Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art - Hardcover

Linda Schele; Mary Ellen Miller

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080761159X ISBN 13: 9780807611593

Publisher: George Braziller, 1986

Synopsis

xii + 335 pp. with many figs. & 123 color plates, 4to.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Ellen Miller is the Vincent Scully Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Her previous books include The Art of Mesoamerica.

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
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 080761159X
• ISBN 13: 9780807611593
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 335