A Fascinating Book Full of Translations of Maya Glyphs

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	• A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya David Freidel, Linda Schele Harper Perennial, 1992 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Very Useful Resource for Visiting Mayan Ruins

I bought this book prior to visiting the Mayan ruins at Copan, Honduras. I found it a very useful guide to the Mayan world. I have a purely amateur interest in the Mayas, with no academic background. I wish I had this book with me when I visited Tikal, Chichen Itza and other sites in Mexico. The book devotes a chapter each to the major Mayan sites such as the two I just mentioned, Palenque, Copan, and others. It provides basic cultural information about Mayan language and social structure, interspersed with interesting if unconventional narrative passages in which the writers imagine what a day in the life of a historical Mayan figure might have been like. Some might be put off by these passages, but I liked them well enough. You can read the book simply for general cultural background, or take it with you on a stela-by-stela tour of the ruins. At times, there was a bit too much detail for my purposes, but I would rather have too much information than too little, and mostly the amount of information was just right. The book also provides a few portraits of archaeologists who have devoted their lives to uncovering the history of the Mayas, including some discussion of the cracking of the Mayan Code. It was informative and a worthwhile read, particularly if you are planning a trip to see the ruins for yourself.

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Good Mayan Book

Great book to read after visiting the Yucatan. I can't get enough information and this book helped out alot.

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Dry But Worth It

Of the various books available on Mayan culture that a layman has any chance of engaging profitably, this is one of the best. Detailed and well-organized, it presents a wealth of material on the subject, with plenty of accompanying illustrations that are well linked to the text, unlike other books which drop in pictures seemingly at random or which fail to explain why they are placed as they are. (Or, my personal favorite, those that assume you know why the picture is there, and what it's of, and don't bother to provide captions.)

If you're not afraid of "tomes," this is an excellent book for you, though it's not an introductory text. I'd recommend starting with something a little more basic before you tackle this fellow. But once you've familiarized yourself with the lay of the land regarding the Mayas, you won't find many books that cover so many different aspects of their life and culture in such a deep, dense way. You can feel these authors' love for their subject.

However, that being said, I must warn you this is a fairly dry book, and I am a reasonably tolerant reader when it comes to subjects I enjoy such as this one. It's chock full of great stuff, but its tone and style are heavily scholastic, so be prepared. It's still worth it. I have read any number of books thicker than this in a few sittings, but I found I retained more of the material and stayed more engaged by taking small bites of it over a few weeks.

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A Fascinating Book Full of Translations of Maya Glyphs

Note: It looks like I have offended some Mormons who don't want you to read this book. Nevertheless, science won't go away. Your "helpful" votes are appreciated

Schele and Freidel's book takes you into the mind of the ancient Maya, where bloodletting induced visions that opened doors into the world of pagan spirits and everyone had an animal "familiar."

The description of the "War of Conquest" of Tikal (tee-kal) against Uaactun (wa-shak-toon) is riviting. It is fascinating that we know the name of the general of Tikal, "Smoking-Frog." At other places, we now also know the names of the Maya leaders. "Ah Zacol...governed Lacanja for Knot-eye-Jaguar, the king of Bonampak." Other names are equally strange. I won't list the name of one king because Amazon's filter's would reject my review. Anyway, his name was "p-n-s of the jaguar."

I came to my interest in the Maya from my early encounters with Mormon authors who used specious scholarship to connect the Maya to the religious novel called the "Book of Mormon." Now that Maya writing has been deciphyered, all those false claims have been exposed. In many cases, the truth was known, but Mormon writers were engaging in the practice of lying for the Lord to promote their faith.

When the Spanish first saw Maya art, they misinterpreted it. They named one temple, for example, the "temple of the cross." The cross-like tree was seen as evidence that the Maya were Christians. Now we know that in the case of the temple of the "Foliated Cross" that the cross-bar of the cross is actually a maize plant with a "human head as an ear of maize." The maize plant is growing out of the "waterlily monster."

It was interesting to learn that the upright stone monuments, or stela, were known as "tree-stones" and the doorways into the temples were represented as the mouths of mountain monsters. The doorways are seen as caves into the mountain.

"Bloodletting, the focus ritual of Maya life, was the instrument" of the materialization of other-worldly beings.

The claims of Mormons and others that Stela B at Copan depicts elephant trunks was refuted even before the translation of the Maya glyphs. The trunks are actually the long beaks of macaws (you can see the colorful birds there today). The false claim is now doubly refuted because the writing on the stela refers to "macaw mountain," a nearby hill--not "elephant mountain."

Mormons are still claiming that there is a horse carved on the Temple of the Wall Panels at Chichen Itza. It is actually a damaged feathered-serpent (one feather hangs down to make the so-called horse's head). In reality, the Maya were so ignorant of horses that when Cortes left his lame horse among the Itza, they fed it meat.

The strange diet cause the horse to die and the Maya made a statue, calling it "Tzimin Chac," from the "Tzmin," meaning tapir (the animal most similar his general shape to a horse), and "Chac," the god of rain and thunder. When Father Urbita came to convert the Itza, he destroyed the idol at great risk to his life.

The Book of Mormon connection to ancient mesoamerica is without foundation. As you go back in time, the paganism only increases. There was no Hebrew civilization in mesoamerica.

This 500-page book belongs on the shelf on anyone interested in the mind of the ancient Maya.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

The recent interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs has given us the first written history of the New World as it existed before the European invasion. In this book, two of the first central figures in the massive effort to decode the glyphs, Linda Schele and David Freidel, make this history available in all its detail. A Forest of Kings is the story of Maya kingship, from the beginning of its institution and the first great pyramid builders two thousand years ago to the decline of Maya civilization and its destruction by the Spanish. Here the great historic rulers of pre-Columbian civilization come to life again with the decipherment of their writing. At its height, Maya civilization flourished under great kings like Shield-Jaguar, who ruled for more than sixty years, expanding his kingdom and building some of the most impressive works of architecture in the ancient world. Long placed on a mist-shrouded pedestal as austere, peaceful stargazers, the Maya elites are now known to have been the rulers of populous, aggressive city-states.

Hailed as "a Rosetta stone of Maya civilization" (Brian M. Fagan, author of People of the Earth), A Forest of Kings is "a must for interested readers," says Evon Vogt, professor of anthropology at Harvard University.

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