1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [155]
Most of the stelae at Kaan were made from soft stone that has eroded too much to be readable. Martin and Grube thus had to rely on inscriptions at other sites that mention Kaan and its rulers. These are surprisingly numerous. Too numerous, in a way: archaeologists have turned up at least eleven versions of Kaan’s early dynastic history painted on big vases. Exasperatingly, none of the eleven tells exactly the same story. The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological—as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pen-dragon. The dates are inconsistent, too. Kaan’s origins may reach back as far as 400 B.C. But the city-state does not unambiguously enter the historical record until about 500 A.D., when it had a king named Yuknoom Ch’een. The city was already dominating its neighbors; in 546, Yuknoom Ch’een’s apparent successor supervised the coronation of a five-year-old monarch in nearby Naranjo.
This supervision, recorded on a stela erected seventy years afterward, is the first known example in Yucatán of a Mesoamerican specialty: the chaperoned coronation. For much of the last century most Mayanists believed that at its height—200 to 900 A.D., roughly speaking—the Maya realm was divided into a hugger-mugger of more or less equivalent city-states. Critics pointed out that this theory failed to account for an inconvenient fact: Kaan, Mutal, and a few other cities were much bigger and more imposing than their neighbors, and therefore, one would usually assume, more powerful. According to the skeptics, Maya society was divided into a small number of blocs, each controlled by a dominant city, each striving to achieve some semblance of empire.
Compelling evidence for this view did not emerge until the mid-1980s, when several epigraphers figured out that the Maya glyph ahaw, which means “sovereign” or “lord,” had a possessive form, y-ahaw, “his lord,” meaning a lord who “belongs” to another lord: that is, a vassal king. Another glyph, u-kahi, turned out to mean “by the action of.” They were only two words, but enough to make dozens of texts speak. In the stela, the five-year-old ahaw in Naranjo was crowned “by the action of” the ahaw of Kaan. Naranjo’s young king “belonged” to Kaan. (Naranjo is the name scientists gave to the city; its original name may have been Saal.)
“The political landscape of the Classic Maya resembles many in the Old World—Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy are worthy comparisons—where a sophisticated and widely shared culture flourished among perpetual division and conflict,” Martin and Grube wrote in Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens (2000), their remarkable summary of the epigraphic discoveries of the last three decades. It was a “world criss-crossed by numerous patron-client relationships and family ties, in which major centers vied with one another in enmities that could endure for centuries.” As Martin put it to me, Maya civilization indeed bore striking similarities to that of ancient Greece. The Greeks were divided into numerous fractious communities, some of which were able to dominate others by threats of force, unequal alliance, or commerce. And just as the conflicted relationship among Athens and Sparta was a leitmotif of Greek life, so Maya society resounded for centuries with the echoes of the struggle between Mutal and Kaan.
Sometime before 561 A.D., a ruler known only as “Sky Witness” took the throne of Kaan. A major figure despite his obscurity, Sky Witness set out to destroy Mutal. The motive for his hatred is uncertain, though it may have been rooted