David Stuart was the wunderkind of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment: his first international conference paper, given before he was even a teenager, was followed by a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks and then a MacArthur Prize Fellowship when he was 18. He has been working on the Maya hieroglyphic script, in use on monuments and manuscripts from the later centuries BC until well into the second millennium AD, for almost half a century. This book distils his experience and that of a network of other epigraphers and archaeologists into an account both scholarly and designedly readable by a wider public, although the pseudo-scientific ‘BCE/CE’ nomenclature is perhaps unfamiliar to a public used to ‘BC/AD’. There is understandable overlap in subject matter with Simon Martin’s Ancient Maya politics (2020), but the latter is more academically aligned: both books are necessary, both are excellent and an indication of how far the field has advanced since T. Patrick Culbert’s (Reference Culbert1991) Classic Maya political history.

The Maya world was quadripartite, like that of ancient Mesoamerica, of which it formed the eastern portion. Four cardinal directions each had their own colour, auguries and deities. The east–west axis, from the rising to the setting of the sun, was dominant; a north–south axis also flipped vertically, linking the heavens to the underworld. Stuart’s book is similarly partitioned, taking the four quarters of the Maya world in turn, from the emergence of the first villages in the second millennium BC to the devastation of the Spanish conquest three millennia later: hence this book’s title.

After telling of his excitement encountering new inscriptions—in this case at La Corona—Stuart begins with the chapter ‘Rupture’ (his term for the ‘Maya Classic Collapse’ around AD 900), when large parts of Maya knowledge vanished. This is followed by an account of how the civilisation was rediscovered and proclaimed by scholar-travellers, such as John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s, and noting the importance of the undervalued Yucatecan historian Juan Pío Perez. Serious archaeological fieldwork started with Alfred Maudslay in the 1880s, yielding numerous monumental inscriptions then used by armchair scholars including Ernst Förstemann and Joseph Goodman.

Maudslay, like the two major epigraphers of the early twentieth century, Sylvanus Morley and Sir Eric Thompson, thought (unlike the prescient Stephens) that the inscriptions contained astronomical and calendric, but not historical, records. The converse was proved in the 1950s, when Yuri Knorosov (after earlier scholars were ignored) demonstrated phoneticism, Heinrich Berlin recognised historical geography, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff identified dynastic history—real language, recording real people in real places and real time. ‘By the early 1980s’ Stuart says, ‘we came to realise that Maya hieroglyphs were a complex visual system that disguised a rather simple underlying structure … We can read most texts we encounter … Each year there are new inscriptions … and it is fair to say that each text gives us something we have never seen before’ (pp.43–44). A striking example would be the mathematician-astronomer Sak Tahn Waax’s personal signature appended to a complex calendric calculation recently identified at Xultun (Rossi, Stuart & Hurst Reference Rossi, Stuart and Hurst2026).

Before examining current understanding, Stuart gives us in the chapter ‘Dawning’ a summary of the Archaic (7000–2000 BC) and Preclassic (2000 BC–AD 200) periods when Maya society and civilisation emerged: human presence by the early Holocene, maize farming before 2000 BC and village settlements by 1500 BC. Distinctive ceramics appear before 1000 BC, slightly later than those known from adjacent areas. Long-distance exchange of jade and obsidian attests Maya integration into a Mesoamerican oikumene that, during the first millennium BC, engendered the first complex places—some such as Aguada Fénix of an early date and enormous scale hitherto unimagined. Sites like El Mirador have structures larger than anything in the succeeding Classic period (AD 200–900). When writing appeared, perhaps as early as the fourth century BC, it is within the context of a society already economically, culturally and politically developed.

‘Dynasties’ documents how the rulers of the Maya realms talked about themselves in text and image, when we can finally identify specific individuals and their life-histories with precise dates in the Maya Long Count, by around AD 200 (a Long Count of AD 180 was recently deciphered on Stela 46 at El Palmar in Quintana Roo, which is more than a century older than Tikal Stela 29’s hitherto earliest date of AD 292). More than 30 polities have documented successions, often originating in the early centuries AD, including Tikal, Uaxactun, Naranjo, Palenque, Copan and Calakmul, and ending between AD 800 and 900. Their texts detail cosmic and quotidian events, including martial and marital interactions, conflict and alliance. Stuart describes many of these, with special attention given to the ‘arrival of strangers’ at Tikal on 16 January AD 378 which apparently documents the intrusion of an external, probably Teotihuacan, power into the Maya heartland.

Later, the long-term rivalry between the Mutul dynasty of Tikal and the Kanul line at Dzibanche and then Calakmul framed much Classic-period interaction: the Kanul web of alliances to enmesh the Mutul and their allies ended only in AD 695 when the Kanul were defeated, something triumphantly proclaimed on Tikal Temple I. Recent decipherments have greatly enlarged the cast of known individuals and the range of events: the interplay between Bajlaj Chank’awil, his daughter Wakjalam Chanlem, his brother Nunujolchak and the latter’s son Jasaw Chank’awil of Mutul, in parallel with Yuknomch’en and Yuknom Yich’ahkk’ahk of Kanul, is but one part of a veritable Maya ‘game of thrones’ (p.185) found equally in the conflicted histories of Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras on the Uusmacinta, and of Copan and Quirigua to the south.

One of the most striking events in Classic Maya history, the long-distance marriage alliance postulated between the polities of Palenque and Copan (e.g. Schele & Mathews Reference Schele and Mathews1991: fig. 10.7; 500km in straight line), is thrown into doubt by Stuart, but appears only in a footnote (p.260 n.13); and for an explanation of that doubt, one has to go to Martin’s book, again to a footnote (Martin Reference Martin2020 p.184 n.19). Without that signal event, inter-polity marriage begins to look more normal, with a mean distance of 64km versus a mean 49km for inter-polity warfare with a nearer neighbour (Hammond Reference Hammond1991: 277–78), although inter-hegemonic strife goes further.

Abandonment of numerous important centres at the end of the Preclassic was matched by a similar phenomenon in the sixth century AD, and then subsequently by the well-known ‘Collapse’ in the ninth century: none have so far been adequately explained, although theories about the latter have been multiple and ingenious. Stuart carries the narrative from this ‘Great Rupture’ into the Postclassic after AD 900, with the late florescence of Chichén Itzá and its reflection in the later capital of Mayapan. Both cities had iconographic and perhaps political links with central Mexico: the Aztecs were already on the borders of Maya lands when the Spanish invaded in the sixteenth century.