Linda Schele and David Friedel have been two of the most noteworthy archaeologist/epigraphers/Mayanists in the last 30 years. They have collaborated to give the world some amazing insight into the world of the Maya, especially through the social research and the epigraphical research they invested in. This piece reflects some of their thoughts on the Maya development of the politics of kings.
Many of the great inventions of the past were social inventions. To some extent, and because the population on the earth was growing, social inventions were certainly absolutely necessary. As Schele suggests, just as the Athenian Greeks whom we revere as spiritual forebears, invented democracy, so the Maya invented the ideas which cemented their survival as a civilisation. To Friedel and Schele the most important social invention of all for the Maya was the invention of kingship. To their amazement, the Maya organised this kingship option in the span of a century. Just like that, the ancient Maya people had their great ahauob, the high kings.
Kingship seems to have been an invention deeply rooted in necessity as external forces were tearing at the then highly egalitarian organisation that the Maya subscribed to. At the same time the Maya were “forced” into kingship their non-Maya Mesoamerican counterparts who they were trading with such as the Teotihacanos, and the Zapotecs (to name a few) who were trading on the coast were becoming incredibly wealthy but the distribution of that wealth was highly was being tragically unequally distributed within these societies. We must remember that the ancient Mesoamericans and the ancient Maya system was one that considered the accumulation of wealth as an aberration hence this left these people cringing in social strife.
The success of the trade and agricultural enterprise made many kingdoms fantastically wealthy – even though the inequality was rampant and devastating. What truly was a problem and what they were trying to resolve was inequality because, as Schele and Friedel put it, “…because that is precisely the state of affairs that the institution of ahau defines as legitimate, necessary, and intrinsic to the order of the universe.
Kingship addressed the problem of inequality, not by destroying or denying it, but by embedding the contradictory nature of privilege into the very fabric of life itself.