The evolving field of ancient Maya studies has of late begun to take seriously the narrative and poetic features of the roughly 10,000 extant Maya texts. Although once primarily a source for historical data, Maya hieroglyphic texts are now providing startling insights into the craft of scribal production at the narrative level. Discovering the literary aspects of certain ancient texts has also laid clear the powerful continuity between Classic period (AD 250–900) poetic practices and those that survive in many current Maya groups. Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins's welcome addition to this burgeoning subfield of Maya research offers a breadth of new information and analysis that greatly contributes to our understanding of “narrative,” both linguistic and visual. Indeed, in the introduction, the authors state that one of their main purposes is to show the “relation between narrative text and narrative art” (p. 4) through both empirical and deductive approaches. A key aim of their work is to explicate the function of literary forms that have survived through the colonial period, even into present-day Maya communities. They argue that such literary structures can work in tandem with accompanying images on Classic period monuments to highlight or deemphasize certain events (p. 23).
The book comprises nine chapters that are handsomely illustrated with drawings and photographs of monuments, ceramics, and hieroglyphic texts. The first chapter, “The Creator Grandparents and the Place of Duality,” investigates the complex nature of deity among the Maya. It shows the dualistic character of many Maya gods, both past and present, in particular within the Popol Vuh and related narratives. The discussion of water-related iconography in relation to gods and dualism is particularly interesting. The duality of the creator grandparents, according to the authors, creates a balance in the world, representing a type of “ideal state” of complementarity—a notion they later argue is “one of the primary organizing principles in Maya worldview” (p. 77).
In Chapter 3, the authors introduce the concept of a narrative time frame across several monuments. They first illustrate this with Yaxchilán Lintels 1, 2, and 3, which they show contain a continuous poetic structure, suggesting that the Maya could spread out poetic constructions over more than one monument. Then Chapter 4, “The Literary Nature of Mayan Texts, Ancient and Modern,” analyzes the myriad of speech types in some Mayan languages and how speech couplets create “heat” or holiness in the narrative. Furthermore, nested couplets (chiastic structures) and other forms of parallelism participate in this generation of metaphoric “heat.” The discussions of the Lacandon story, Song of the Jaguar, previously published by Hopkins, impressively demonstrate the blending of poetic, aesthetic, and prosodic elements in Maya poetry. Maya Narrative Arts’ heavy reliance on postcolonial Maya narratives that boast a consistent brand of literary features supports the authors’ contention: poetics reveal pragmatic intent (p. 118). They argue that the Maya “are narrating history with a rhetorical strategy, in a poetic form” (p. 124), a fact they illustrate from the text on the sarcophagus lid of K'inich Janaab Pakal I at Palenque, something further elaborated on in Chapter 7.
The book also presents a test case for the use of an iconographic couplet, what the authors describe as a “framing convention” (p. 127). A debate between the authors and David Stuart exists as to the meaning of the “Ux Yop Huun” entity: either a headdress (Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins) or a god or a Preclassic hero-king's name (Stuart) on the Palace Tablet at Palenque. The authors use the directional movement followed by the reader in the caption texts to the corresponding iconographic imagery to suggest it “frames” the object being discussed—a royal headdress. The notion of a framing convention in this case, however, is sufficiently indeterminate as to add little to the debate. The clear and purposeful narrative patterning of the Palace Tablet text as described by the authors is the most compelling part of this chapter. A more convincing analysis of the interplay between text and image appears in Chapter 5.
Chapter 5 probes the connection between both text and iconography, as well as the narrative or poetic presentation of images. Maya writing is highly visual, something scribes took full advantage of in both hieroglyphic signs and in iconography. The authors discuss the importance of “semantic markers”: signs that represent specific concepts, objects, or materials (stone, wood, and so on) but that lack linguistic content. This chapter therefore stresses the visual nature of Maya writing, of images that evoke ideas not inherent outside their lexical semantics; for example, marking a celt with a “shiny” marker, a mountain with a “stone” marker, or a nocturnal animal with a “night” marker. Additionally, Chapter 5 provides a clear discussion on the relationship between text placement in identifying individuals in the scene and how “visual couplets” can be created when caption texts bifurcate a scene.
The next three chapters (6–8) use the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, the Palenque Temple of the Inscriptions Sarcophagus, and the Palenque Cross group texts, respectively, as concrete examples of how the skilled Palenque scribes presented narratives for both visual and linguistic consumption. These chapters contain a great deal of useful information for nonspecialists and scholars alike by unpacking the various ways scribes manipulated grammar (fronting, highlighting, and so on), image-to-text placement, poetry (in the form of metaphor, couplets, chiasmus, and the like), and architectural “metaphor” to produce aesthetically engaging narratives.
Minor spelling errors occasionally occur in the book, such as “Tzeltal-Tzotil” for “Tzeltal-Tzotzil” (p. 60). The authors’ use of orthography to represent hieroglyphic texts is generally current, and although they state they retain a degree of independence regarding orthography, there are some small inconsistencies in their transcriptions: “Janab” for “Janaab” (p. 65), “Bak” (p. 245) and “baak” (p. 203), “k'atun” and “katuns” (p. 76), “Chol” (p. 274) and “Ch'ol” (p. 130), “nahb” (p. 176) and “naab” (p. 170), “nah” (p. 157) and “naah” (p. 163), and “ba'ktun” (p. 240) and “bak'tun” (p. 233). There are also occasionally unexplained italicized portions of names (“Mak'abajte”) (p. 221) and the consistent use of italics on “k'in” in month names (e.g., K'ank'in,” p. 265), with no obvious reason stated.
Overall, Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins marvelously weave ethnographic, linguistic, and iconographic data together throughout the volume, all with an eye on continuity. Although certainly there are legitimate cautions with assuming an unbroken or unchanged ideology from the Classic period until the present, the authors use these data judiciously and quite effectively, in my view, to open vistas into past thought and practice. This timely book is a valuable synthesis of the detailed historical record that Maya hieroglyphic writing currently affords us and the poetic features, both visual and linguistic, used to create narrative art.
