The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology

by James A. O'Kon

  Jean Frederick Waldeck, the artist who engraved some of the plates in Berthoud’s 1922 volume, traveled to Mexico in 1825. Waldeck, who claimed to be a count, spent nine years working in Mexico City as a hydraulic engineer before traveling south to the Yucatán, where he sketched and painted the ruins of Maya classic cities. He found his was to Palenque, where he lived in the ruined structures from May 1832 to July 1833. The building he used as his place of habitation is still known as the “Temple of the Count.” He then traveled to the ancient city of Uxmal in 1834, producing architectural reconstructions of the site. He returned to Paris and began work on the production of lithographs developed from his renderings of the Maya sites. In 1838, he published Voyage Pittoresque et Archéologique dans la Province d’Yucatan. Illustrations in this book indicate the Eurocentric spin that Waldeck infused in his interpretations of Maya art. His paintings of Uxmal reflect a pronounced Egyptian style. The most skewed prejudices are in his renditions of hieroglyphics, which depicted elephants in his illustrations of Maya monuments. The illustrations in his book, though flawed, provided the first eye-witness accounts of classic Maya ruins since Mexico’s independence.

  The Mystery of the Maya Codices

  The greatest compilation of Maya knowledge was set down in the thousands of Maya books destroyed by the zealous Spanish conquistadors. Only four examples of these marvelous works are known to survive today. These few examples of a once-voluminous library were the key to the decipherment of the Maya script and the unveiling of the secrets of the Maya (Figure 2-2).

  A single Maya book, the Dresden Codex, was known to survive in European libraries during the mid-19th century. The origin of this singular artifact is clouded in the mist of time, though it may have been a part of the treasure sent back to Spain by conquistadors. In 1519, before his conquest of Mexico, Hernán Cortés and his bloodthirsty band were sacking the coast of the Gulf of Mexico near the present-day city of Vera Cruz. They were collecting loot from the cities of Gulf Coast Maya. While ransacking the houses of the local inhabitants, it was reported that the Spanish encountered innumerable books. Some samples were collected for their artistic value, along with other looted valuables and captives. Their trove included valuables collected from local raids plus bribes paid to Cortés by the Aztec emperor. Part of the booty, the “royal fifth,” was the 20 percent to be paid to the Spanish royal court. Reports from Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés’s private secretary, indicated that the royal fifth included some books, folded like cloth, which contained figures like the Mexicans (Aztecs) use for letters. These books were of little value to the cut-throat conquistadors, who did not value them because they did not understand them.

  The ship transporting the royal fifth, including captives from the raids, treasure, and the books, reached Spain safely. In a letter, Giovanni Ruffo da Forli, Papal Nunico at the Spanish court who had inspected the treasure, described his memories of the books. He stated that there were some paintings, folded and joined in the form of a book, and that in these were figures and signs in the form of Arabic or Egyptian letters. Italian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, present at the review, described the books as being made of the inner bark of a tree, the pages coated with plaster and the cover made of wooden boards. He described the writing as characters written in a line and that they greatly resembled Egyptian forms.

  One of the passengers on the treasure ship with the royal fifth was Francisco de Montejo, the future governor of the Yucatán, who was quite knowledgeable about the Maya. He had gained his knowledge from Gerómino de Aguilar, a Spaniard held captive by a Maya chief for eight years. Through Aguilar, Montejo knew of the existence of Maya books and their writing capabilities. Peter Martyr interviewed Montejo and learned of the contents of Maya books. Martyr reported that the contents of the books included descriptions of laws, sacrifices, ceremonies, rites, astronomical notations, and mathematical computations. There can be no doubt that the “works of art” that fascinated the European men of learning were Maya codices.

  The fate of the Maya books reaching Spain as part of the royal fifth is unknown. An exception could be the invaluable Dresden Codex. In 1739, the Royal Library of Saxony in Dresden purchased a unique book from a private collection in Vienna. This book was not catalogued and went unnoticed until 1796, when it surfaced in a most unlikely place. That year a treatise was published in Leipzig relating to the art of interior design. The five-volume work was entitled Darstellung und Geschichte des Geschmacks der vorzÜglichsten VÖlker (Depiction and History of the Taste of Superior Peoples) by Joseph Friedrich, Baron von Racknitz. The volumes included a plate showing a room decorated with icons from the Dresden Codex. However, though this was the first publication of Maya script in print, the contents of this volume, no doubt, escaped the study of scholars.

  Alexander von Humboldt, the famous German explorer, made significant studies in American geology, meteorology, and natural history, and published an atlas in 1810. The volume entitled Vues de Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de L’Amérique (Views of the Mountain Ranges and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas). This work includes a plate showing five pages from the Dresden Codex in intricate detail. This was the first publication of a portion of a Maya codex and the first accurate representation of a Maya hieroglyphic text.

  At the mid-point of the 19th century, there were no researchers in the Americas attempting to decipher the Maya script. Extensive research into the Maya civilization was almost impossible due to the lack of access to the published works on the topic. All published works on the Maya were printed in Europe, in limited numbers with a costly price tag. They consisted of multiple volumes printed in elephant folio format, each weighing 20 to 40 pounds and measuring 30 inches × 24 inches (77 cm × 60 cm). Furthermore, they cost thousands of dollars per set, winding up in the collections of a few erudite European collectors. The publications were rare in Europe and all but unknown to scholars in America. Experts have determined that a single set of these volumes may have found its way to the United States by 1843, when serious exploration of Maya cities began to take shape.

  The works containing invaluable knowledge of the Maya had a way of going missing in archives and libraries; the invaluable works relating to Maya life during the conquest by Bishop Diego de Landa were lost in the Madrid archives and not recovered for 300 years. The effort to destroy Maya books was complete, with the exception of four Maya codices that are known to survive. In the mid-19th century the Dresden Codex had not been recognized for the information on Maya script that it contained. The other three codices were not discovered until the 19th and 20th centuries. The Paris Codex was found in the Paris National Library in 1859, the Madrid Codex was uncovered in 1866 in Madrid, and the Grolier Codex was discovered in New York in 1976 and was returned to Mexico. The wonder of it all is that four survived. Could it be that the world’s great libraries, including the Vatican Library, have other codices in their vaults?

  Unveiling of the Maya Civilization to the World

  During the middle of the 19th century, Spain’s colonies in the New World won their independence. Gone was the xenophobic policy of New Spain. The Maya homeland in Mexico and Central America was opened to explorers and scholars of antiquity.

  On October 3, 1839, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood boarded a ship in New York harbor and set sail for the Bay of Honduras. Little did this talented pair know how much this adventure would change their lives and result in the rewriting of world history.

  When their ship set sail for the tropics, 34-year-old John Lloyd Stephens, a New York City attorney, and 40-year-old Frederick Catherwood, a British architect, were enthralled with their mission. The pair had met in England four years earlier and established a friendship based on mutual interests in ancient art and architecture. Both men had had extensive experience in the study of classic European and Egyptian archaeology. They had visited ruins of the ancient world, recording descriptions and illustrations of classic archaeological s
ites. Stephens was a successful travel writer. He had traveled the old world and had written two popular travel books: Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petria, and the Holy Land (1837) and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838). The books were written in a style that provided a chatty narrative of everyday incidents that he encountered in his travels (Figure 2-3). Catherwood was a gifted artist with extensive archaeological experience in the Mediterranean and the Near East. He had trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and, following his formal training, became a traveling illustrator. Catherwood traveled extensively in Greece, Egypt, Italy, and the Near East, preparing illustrations of the ancient monuments from classic civilizations.

  Stephens had learned of possible lost cities in the Yucatán and Central America from a book seller in New York and persuaded Catherwood to accompany him in the exploration of the abandoned Maya cities to record the sites with his accurate illustrations. Stephens had secured a diplomatic passport from President Martin Van Buren as the U.S. Representative to the Central American Federation. Stephens took great advantage of his diplomatic status in traveling throughout the region exploring the Classic Maya cities. The result of this collaboration was the 1841 publication, in two volumes, of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, followed by additional discoveries of Maya cities in the two-volume work Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, published in 1843.

  Figure 2-3: John Lloyd Stephens wrote a series of books that revealed the Maya civilization and changed world history. Wikimedia Commons.

  The explorations of the Maya cities were carried out methodically and recorded with meticulous detail. Stephens and Catherwood had gained extensive experience observing Egyptian monuments and their carved hieroglyphics. This experience with similar ancient iconography provided a substantial background for their observations, narratives, and illustrations of Maya art and architecture.

  The technology of the camera was in its infancy during this period, and the team had the use of a daguerreotype camera on their second journey. This type of camera could produce an image, but the technique of reproduction of photography would not be mastered for several years in the future. To capture the complex details of Maya art, Catherwood combined his natural talent for drawing with the use of a camera lucida. This device projected the image of a monument directly onto sheets of sectioned graph paper. Images could be accurately drawn in the correct proportion and perspective. His illustrations provided exquisite images that were reproduced as engravings in the two-volume sets (Figure 2-4 and Figure 2-5). The camera lucida images produced an exponential increase in quality when compared with any method of illustration that had previously been published depicting the monuments and structures of the classic Maya.

  Figure 2-4: Frederick Catherwood traveled with John Lloyd Stephens and produced accurate illustrations of Maya art and architecture. Wikimedia Commons.

  Stephens’s narrative of the art and architecture of the monuments in the classic cities, and the daily incidents of the adventure are well organized and clearly written. Stephens was familiar with the recent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by the French scholar Jean François Champollion, who had decoded the Rosetta Stone. Stephens was convinced that the carved inscriptions on the monuments were a hieroglyphic script that described the historical records of the civilization that had constructed the cities. This leap of consciousness was a direct link derived from to his knowledge of the writing systems of ancient civilizations that he had observed in the ancient cities of the Old World. Stephens stated, in Volume One of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, “One thing I believe, that its history is graven on its monuments. No Champollion has yet brought to them the energies of the inquiring mind. Who will read them?” Stephens’s concept was well ahead of his time; however, his conception of the inscriptions of the script was to be criticized as erroneous by Mayanists for decades into the future. However, history and hard work by epigraphers would prove him to be correct.

  Previous European volumes on the Maya had cost thousands of dollars each. In 1841, Stephens’s two-volume sets sold for five dollars and were affordable to the general American reading public. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán sold 20,000 copies in the first three months of publication. Stephens’s clever narrative and the precise engravings by Catherwood produced works that became best-sellers throughout the world. In 1843, the pair published a second two-volume set relating to the Maya, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán. The second set, equally popular as the first, related to their exploration of Maya sites in the Yucatán. Though not covering the distances reflected in their first effort in Maya exploration, the second volumes explored a greater number of abandoned cities. These volumes are masterpieces of accurate visual and narrative descriptions of Maya cities (Figure 2-6).

  Stephens’s conclusions included his theories of the substance and age of the Classic Maya cities. Unlike European scholars, Stephens hypothesized that the ruins were of recent origin and had not been constructed by travelers from ancient Mediterranean cultures. Furthermore, he concluded that the inscriptions carved on the monuments constituted a writing system and recognized that the writing at different sites was apparently of the same language. He further concluded that the script carved on the monuments was the same writing system as illustrated in the Dresden Codex. These popular books resulted in the rewriting of the history of the Americas and opened the Maya civilization to exploration and multiple fields of study. Today, these books are as popular with aficionados of Maya archaeology as they were in the 19th century.

  Figure 2-5: View of El Castillo at Chichen Itza by Frederick Catherwood, the first images the world saw of the Maya civilization. Wikimedia Commons.

  Figure 2-6: The Maya arch at Labná by Frederick Catherwood. Wikimedia Commons.

  Stephens and Catherwood never returned to the Yucatán after the success of their books. However, their final collaboration made another significant impact on American life and history. Stephens had grown wealthy from the sale of his books. In the late 1840s, he helped fund the construction of the famous Panama Railroad, and Catherwood joined the effort as the civil engineer for the design and construction of the roadway line. The Panama Railroad transported gold prospectors from the east coast of Panama across the isthmus on their way to the gold fields of California. The railroad was a success and is still operating today. However, as the Trans-Isthmus project was completed, tragedy struck both players. Stephens was injured in Panama and died in New York City in October 1852. Shortly afterward, Catherwood followed him to the grave in 1854. While returning on the steamship Arctic to New York from England, the ship was struck by a French freighter. He went down at sea off the coast of Labrador, with many of his drawings and daguerreotypes.

  The Collection of Data and the Unraveling of the Maya Code

  After the Mexican-American War in 1848, travel in Mexico became hazardous. The rate of exploration was reduced by the civil strife, but some adventurers were able to travel with the protection of small armies. The technology of the camera had improved, along with the ability to record photo prints, and the Yucatán became a hunting ground for adventurous explorers traversing the rainforest seeking new finds. They were equipped with the new type of camera to record their discoveries. The explorers used photographic images and narrative descriptions of their discoveries. Though the corpus of descriptions and imagery of the ruins grew, there were few attempts to decipher the script and disclose the secrets of the Maya, including those of Constantine Rafinesque and James McCulloh.

  Traveling in Mexico from 1857 to 1861, French adventurer Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay used the new invention of reproducible photography and an efficient method of plaster casting using lightweight molds to produce three-dimensional copies of Maya art. The two innovations created a tremendous visual impact on the recording and dissemination of Maya art. In 1862, Charnay published his findings in Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s volume C
ités et Ruins Américaines (American Cities and Ruins). He patterned his work after that of Stephens, employing a running narrative with clear photographic images. He returned to Mexico from 1880 to 1883 to visit the ruined cities, and published Les Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde (The Ancient Cities of the New World) in 1887. The development of the photogravure printing process had enhanced the reproduction of photography. This allowed his published works to be available to the same wide public readership as the works of John Lloyd Stephens. The lost cities of the Maya became popular again.

  Born near London in 1850 to a wealthy engineering family, Alfred Percival Maudslay led a life of scholarship and adventure, and left a significant mark as a leader in Maya archaeology. Maudslay attended Cambridge University and then joined the diplomatic service. He served as a British diplomat in the South Pacific, where he was involved in subduing rebellious tribes in Fiji. After that posting, he was appointed British Consul to Tonga and Samoa. He resigned the British Diplomatic Corps and traveled to Mexico to begin the major archaeological work that is his legacy. He was first drawn to the ruins of the Maya cities by reading the works of John Lloyd Stephens. Maudslay carried out seven explorations in Mexico and Central America. During his first trip in 1881, he set a goal of providing a complete and accurate record of the architecture, art, and inscriptions of specific Classic Maya cities, including Chichen Itza, Copán, Palenque, Quiriguá, and the river city of Yaxchilan. Maudslay used the newly developed wet plate photographic process and made paper-mâché casts of the monuments. The work at the sites was carried out under conditions of great hardship, and the effort of transporting the voluminous results of his works back to London was a considerable task.