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4 books match the query 'Inscriptions, Mayan'

cover of Linguistics Of Maya Writing

Linguistics Of Maya Writing

Soren Wichmann

University of Utah Press, 2004

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cover of Maya Narrative Arts

Maya Narrative Arts

Karen Bassie-Sweet

University Press of Colorado, 2018

In Maya Narrative Arts, authors Karen Bassie-Sweet and Nicholas A. Hopkins present a comprehensive and innovative analysis of the principles of Classic Maya narrative arts and apply those principles to some of the major monuments of the site of Palenque. They demonstrate a recent methodological shift in the examination of art and inscriptions away from minute technical issues and toward the poetics and narratives of texts and the relationship between texts and images.
 
Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins show that both visual and verbal media present carefully planned narratives, and that the two are intimately related in the composition of Classic Maya monuments. Text and image interaction is discussed through examples of stelae, wall panels, lintels, benches, and miscellaneous artifacts including ceramic vessels and codices. Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins consider the principles of contrast and complementarity that underlie narrative structures and place this study in the context of earlier work, proposing a new paradigm for Maya epigraphy. They also address the narrative organization of texts and images as manifested in selected hieroglyphic inscriptions and the accompanying illustrations, stressing the interplay between the two.
 
Arguing for a more holistic approach to Classic Maya art and literature, Maya Narrative Arts reveals how close observation and reading can be equally if not more productive than theoretical discussions, which too often stray from the very data that they attempt to elucidate. The book will be significant for Mesoamerican art historians, epigraphers, linguists, and archaeologists.
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cover of The Inscriptions of Calakmul: Royal Marriage at a Maya City in Campeche, Mexico

The Inscriptions of Calakmul

Royal Marriage at a Maya City in Campeche, Mexico

Joyce Marcus

University of Michigan Press, 1987

Calakmul is a large Maya site in the Yucatán Peninsula of southern Mexico, just north of Tikal and the Guatemala border. In the 1980s, Joyce Marcus sketched and photographed the inscriptions on the monuments of Calakmul, in an effort to understand the nature of Maya territorial organization through the hieroglyphic record. Through the inscriptions, she was able to identify a sequence of rulers and royal couples, and their association with temples and other architecture at the site. Foreword by William J. Folan.
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cover of The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya

The Memory of Bones

Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya

By Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube

University of Texas Press, 2006

All of human experience flows from bodies that feel, express emotion, and think about what such experiences mean. But is it possible for us, embodied as we are in a particular time and place, to know how people of long ago thought about the body and its experiences? In this groundbreaking book, three leading experts on the Classic Maya (ca. AD 250 to 850) marshal a vast array of evidence from Maya iconography and hieroglyphic writing, as well as archaeological findings, to argue that the Classic Maya developed a coherent approach to the human body that we can recover and understand today.

The authors open with a cartography of the Maya body, its parts and their meanings, as depicted in imagery and texts. They go on to explore such issues as how the body was replicated in portraiture; how it experienced the world through ingestion, the senses, and the emotions; how the body experienced war and sacrifice and the pain and sexuality that were intimately bound up in these domains; how words, often heaven-sent, could be embodied; and how bodies could be blurred through spirit possession.

From these investigations, the authors convincingly demonstrate that the Maya conceptualized the body in varying roles, as a metaphor of time, as a gendered, sexualized being, in distinct stages of life, as an instrument of honor and dishonor, as a vehicle for communication and consumption, as an exemplification of beauty and ugliness, and as a dancer and song-maker. Their findings open a new avenue for empathetically understanding the ancient Maya as living human beings who experienced the world as we do, through the body.

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