A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [129]
It was not just the painting of the Silk Princess that these brooms kept clean – this Buddhist shrine also contained painted images of the Buddha as well as the Hindu gods Shiva and Brahma. Other shrines in the complex have pictures of Buddhist, Hindu and Iranian gods as well as very local deities. The gods that travelled the Silk Road were, like the traders themselves, happy to share accommodation.
PART ELEVEN
Inside the Palace: Secrets at Court
AD 700–900
This section explores life in great royal courts across the world through objects that were intimate, private expressions of public power. Although made for different settings, all these objects were created so that the rulers of the world could state and re-state the full extent of their authority, to themselves, to their courtiers and their gods. Sometimes they also suggest the very real obligations they saw as going with that authority. The civilizations of Tang China, the Islamic Empire and the Maya in Meso-America were all at their peak during these centuries. Although medieval Europe suffered periods of chaos, there were moments of high artistic achievement, such as those at the court of the Frankish emperor.
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Maya Relief of Royal Blood-letting
Stone relief, from,Yaxchilan (Chiapas), Mexico
700–750 AD
It’s tough at the top – at least, that’s what those at the top like us to think. The long hours, the public exposure, the responsibility. In return, though, most of us would argue, they get the status and the pay – and many people, it seems, are willing to settle for that particular trade-off. But almost everyone would think twice about envying anyone, however privileged, whose regular duty was to go though an ordeal like the one portrayed here. I find it hard even to look at the image.
It is a limestone relief carving, about the size of a small coffee table. It’s rectangular and it shows two human figures. A man stands holding a blazing torch over the kneeling figure of a woman. Both are elaborately costumed, with wonderfully extravagant headdresses. So far, so innocuous. But when you look more closely at the woman the scene becomes horribly disconcerting, because you can see that she is pulling a rope through her tongue – and the rope contains large thorns which are piercing and lacerating her.
My squeamish European eye keeps focusing on this stupefying act, but for the Maya of around AD 700 this would have been a scene of their king and his wife together in a devotional partnership, jointly performing a ceremony of fundamental significance for their position and their power. It was commissioned by the king for the queen’s private building, and it was certainly intended to be seen by only a very select few.
The great Maya civilization collapsed not long after this stone slab was carved, and its deserted cities bewildered the first Spanish visitors in the sixteenth century. For hundreds of years afterwards, explorers travelling in southern Mexico and Guatemala came across huge abandoned cities hidden in dense jungle. One of the first modern visitors, the American John Lloyd Stephens, tried to describe his wonderment in 1839:
Of the moral effect of the monuments themselves, standing as they do in the depths of the tropical forest, silent and solemn, different from the works of any other people, their uses and purposes and whole history so entirely unknown, with hieroglyphs explaining all but perfectly unintelligible, I shall not pretend to convey any idea.
Maya territory covered modern Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico. The first Maya cities have their beginnings around 500 BC, just a little before the Parthenon was built in Athens, and the Maya civilization continued for well over a thousand years. The greatest cities had tens of thousands of inhabitants, and at their centre were pyramids, public monuments and palaces. Thanks