Maya History by Tatiana Proskouriakoff

For expert epigraphers only

Russian-American scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff is one of the stellar names in the field of Maya studies and was an instrumental contributor to the decipherment of the Maya’s written language. The book Maya History, a summation of her life’s work, was incomplete at the time of her death and published posthumously in 1993. Prior to Proskouriakoff, the prevailing view among Maya scholars was that the hieroglyphic carvings left behind by the Maya civilization were largely devoted to astronomical, calendrical, and mythological content. Proskouriakoff, on the other hand, proved that the Maya carvings were historical records of political events and dynastic lineages. Although the Maya’s written carvings were not completely deciphered, Proskouriakoff was able to recognize the names and titles of rulers and enough verbs to connect royal family trees and diplomatic relations between various Maya city-states. In Maya History, Proskouriakoff examines almost every Mayan stela catalogued during her lifetime, as well as lintels, staircases, and other carved monuments. She presents her findings largely in chronological order while bouncing back and forth between just about every Maya city in Guatemala and Southern Mexico.

This is an important and fascinating book, but it’s not for general readers. Here’s a typical sentence: “The second hand glyph holds a ‘hook-scroll’ (T19), associated with death expressions, and refers to a rare ahau compound such as that inscribed on a vessel from the Tzakol III burial 22 at Uaxactun (R. E. Smith 1955:2:Fig. 7)”. Proskouriakoff’s intended audience of university professors would have had access to a library of books with illustrations and photographs of Mayan stelae and texts, as well as J. Eric S. Thompson’s catalog of Maya glyphs (where one would find the “T19” mentioned above, for example). Very few illustrations of stelae are actually included in this book (though many single glyphs are pictured alone), so she’s constantly describing monuments that the reader can’t see. Dates are all presented in Maya notation (e.g. 9.12.9.17.16 5 Cib 14 Zotz’), which is no surprise, but no Gregorian equivalents are given. To fully understand everything in this book, one would need not only a faultless understanding of the Maya calendar but also a professional familiarity with all the archaeological sites discussed, or at least a wealth of PhD-level reference materials with illustrations of every stela. Proskouriakoff’s scholarship is sound, but this book could really use a publisher that will go the extra mile to illustrate it to the extent it deserves.

While Proskouriakoff outlines a great deal of Maya chronology in this book, she continually admits that much of what she is stating is speculative or unresolved. The reading of Maya hieroglyphs has no doubt come a long way since much of Maya History was written. Since then, I’m sure that many of Proskouriakoff’s conjectures have been confirmed, but probably a few have been proved erroneous. This book is really more about the process of decipherment, however, than the results. The amount of actual historical information in this book could have been summarized in a two- or three-page chronological table (unfortunately it isn’t). The bulk of the text, on the other hand, is Proskouriakoff’s explanatory examination of Maya glyphs and text.

Proskouriakoff’s Maya History is a five-star book in the history of Maya studies. For the general reader, however, it’s not a five-star reading experience. For nonacademic readers like myself looking for a deeper dive into the arcane details of this subject, I would recommend Forest of Kings by Linda Schele and David Freidel. Like Maya History, it combines historical narrative with a detailed examination of glyphs and iconography, but it’s more accessible to the general reader and more generously illustrated.
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Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

Prehistoric life was horny and boring

California author Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his science-fiction visions of the future, but his 2013 novel Shaman is set in prehistoric times. During the Ice Age, a young man named Loon reluctantly undergoes training to become his tribe’s shaman. Like many a teenager coming of age, he feels forced into a future he didn’t choose. The only aspect of the job that really interests him is cave painting. The story takes place at a time when homo sapiens, such as Loon and his people, coexisted with Neanderthals, referred to here as “the Old Ones,” so maybe around 45,000 years ago. Though no place names are stated, geographical features indicate that the story takes place in Europe.

Shaman is science fiction only in the sense that it is based on archaeological and anthropological science. The book contains no elements of fantasy or speculative fiction, with the exception of Robinson’s ridiculous choice of a supernatural narrator. For the most part, Robinson aims for a realistic depiction of prehistoric man. In fact, his take on Ice Age living is so realistic that, but for the fact that the characters have names, more often than not Shaman reads very much like a textbook: This is the way early man hunted and preserved their food. This is the way they executed cave paintings. This is how they undertook their seasonal migrations. This is the way they made snowshoes. The characters perform these actions for the reader as if they were mannequins in a natural history museum diorama. If I want to know about how ancient man lived, I would rather read an actual textbook, such as Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe by Jane McIntosh. Fiction, on the other hand, should offer drama, characterization, and plot, all of which are scanty qualities in Shaman.

Nothing resembling a plot shows up until halfway through the book, at which point some characters travel to distant lands, where we get another textbook on another tribe’s way of living. The fictional content of the book is sparse and rather dull. There is a chase scene, for example, that lasts eight chapters, and it’s largely just descriptions of snow and ice. I like the fact that Robinson didn’t go in for soap-opera melodrama or new-age mysticism like The Clan of the Cave Bear, but he should have done more to make this story interesting. He wants to convince us that stone-age humans were people too, but then he delivers very little conflict between the shallowly drawn characters as they act out some questionably Edenic caveman fantasy camp.

Something else Robinson wants you to know about prehistoric people is that apparently they were obsessed with genitalia and bodily functions. I don’t know why it is that when authors these days write about the ancient world, they feel compelled to load their prose with bodily fluids of the reproductive and digestive systems, but Robinson is only one of many who have gone that route in recent years. Is that supposed to be cutting-edge realism? Prehistoric communities probably had more open attitudes about sex and sanitation than we do, but I also think they had other things to think about, like survival.

Robinson is so concerned with describing everything in minute detail that there is little room left for a story, and what there is moves at a glacial pace. As a result, reading Shaman feels like a very long haul. The time period and subject matter would seem to offer some interesting narrative possibilities, so it’s hard to understand why this book turned out to be so boring.
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Writing (Ancient Peoples and Places series) by David Diringer

Broad, shallow overview of ancient scripts

In 1957, the London publisher Thames & Hudson began publishing a series of books on archaeology entitled Ancient Peoples and Places, which eventually grew to 113 volumes. In most cases, each book synthesizes the current research on a particular region or ancient civilization. The 25th book in the series, however, was the first volume to break that rule by focusing instead on the worldwide ancient history of a particular cultural phenomenon: Writing. That book entitled Writing, written by David Diringer, was first published in 1962.

Diringer starts by explaining the distinctions between pictographic, ideographic, transitional, phonetic or syllabic, and alphabetic forms of writing. He then goes on to examine individual scripts of different regions of the world and their chronological development. He starts by discussing the first pictographic symbols of prehistoric peoples. He then examines ancient writing styles of the Near East, including cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittite hieroglyphics, and the Minoan or Cretan scripts Linear A and B. This is followed by a chapter on East Asian scripts, which only covers Chinese and Japanese, with a brief addendum on Easter Island writing. Then follows a chapter on the pre-Colombian writing of the Maya and Aztecs. Not surprisingly, the most coverage is reserved for the ancient languages that were precursors to our own alphabet, which arose out of Semitic scripts that precursed the Phoenician, Greek, and finally Latin alphabets. Multiple side trips are taken into other written languages, such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Indian scripts. The book is illustrated with many transcriptions of ancient writing, photographs of inscribed artifacts, and phonetic and alphabetic tables of the languages covered.

The books in the Ancient People and Places series are meant to be concise introductory texts for students and general readers. They typically run about 200 pages, with many illustrations and charts, plus another 60 pages of photographs. In a book of that size, Diringer can’t provide a comprehensive history of every ancient script, so he had to make choices about what to feature and what to omit. Nevertheless, he covers a surprisingly large number and broad variety of languages here. What you get in this book is a little bit of knowledge about a lot of different scripts and their cultures. Diringer provides enough information to pique one’s interest, so the reader can seek out further information on specific languages in more specialized texts.

I read the first edition of this book from 1962. At that time, the Minoan script Linear B had just been deciphered, and the Mayan glyphs had not been completely deciphered. Soviet scholar Yuri Knozorov would put the finishing touches on cracking that code a few years later. I’m sure a lot of other discoveries have been made regarding ancient scripts in the past 60 years. Nevertheless, as emphasized before, this is a basic introduction to the field, and much of the fundamentals have survived the test of time. There’s not enough space here for Diringer to teach you how to read any of these scripts anyway, so if you require that level of detail and accuracy, look for a more advanced text. As a general overview, I enjoyed this book. It provides a clear outline of the development of alphabets over millennia, and it brought to my attention a few ancient civilizations and their scripts with which I was unfamiliar. I have been pleased with the volumes of the Ancient Peoples and Places Series that I have seen thus far, and I look forward to reading more of them.
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Mexico (Ancient Peoples and Places series) by Michael D. Coe

Great concise overview of everyone northwest of the Maya

In 1957, the London publisher Thames & Hudson began publishing a series of books on archaeology entitled Ancient Peoples and Places. These books were republished in America by Frederick A. Praeger. In most cases, each book synthesized the current research on a particular region or ancient civilization. These books are authoritative enough to perhaps be used in undergraduate courses but accessible enough to educate general readers. The series eventually included at least 112 volumes. Some of these books are still in print and have been updated over the years.

Mexico, the 29th book in the Ancient Peoples and Places series, was first published in 1962 and is now in its eighth edition. It was written by Michael D. Coe, a distinguished archaeologist of pre-Colombian Mexico and Mesoamerica. Of the major scholars of Mexico’s ancient peoples, Coe has perhaps done the most to educate non-academics by writing books accessible to the general public, such as his popular 1992 book Breaking the Maya Code, which won a National Book Award. The reader won’t find any Maya here, however. Coe explains that the Maya need their own book in the series, which he wrote and published a few years later. Here Coe makes a cultural distinction between Mesoamerica, home of the Maya, and Mexico proper, being everything northwest of the Yucatán. Much of the ancient history presented here centers around the Valley of Mexico, location of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (site of modern Mexico City).

Later editions of this book are subtitled From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, but the book is really a broad overview of all the ancient cultures that inhabited Mexico from the first humans who walked down from the Bering Land Bridge thousands of years ago to the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish conquistadores in 1521. The Olmecs and the Aztecs only get one chapter each. (They both later got their own books in the Ancient Peoples and Places series.) The absence of the Maya and the brevity with which the Olmecs and Aztecs are treated may be perceived by some as a detriment to the book, but I actually see it as a strength. One can find hundreds of books on those three civilizations, while the rest of Mexico’s ancient peoples go ignored or neglected. Here Coe provides a concise but comprehensive overview that gives everyone their due consideration. Centuries before the rise of the Aztecs, Native Mexican peoples had already left monumental testaments to their great civilizations, such as the metropolis of Teotihuacán northeast of Mexico City, Monte Albán in Oaxaca, and El Tajín in Veracruz. An archaeologically curious traveler wandering around Mexico today will hear all about the ancient histories of the Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Chichimec peoples, and many more. It is hard to grasp the broader picture of where and when these different cultures lived, and how they interacted and influenced one another. This book provides a clear key to how they all fit together geographically, chronologically, and culturally.

The content is a combination of historical synopses and mini-field reports of what was found at particular archaeological digs. Although this is an introductory text, Coe doesn’t dumb down the subject matter. The reader is expected to quickly grasp archaeological terminology, for example the official designations for specific Ice Age periods, pottery cultures, or styles of spear points. The many photographs, illustrations, charts, and maps are helpful. I’m not an archaeologist, just a layman and tourist, but I have read much on Mexican history, and I still learned a lot of fascinating facts from this book. If this is an indication of the quality one can expect from the Ancient Peoples and Places series, then I look forward to reading many more of these books.
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Aztec by Gary Jennings

Fascinating history retold with inappropriate kinks

I have an avid interest in Mexico and its pre-Colombian history, and I have often wondered why there aren’t more historical novels set in that world. When I heard about Gary Jennings’s novel Aztec, published in 1980, it sounded like that Mexican epic I had long been looking for, but in some respects it turned out to be a case of “Be careful what you wish for.”

Aztec is ostensibly the autobiography of an elderly Mexica man named Mixtli. His narrative is transcribed verbatim by a team of Spanish clergymen in the year 1529, under the direction of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga. This clever structure allows the bishop to provide brief commentaries from a Spanish perspective in his letters home to King Carlos. In a wise choice by Jennings, Mixtli is not an Aztec king, high priest, or great warrior, but rather a minor noble with a talent for languages. Through his work as a scribe, interpreter, and diplomat, he is able to move in all circles of Aztec society and is present at some of the most important events in Mexican history. The book takes place mostly in the ancient metropolis of Tenochtitlan and focuses on the culture of the Aztecs, Mexica, or Triple Alliance (three names for the same civilization), but if you are interested in other cultures of ancient Mexico, have no fear. Mixtli travels quite a bit, so the reader also gets glimpses of the Maya, Olmecs, Tarahumara, and several other peoples of ancient Mexico.

Unfortunately, one aspect of the book that’s really awful are its sex scenes, of which there are many. One minute you’re deeply involved in the history of ancient Mesoamerica, and the next minute you’re reading Penthouse Forum. These scenes are almost all totally unnecessary and positively juvenile in their boyish glee over salacious details of reproductive anatomy. Did you know that earthquakes make people horny? Well, if you didn’t, Jennings manages to work that into the story not once but twice. The sex scenes are not only annoying but unrealistic. If an Aztec were recounting his life story to a bunch of Spaniards, would he describe everything in minute detail as if his listeners had never seen genitalia before? I don’t know if incest and pedophilia were common in ancient Mexico, but even if they were, the giddiness with which Jennings recalls such incidents is uncalled for. As one would expect, there’s also plenty of violence in this novel, which is more excusable. Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism were part of Aztec culture, and the gore inherent in their description is justified, but beyond that Jennings also includes a few over-the-top scenes of gratuitous torture porn.

Something else that’s exasperating about this novel is its inordinate length. I could have read five or six other books in the time I spent on this one, and the meandering plot, repetitious dialogue, and unnecessary scenes (see previous paragraph) do not justify its overly protracted duration. If it’s the Spanish conquest you’re interested in, Cortés doesn’t show up until about 80 percent of the way through, but the book does move pretty briskly after that. The conquest of Tenochtitlan is a familiar story, but Jennings does a good job of bringing it to life.

To his credit, Jennings strikes a good balance between research and storytelling. Some writers of historical novels rely too heavily on research to the point where you feel like you’re reading a textbook. Jennings, however, puts the fiction on an equal footing with the facts, resulting in a novel that reads like a novel. It’s possible that Aztec may be one of the best novels (in English) about pre-Colombian Mexico (because there aren’t many), but that still doesn’t excuse its faults and excesses. If you’re interested in ancient Mexican history, you’re going to want to read this, but expect to be periodically frustrated, annoyed, disappointed, and bored by it.

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