sections go into detail about political maneuvering and the shifting alliances between warring states, so that was good/neat. They just go over that stuff so fast, though. It’s an oddly paced documentary all told, in other words. I’m already well-versed in the exploration of the temple of inscriptions and discovery of Pakal’s tomb, so their spending so much time on that was kind of bothersome when they could have been talking about more ancient history- still, it is a pretty good story, so I can’t blame them for being dramatic about it.  Another qualm I have about the documentary that I can’t really blame them for is that they’re a little misleading about the order of events dealing with our knowledge of Pakal, subtly implying that he was already a well-known figure by the time his tomb was discovered, even though we knew next to nothing about any historical details when the temple of the inscriptions was being explored. They did that to introduce him as a historical figure, and that’s only the vibe I got from it, so maybe that wasn’t the case.