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Fiery Pool: The Maya, the Mythic Sea and the Turtle

'Fiery Pool, The Maya and the Mythic Sea' opens this weekend at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. - Photo Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Copyright 2009 Joroge Perez de Lara (CLICK TO SKIP TO THE SLIDESHOW)After a successful stay at the Peabody Essex Museum, ‘Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea’ opens this weekend at Forth Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum. The exhibition offers a new interpretation of the ancient culture, beyond the traditional view of the Maya as a land-based civilisation.

Expect supernatural crocodiles breathing forth rain; cosmic battles taking place between mythic beasts and deities; and art works adorned with shark teeth, stingray spines, sea creatures and waterfowl all part of the new and vivid picture the exhibition paints of the Maya world view: the Maya did not just navigate river and streams, they navigated the cosmos.

They had this fundamental notion of the Maya world as a giant turtle, floating on the primordial sea. Not an everyday day turtle, floating in the pond this is the cosmic turtle on which all of us float, explains Stephen Houston, Professor at Brown University, who organized the exhibition together with Daniel Finamore, Curator at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).

Also presentaround 3100BC were:

  • Newgrange & Skara Brae
  • Otzi the Iceman
  • The Minoans
  • Egypt’s first mastabas
  • Stonehenge earth bank &ditch
  • Cuneiform

13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk’u (August 11, 3114 BC*), is the mythicaldate is recorded throughout the entire Maya area as the beginning of the current creation, when -as described inthePopol Vuh creation myth- themaker let made the earth appear where there before was only the calm sea and the great expanse of the sky.

However, it must be noted, according to ‘accepted history’ (and wikipedia) the first clear Maya settlements weren’t established until approximately 1800 BC on the Pacific Coast – and the oldest discoveries of Maya occupation discovered so far (at Cuello, Belize) have been carbon dated to around 2600BC.

Fast forward to the Classical period (300-900AD) -whenthe civilization reached its peak – and ‘Maya’ ment hundreds of cities across Mexico and Central America andtheir territoryreached as far as the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The Maya practised a complex religion and used a refined pictorial writing system composed of more than 800 glyphs.

While today 90% of these glyphs are understood (an introduction on ancientscripts.com),it was only in the late eighties that the glyph for ‘sea’ was identified. Until then, the importance of the sea in Maya culture had not been fully understood. The identification of this glyph, translated literally as ‘fiery pool’, brought to attention how important the oceanic, inland and atmospheric waters were for the Maya’s existence resulting in the exhibition ‘Fiery Pool’ and its companion book.

Click the images to see a larger version.

In 1986, the Kimbell Art Museums landmark exhibition The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art shed new light on the importance of dynastic lineage and blood sacrifice to the Maya, commented Eric Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum.

This exhibition is the next important chapter in Maya research, and I am thrilled that the Kimbell Art Museum will showcase it.The museum has dedicated part of its website to the exhibition, find it at kimbellart.org/mayaand try their (addicting) Glyphs game.

Over 90 works, focusing on the sea as a defining feature of the spiritual realm, offer insights into the culture of the ancient Maya. The artefacts, displayed in four sections,reflect the broad range of media used by Maya artists: massive, carved stone monuments and delicate hieroglyphs, painted pottery vessels, sculpted human and animal figurines, and an assortment of precious goods crafted from jade, gold and turquoise.

Water and Cosmos

Surrounded by the sea in all directions, the ancient Maya viewed their world as inextricably tied to water, an idea that is explored in the first section of the exhibition, Water and Cosmos. More than a necessity to sustain life, water was the vital medium from which the world emerged, gods arose and ancestors communicated.

A limestone panel from Cancuen, Guatemala, is an exceptional example of Maya sculpture, depicting a ruler known as Tajchanahk, TorchSkyTurtle, seated on a water-lily throne in the royal court while simultaneously inhabiting the watery realm. For the Maya, the realms of earth, sea, sky and cosmos may have been perceived as flowing into each other rather than as distinct territories of being.

Creatures of the Fiery Pool

The world of the Maya brims with animal life animated, realistic and supernatural all at once. The objects in the second section, Creatures of the Fiery Pool, portray a wide array of fish, frogs, birds and mythic beasts inhabiting the sea and conveying spiritual concepts.

An effigy of a Caribbean spiny lobster is the only known Maya representation of the creature, excavated in 2007 from Lamanai, one of the oldest sites in Belize. It dates from the turbulent early colonial period, when traditional Maya life was disturbed by the incursion of Spanish soldiers and missionaries.

Navigating the Cosmos

The section Navigating the Cosmos explores water as a source of material wealth and spiritual power. All bodies of water rivers, cenotes and the sea were united, and connected the land of the living to the underworld.

A magnificent head of a deity with characteristics of the Sun God is one of the most exquisite works discovered in the Maya world. It was found in the tomb of an elderly man, likely cradled in his arm upon burial at the sacred site of Altun Ha. Weighing nearly ten pounds, the sculpture was created from a single piece of jadeite, the colour of which was directly associated with the sea.

Birth to Rebirth

The final section of the exhibition, Birth to Rebirth, addresses the cyclical motion of the cosmos as the Maya pictured it. The sun rose in the morning from the Caribbean in the east, bearing the features of a shark as it began to traverse the sky. Cosmic crocodiles exhaled storms and battled with gods of the underworld.

An elaborate ceramic incense burner from Palenque (where they had an ingenious water system), Mexico, portrays a deity central to a creation myth. Water-curls on his cheeks and ear ornaments, which link him to the rain god (Chahk), speak of his connection to the watery world. A shark serves as his headdress, topped by a toothy crocodile. From this censer, ritual smoke curled through the city of Palenque, suffusing it with scent and mystery.

‘Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea’ at the Kimbell Art Museum runs from Sunday August 29 until the end of the year and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, available at the museum.

On October 10th, the museum invites everybody to experience the rich culture of the ancient Maya at ‘10.10.10, Celebracion de los Mayas’, a free family festival with Maya-inspired art activities, film and live music. Admission to the exhibition will be free that day.

Taking your kids to see ‘Fiery Pool’? You want to download (and print) the exhibition discovery kit from the PEM website.

The exhibition ends January 2, 2011. ‘Fiery Pool’ will then travel toSaint Louis, where it opens at the Art Museum February 13th.

Maya Pool the Size of a Football Field Discovered in Uxul, Mexico

The German-Mexican excavation team exposes the floor of the Maya pool, covered in ceramic shards. These would have sealed the reservoir. - Image copyright Institute for Ancient American Studies, University of BonnArchaeologists digging at the ancient Maya city of Uxul, Mexico, havelocated an artificial lake the size of a football field. The two metres deep pool its floor a mosaic of ceramic shards was constructed about 1,500 years ago.

Uxul is located on the Mexican Yucatn Peninsula, near the Guatamalan border and only twentysix kilometres southwest of Unesco World Heritage Site Calakmul. German and Mexican archaeologists started systematically excavating and mapping its ruins in 2009.

In doing so, we stumbled upon two square water reservoirs, each about 100 metres by 100 metres, says Dr Iken Paap from the University of Bonn.

Massive pools for storing drinking water called ‘aguadas’ are well known from other Maya cities. What makes these newly discovered reservoirs and exceptional find, is that the Uxul peoples seem to have devised an ingenious and previously unkown way to seal their water storage systems.

We’ve carried out atrial excavation, right in the middle of one of the reservoirs, explains Nicolaus Seefeld.We found that the floor, at two metres deep, was almost completely covered with ceramic shards probably pottery fragments. If it is like this throughout the entire aguada, we don’t know yet.

Click the map to see a larger version. The two artificial lakes are marked in blue on this map of Uxul's ruins. Both measure about 100x100 metres (a football field is about 90 by 120 metres.) - Image copyright Institute for Ancient American Studies, University of Bonn
Click the map to see a larger version. The two artificial lakes are marked in blue on this map of Uxul’s ruins. Both measure about 100×100 metres (a football field is about 90 by 120 metres.) – Image copyright Institute for Ancient American Studies, University of Bonn.

If so, the pools are an extraordinary find not at least because of the sheer amount of pottery needed; each of the Uxul aguadascould contain approximately ten Olympic swimming pools.

It is possible future excavations will reveal additional reservoirs. The aguadas needed to store enough water for Uxul’smore than2,000 residents to make it through the three-month dry season.

The German-Mexican excavation team alsofound Uxul’s first intact graves.

From these, and new research on the water provisions and vegetation history, we expect to gain new insights into the inhabitants of this Maya city, says Bonn University’s Dr Nikolai Grube.

All burials found so far were destroyed by grave robbers in search for pottery or jade.

Analysis of the different layers at Uxul shows it was populated throughout the different periods of Maya civilization. We excavated more than three meters deep, revealinga sequence of layersranging from the late Preclassic to the late Classic or Postclassic period,” tells Dr Paap.Inscriptionshave revealedthat around 630 AD, the city of Uxul was annexedto the kingdom of Calakmul.

The name ‘Uxul’, meaning’at the end’, was given to the city by explorers Karl Ruppert and John Denison when they tired and ill after a long expedition through the Yucan Peninsula’s rainforest discovered the ruins in 1934. Not much has changed since the thirties; Uxul is still at the end of the world, far away from modern roads and cities (photographs from the 2010 excavation season seem to confirm this).

To reach the ruins, it takes travelling 120km of jungle paths through the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, explains Dr Iken.

A thousand years ago, Uxul wasn’t isolated at all. Excellently positioned between the great Mayan cities of El Mirador in the South and Clakmul, the city was trading as far as modern-day southern Guatemalaand the highlands of central Mexico.