Stela from Late Classic Maya, at the Art Institute of Chicago

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Late Classic Maya Vicinity of Calakmul, Campeche or Quintana Roo, Mexico Stela, A.D. 702 Limestone 162.6 x 68.6 x 30.5 cm (64 x 27 x 12 in.) Wirt D. Walker Endowment, 1990.22 African Art and Indian Art of the Americas Gallery 136 Maya city-states in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras showcased their rulers on stone monuments called stelae. Placed before palaces and pyramids of ritual centers, these sculptures revealed major dynastic events between A.D. 200 and 900, including royal inaugurations, military victories, marriages, deaths, rituals, and key agricultural cycles. The carving style suggests the stela may be from Calakmul, a major Classic Maya city in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula near Guatemala's Petén district border. A male figure stands in a frontal position with his head, lower legs, and feet (now missing) turned left. His gaunt face indicates he is elderly. He holds a double-headed serpent bar across his body and wears ceremonial attire associated with the Maize God, including a plumed headdress, jade jewelry, a jade-netted kilt, and a spondylus seashell below the midriff. This costume symbolically connected the ruler to earth, sky, water, and maize. Hieroglyphics on the left side record the date 9.13.10.0.0 in the Maya calendar corresponding to January 26, A.D. 702. This marked the completion of a Maya 10-year period. The text on the right documents the ruler's ritual auto-sacrificial bloodletting performed to commemorate this momentous occasion. Although eroded, the hieroglyphs likely name the ruler, his ancestry, and the place he governed. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/75645?search_no=30&index=0 123D Catch scan by Yasmine Yafshar