THE MAGNIFICENT Maya murals of San Bartolo are an even more important discovery than the national press have implied. Dating to around 200BC, the San Bartolo art — which appeared in The Times on December 15 last year — is a millennium older than the famous murals of Bonampak in Mexico, hitherto the most complete set of Ancient Maya narrative paintings.
Discovered in 1946 by the explorer Giles Healey, the Bonampak murals fill three rooms with an elaborate account of the rituals surrounding the designation of an heir to the throne of Chaan-Muan, Bonampak’s king. The first room shows allied lords at the presentation of the child heir, with numerous attendants and musicians. In the second, a bloody battle results in the capture and arraignment of sacrificial victims from another kingdom, and in the third, unfinished, room there is a celebration with sumptuously clad dancers in tall green quetzal-feather headdresses.
Although some aspects of this interpretation have been disputed and tweaked over the past half century, Bonampak has remained one of the widest windows into the minds and preoccupations of the Classic Maya at the height of their civilisation: its evidence on costume, social ranking, ceremony and conflict is still unparalleled. The finds at San Bartolo promise to be as significant, albeit in a slightly different way.
The long strip of narrative winds around the interior cornice of a small building, partly destroyed when it was buried beneath a later temple: Professor William Saturno discovered the paintings five years ago when he took shelter in a looters’ trench that penetrated to the heart of what is now known as the “Pinturas” (paintings) pyramid on the eastern side of San Bartolo’s small but impressive civic core.
Only the north, west and part of the eastern cornice remain, but because the demolition rubble was used to fill in the room, many fragments from the south and east cornices have been found on the floor, and are gradually being reconstructed. Professor Saturno uses a flatbed scanner to record the fragments. He also used the scanner directly on the walls to record the newly-uncovered western frieze, from which drawings have been made by the artist Heather Hurst, a recent MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner for her work on the Bonampak and San Bartolo art.
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The north wall, already reported in scholarly journals as well as in National Geographic magazine, shows a series of semi-naked women making offerings to the Maize God. Maize was the staple of Maya agriculture, worshipped as a deity and the subject of an elaborate and extensive iconography from the Middle Preclassic, just before the date of San Bartolo, through to the Late Postclassic in the 16th century.
Most Middle Preclassic depictions are on Olmec jade artefacts from just west of the Maya Area, and almost all of these are looted, lacking archaeological context. Some are probably fakes. At San Bartolo, a Maize-God ceremonial is shown complete, and in its original location.
The west wall shows a succession of gods associated with burnt offerings and sacred trees. The offerings of a fish, a deer, a turkey and fragrant blossoms represent the realms of the watery underworld, the land, the sky and the paradise where the sun is reincarnated each dawn. A bird deity sits in each of the trees, and each of the gods offers blood by perforating his penis with a long spine. Such offerings were carried out in later Maya and Aztec times, and transmuted into the wholesale removal of victims’ hearts.
North of this is a fifth tree, associated with the Maize God himself, a striking figure already known from Olmec art. Another representation shows him crowning himself as ruler, yet others as an infant and as growing maize in the earth, flanked by the gods of rain and rivers, and finally dying: the entire cycle allegorises the lifecycle of the Maya staff of life. Similar beliefs obtain across the world, from John Barleycorn to Hiawatha.
At the very end of the west wall, tucked into the corner, a Maya ruler, seated on a scaffold throne, is approached up a ladder by an attendant lord bearing a crown. Immediately below this is one of the oldest known Maya hieroglyphic texts, which refers to the event and ends with the glyph for the word “Ahaw”, meaning ruler. Its position in one corner of the room recalls the location of the young heir in the Bonampak murals, suggesting that a central position on the wall does not, as it would in much Western art, confer prominence.
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Clearly the Maya had developed a complex, naturalistic stye of mural art, reflecting an equally complex belief system by 200BC. So accomplished is it that a century or two of prior ancestry must also be allowed for, taking the beginnings of Maya art back to around the middle of the first millennium BC, coeval with Achaemenid Persia and the emergence of Classical Greece.