In Search of the Lost Empire of the Maya
CALAKMUL In the seventh century A.D. the Snake rulers presided over this capital city—in what today is southern Mexico—and its largest structure, a pyramid 180 feet tall. From Calakmul they managed an intricate web of alliances.
The ancient city of Holmul isn’t much to look at. To the casual observer it’s just a series of steep, forested hills in the middle of the jungle in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. The jungle here in the Petén Basin is thick and warm but drier than you might expect. And silent, except for the drum of cicadas and the occasional calls of howler monkeys.
Take a closer look, and you may notice that most of these hills are arranged in massive rings, like travelers huddled around a fire on a cold night. An even closer look reveals that parts of the hills are made of cut stone, and some have tunnels carved into their sides. In fact they’re not hills at all but ancient pyramids, left to decay after the collapse of the Maya civilization a millennium ago.
The site was a thriving settlement during the Classic Maya period (A.D. 250-900), a time when writing and culture flourished throughout what is today Central America and southern Mexico. But it also was a time of political upheaval: Two warring city-states were locked in perennial conflict, grappling for supremacy. For a brief period one of those city-states prevailed and became the closest thing to an empire in Maya history. It was ruled by the Snake kings of the Kaanul dynasty, which until just a few decades ago no one even knew existed. Thanks to sites around this city-state, including Holmul, archaeologists are now piecing together the story of the Snake kings.
Masks from the tombs at Calakmul were meant to ease the passage of the Snake elite into the next world. Royal visages made of green jade, more valuable than gold to the ancient Maya, evoked the annual agricultural cycle and regeneration.
Holmul isn’t a big, famous site like nearby Tikal, and it was mostly ignored by archaeologists until 2000, when Francisco Estrada-Belli arrived. An Italian-born Guatemalan, he’s ruggedly handsome with scruffy hair and a relaxed demeanor. He wasn’t looking for anything fancy, such as Classic-era written tablets or ornate burials—just some insight into the roots of the Maya. One of the first things he found was a building a few miles from what appeared to be Holmul’s central cluster of pyramids. In it were the remnants of a mural portraying soldiers on a pilgrimage to a faraway place.
Oddly, parts of the mural had been destroyed, apparently by the Maya themselves, as if they’d wanted to erase the history it depicted. Hoping to understand why, Estrada-Belli tunneled into several nearby pyramids. Ancient Mesoamericans built their pyramids in stages, one on top of the other, like Russian nesting dolls. When the people of Holmul added a new layer, they preserved the one beneath, which has allowed researchers to tunnel in and see previous structures almost exactly as they were left.
In 2013 Estrada-Belli and his team worked their way into one of the larger pyramids, tracing an ancient staircase to the entrance of a ceremonial building. Climbing up through a hole in the floor, they discovered a 26-foot-long frieze, marvelously preserved, above the entrance to an ancient tomb.
Stucco friezes are very rare and fragile. This one depicted three men, including a Holmul king, rising from the mouths of strange monsters flanked by underworld creatures, entwined by two giant, feathered serpents. The artwork was iconic and strikingly vibrant.
As Estrada-Belli gazed at the frieze, he noticed a series of carvings at the bottom. Kneeling down, he saw a ribbon of characters, or glyphs, listing the kings of Holmul. Near the center was a glyph that he knew at once was the most electrifying discovery of his career: a grinning snake.
A relief from La Corona, Guatemala—once the ancient city of Saknikte—shows future Snake King Yuknoom Cheen II playing ball during a visit. Hieroglyphics give the date: February 11, 635.
Among the various glyphs, I saw the [name of the] Kaanul,” he says. “Before this we were anonymous; Holmul was anonymous. And then, all of a sudden, we were in the middle of the most exciting part of Maya history.”
The story of the discovery of the Kaanul, or Snakes, and their effort to create an empire begins in Tikal, the city of their most hated enemy. Just as Tikal dominated the Maya lowlands for centuries, it has dominated Maya archaeology since the 1950s. The sprawling city once had a population approaching 60,000, and its elegant buildings surely dazzled visitors in A.D. 750, much as they do tourists today.
It also had hundreds of beautifully carved tombstone-like blocks called stelae. Using the inscriptions on them, scientists reconstructed Tikal’s history until its fall in the ninth century. But there was an odd gap—roughly from 560 to 690—when no stelae were carved and little else was built. Baffled by this 130-year break, archaeologists called it the Tikal hiatus and chalked it up as a mystery of the ancient Maya.
Archaeologists began filling in the gap in the 1960s, when they noticed an odd glyph scattered around various Classic sites—a snake head with a clownish grin and surrounded by markings associated with royalty. In 1973 archaeologist Joyce Marcus recognized it as an emblem glyph—words for a city and ruling title that served as a sort of coat of arms. She wondered if it could be related to the Tikal hiatus. What if some unknown warriors had conquered the city? If they had, where would such a force have come from, and wouldn’t archaeologists be familiar with it?
The jungles of the Petén are hot and parched in the dry season and nearly impassable in the wet season. They’re infested with poisonous plants and insects and menaced by armed drug runners. Nevertheless Marcus explored them for months, visiting ruins and collecting photos of glyphs. Everywhere she went, she saw references to the grinning snake, especially around the ancient city of Calakmul, in what’s now Mexico, near its southern border.
“These satellite sites were mentioning this city in the center. So in that way it was kind of like a black hole,” Marcus says. “It was the hub of a network of sites around it that were equidistant from Calakmul.”
When she got to Calakmul, whose two central pyramids were easily visible from the air, she was amazed by its size—roughly 50,000 people once lived there. Stelae were strewn everywhere, but most of them were blank. The limestone was so soft that centuries of erosion had wiped them clean. She found only two snake glyphs in the city.
The mystery of the snakes prompted a young British researcher, Simon Martin, to assemble all the information he could about the snake glyphs from Calakmul and smaller sites. He used hints of battles and political intrigue from around the Maya world to form a picture of the Snakes and their dynasty.
“We only really know about Tikal from Tikal. Whereas in Calakmul’s case, we know about them from everybody else,” Martin says. “It just sort of coalesced out of the mist. Little by little the significance of all these random appearances began to point in the same direction.
CALAKMUL FROM ABOVE Take in the grandeur of Calakmul as you swoop over and around its 180-foot-tall pyramid in this soaring aerial video.
CALAKMUL FROM ABOVE Take in the grandeur of Calakmul as you swoop over and around its 180-foot-tall pyramid in this soaring aerial video.
Video by David Coventry, Guillermo Cortés, and Jacobo Cortés
Eventually Martin and archaeologist Nikolai Grube published a book called Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, which described the intertwining histories of the kingdoms of the ancient Maya world. At the center of that world, for one shining century, were the Snakes. Like Marcus, Martin says the Snake kingdom was a sort of black hole—one that sucked in all the cities around it and created what might have been a Maya empire. Of course there are still many questions about the Snakes: how they lived, ruled, and fought—and even whether some of them were real.
At the end of the fifth century, Tikal was one of the most powerful city-states in the region. Archaeologists suspect that it held its position with the help of a much larger city high in the mountains 650 miles to the west called Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City. For centuries these two cities shaped Maya painting, architecture, pottery, weapons, and city planning. But all that changed in the sixth century, when Teotihuacan disengaged from the Maya region, leaving Tikal to fend for itself.
Enter the Snakes. No one’s sure where they came from; there’s no evidence of them ruling Calakmul before 635. Some experts imagine them hundreds of years before the Classic era, moving from place to place, creating one megacity after another. But this is guesswork. The first obvious snake glyphs seem to appear in Dzibanché, a city in southern Mexico, 80 miles northeast of Calakmul.
Wherever the Snakes were based, we know that starting in the early sixth century two successive Snake kings recognized that Tikal was vulnerable and made a bold play for political control. The first, Stone Hand Jaguar, spent decades making courtesy calls throughout the Maya lowlands.
The reconstructed burial of a Snake king, thought to be Claw of Fire, who died in 697, includes jade and shell beads placed on a shroud and some of the ceramics interred with him at Calakmul.
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