ARCHAEOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY

WELL PRESERVED MURAL GIVES INSIGHT INTO ORIGINS OF MAYAN CIVILIZATION

[National Geographic Society and World Science staff, December 13, 2005]

Archaeologists at an ancient Maya ceremonial site in Guatemala have uncovered the final wall of what they call the civilization’s oldest well-preserved mural. The finding “has opened a window into the very origins of Maya civilization,” said Project Director William Saturno, of the University of New Hampshire.

“As we excavate the site further and piece together more images and glyphs [symbols] from the mural fragments we have discovered, new surprises could be revealed. The discovery is among the most important finds in Maya archaeology in the last few decades.”

The Maya are a Native American people inhabiting southeast Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, whose ancient civilization reached its height around 300–900 AD. The large painting, from about 100 B.C., shows the mythology surrounding the origin of kings and a highly developed hieroglyphic script, the researchers said.

Before the excavation of the vividly painted mural, there was scant evidence of the existence of early Maya kings or of their use of elaborate art and writing to establish their right to rule, the researchers added. The mural provides information on those subjects.

The site, known as San Bartolo, contains a pyramid complex and several buried rooms. To the west of the pyramid where the mural room was discovered, archaeologists found the oldest documented Maya royal burial, from around 150 B.C. These latest finds at the site will be reported in the January 2006 issue of National Geographic magazine.

“The mural room’s recently excavated west wall is a masterpiece of ancient Maya art that reveals the story of creation, the mythology of kingship and the divine right of a king. The 30-foot by 3-foot west wall mural shows two coronation scenes—one mythological, the other the coronation of a real king,”he said.

Archaeologists have determined the mural is about 200 years older than originally thought. As previously reported, Saturno said he found the mural room in 2001 through luck. Looking for shade, he had ducked into a trench that looters had cut into the unexcavated pyramid, and when he shone his flashlight on the walls, he saw the mural. He and his team are now in the midst of a five-year project to uncover the mural and reveal its story.

“In Western terms, it’s like knowing only modern art and then stumbling on a Michelangelo or a Leonardo,” Saturno, 36, said. “With its fine painting and its elaborate mural showing the mythic basis of kingship, the chamber has upended much of what we thought we knew about the early Maya. The mural shows that early Maya painting had achieved a high level of sophistication and grace well before the great works of the Classic Maya in the seventh century. The mural is wonderfully preserved, parts of it looking like they were painted yesterday.”

The first part of the west wall mural shows the establishment of order to the world, the researchers said. Four deities, variations of the same figure—the son of the maize god—provide a blood sacrifice and an offering in four cardinal directions as they set up the physical world. The deities move through the Maya universe.

The first god stands in the water and offers a fish, establishing the watery underworld. The second stands on the ground and sacrifices a deer, establishing the land. The third floats in the air, offering a turkey, thereby establishing the sky; and the fourth stands in a field of flowers, offering fragrant blossoms, the food of gods, and establishing paradise in the east, where the sun is reborn daily.

The next section of the mural shows the maize god establishing the world center and crowning himself king upon a wooden scaffold.

The final section traces his birth, death and resurrection, bringing sustenance to the world. The last scene shows a historic coronation of a Maya king, named and titled, receiving his headdress from an attendant. By acceding to the throne in the company of gods, the archaeologists explained, the mural likely shows the king is claiming the divine right to rule from the gods themselves.

Project iconographer Karl Taube of the University of California, Riverside, said the San Bartolo murals provide an unparalleled view of the early development of Maya mythology and art.

“All too often such carvings are broken or heavily eroded,” he said. “In contrast, the murals at San Bartolo are in brilliant polychrome and extend for many meters along the chamber walls. Elaborate red spirals indicate wind, breath and aroma and can be seen exhaling from the mouths of serpents and other beings, and at the edge of bird wings to denote movement. The maize god appears no less than seven times in the currently exposed portion of the mural, giving us an unprecedented understanding of his attributes and mythology at this early date.”

Although painted almost 1,500 years after the San Bartolo murals, a Maya book known as the Dresden Codex features a very similar sequence of directional trees and sacrifices, according to the researchers.

Because the surviving symbols within the mural room date to centuries before most other Maya texts, from what is known as the Classic period, they remain hard to read. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin, who is working on deciphering them, said they are probably captions for the figures they accompany. One legible example from the west wall, he said, shows one of the sacrificing young gods named by his accompanying caption as “star man.”

“It’s enigmatic, but emphasizes his cosmological role within the larger creation myth represented,” Stuart said.

About a mile from the mural room, archaeologists said they excavated beneath a small pyramid and found a vaulted tomb, likely the burial place of one of the early Maya kings. The tomb contained a burial complex, they added, housing ceremonial objects and vessels.

During the past year, archaeologists working nearby the mural room have found remains of two other rooms, one that faced the mural room and one on top of the pyramid, as well as thousands of mural fragments, more than 9,000 from a small excavation near the top room alone. In these fragments, the painting is finer and the figures smaller and more intricate, archaeologists said. Saturno and his team say they hope to be able to piece the fragments together to get a sense of what these murals show.

TOMB PAINTING SUGGESTS EARLY ORIGINS OF THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLES

[World Science, December 17, 2005]

Some 64 centuries ago, a prehistoric people of obscure origins farmed an area along Egypt’s Nile River. Barely out of the Stone Age, they produced simple but well-made pottery, jewellery and stone tools, and carefully buried their dead with ritual objects in apparent preparation for an afterlife. These items often included doll-like female figurines with exaggerated sexual features, thought to possibly symbolize rebirth.

[Picture shows details from a tomb painting from Hierakonpolis, from prehistoric Egypt's Naqada culture. A new study suggests the Naqada people, the earlier Badarians and the later Egyptians were essentially the same group. The painting shows a procession of boats, one of which has an awning "sheltering a figure who is probably the ruler and the person for whom the tomb was built," writes Toby Wilkinson in the book "Predynastic Egypt."

“The artwork shows the ruler engaged in various activities—including a ritual water-borne procession, perhaps an ancestor of some of the later festivals of kingship, Wilkinson writes, and "sought to express the multiple roles of the king in relation to his people and the supernatural. Remarkable is the number of features characteristic of classic Egyptian art, present already 300 years before pharaohs inaugurated classic Egyptian civilization by unifying the land around 3,100 B.C. A man holding apart two wild animals in the lower left is a type of "hero" or "master of the beasts" figure found in other artworks of its time.”]

This detail from the same painting seems to show the ruler smiting bound captives, scholars say, a frequent theme in later Egyptian art. The use of a line underneath a row of figures to organize them is also typical of later Egyptian art, Wilkinson asserts, and the number three becomes important in hieroglyphics. Although the objects in the whole painting seem scattered haphazardly, one private scholar has even claimed they're arranged to represent the constellations (The captives being smitten would represent Vela.)

Despite the simplicity of their possessions, a new study suggests these people, the Badarians, may have ultimately given rise to one of the world’s first major civilizations some 14 centuries later: the glittering culture of Egypt. Indeed, the Egyptians seem to have been basically the same people from the end of the Stone Age through late Roman times, the research found.

In the study, Joel Irish of the University of Alaska Fairbanks analyzed similarities among teeth from almost 1,000 people from various eras of Egyptian history and prehistory and found, he wrote, “overall population continuity” over this roughly 5,000-year span. Irish described the results in a paper in the Dec. 5 online edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. But he noted that while the finding backs up views that some archaeologists have voiced before, it’s partly at odds with some other studies of skeletal remains, so further tests are needed. The different results might stem from different sample sizes or types of data used, he wrote.

To the extent that Irish found variations among the teeth, many of those that differed most from the norm came from upper-class tombs. “This suggests these nobles had become genetically somewhat apart, perhaps through inbreeding. On the whole, the findings provide a window into a poorly understood question: ‘Who were the ancient Egyptians?’ By providing a glimpse into their possible prehistory, the study may help explain how the Egyptians developed their world-renowned culture, including the great pyramids that still stand.”

Some studies have also found genetic similarities between ancient and modern Egyptians. These results are debated, but if both they and Irish are right, Egypt’s present-day people and their pyramid-building forebears may largely be part of the same family dating back to the Stone Age.

Badarian culture “might have already existed by about 5000 BC but it can only be definitely confirmed to have spanned the period around 4400-4000 BC,” according to the 2003 Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. The Badarians—and even more so, members of a later culture called Naqada—are widely believed to have been cultural contributors to Egyptian civilization. But it hasn’t been clear whether they were the same people.

British archaeologists discovered Badarian culture in excavations at the modern town of el-Badari in the 1920s. Other Badarian settlements turned up in surrounding areas later. The Badarians were sophisticated compared to the peoples who came before them, according to the 1999 book ”The Prehistory of Egypt,” by Beatrix Midant-Reynes.

With Badarian culture “we unexpectedly plunge straight into a symbolic universe of incredible richness, reflecting an increasingly structured and complex society,” she wrote. “This process was to accelerate enormously throughout the fourth millennium BC, eventually contributing significantly to the emergence of ‘Egyptian Civilization.’

“Their practice of burying objects with the dead was like that of the later Egyptians, though not nearly as elaborate, archaeologists say. Each burial was carefully arranged, with a mat placed on the ground to accommodate the contracted body and the head was sometimes laid on a pillow made from straw or rolled-up animal skin.”

Their burial customs indicate a belief in the afterlife, wrote Margaret Alice Murray in “The Splendor That Was Egypt.” This was not only because the graves included objects presumably for the deceased to use in the afterlife, she explained, but because the corpses were usually laid facing west. “This, as the cemetery lay to the east of the village, suggests the belief that the dead could watch the living and take part in, or at least know of, all happenings there,” she wrote.

The Badarians didn’t mummify their dead, however—as did the later “Egyptians,” whose civilization began around 3,000 B.C. and had far-reaching effects on later civilization, including what some scholars say are major influences on Christianity. Badarian potters had exceptional skill, wrote Michael Rice in “Egypt’s Making.” “Early Badarian vessels are fired to a hardness which approaches that of metal and they are often eggshell-thin,” he wrote.

This technique was unrivalled even by later Egyptian potters, said the Oxford History, which adds that “analysis of Badarian grave goods indicates an unequal distribution of wealth. The wealthier graves tend to be separated in one part of the cemetery. This clearly indicates social stratification, which still seems limited at this point in Egyptian prehistory.”

Among the Badarians, “metal was known but tools were still made of stone,” wrote Murray. The later Naqada culture made wider use of metal. Also, while the Badarians’ “artistic sense was not highly developed,” Naqada culture had more advanced artistic abilities and a better standard of living, she wrote—putting them on a path to a achievements that, like the pyramids, still stand.