The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art - Softcover

Schele, Linda; Miller, Mary Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807612782 ISBN 13: 9780807612781

Publisher: George Braziller Inc., 1992

Synopsis

"[A] work as remarkable for its text as for the photographs and drawings that illustrate it."―Octavio Paz, The New York Review of Books

A comprehensive guide to the Maya which reveals kingship rites, ritual warfare, with a vast array of color plates and drawings. 122 color plates, 300 drawings and 50 black-and-white illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Ellen Miller is the Sterling Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and in 2019 will become director of the Getty Research Institute.

Michael D. Coe is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University. His books include The Maya, Mexico, Breaking the Maya Code, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization, and Reading the Maya Glyphs. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

From Publishers Weekly:

Lavishly produced (with 122 color plates, 300 drawings and 50 black-and-white illustrations), this book, designed to accompany a traveling exhibition, is narrowly focused on the opulent lifestyle and ideology of the Maya ruling elite. Maya history is presented mainly in terms of the sumptuary art, dynastic succession and peculiar (sadomasochistic) courtly rituals of these aristocrats. Schele and Miller see as the keys to this civilization an underworld myth (the Popol Vuh) and grisly blood-letting and -taking ceremonies conducted in royal precincts, parade grounds, ball courts and battlefields, which are pictured on relief carvings and paintings. This interpretation is based on a new phonetic reading of Maya hieroglyphics that has gained ground since the 1960s, to which Schele has contributed heavily. She has come up with eyecatching decipherments of glyphs on monuments that identify the names, dates and some major eventsbirth, death, marriage, accession, the capture of enemiesin the lives of individual Maya kings. Much of this intriguing explication is clearly laid out in the text, captions and notes.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: George Braziller Inc.
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0807612782
• ISBN 13: 9780807612781
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336