K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil knew its history.
For eleven generations, the Mayan ruler dynasty had ruled Copan, a city-state near the present-day Honduras-Guatemala border. From the fifth century AD until the seventh century, scribes painted the genealogies of his ancestors in manuscripts and carved them into stone monuments throughout the city.
Around 650 a certain piece of architectural history seems to have attracted his attention.
Centuries before, village masons built special structures for public ceremonies to view the sun – ceremonies temporarily anchored to the solstices, such as the one that will take place on June 20, 2024. Building these types of architectural complexes, which archaeologists call “E-groups”, had largely fallen out of fashion by the time of K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil.
But in order to realize his ambitious plans for his city, he seems to have found inspiration in these astronomical public spaces, as I have described in my research on ancient Mayan hieroglyphically recorded astronomy.
The innovations of K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil remind us that science changes through discovery or invention – but sometimes also for personal or political purposes, especially in the ancient world.
View the horizon
E-groups were first built in the Mayan region as early as 1000 BCE. Ceibal’s location, on the banks of the Pasión River in central Guatemala, is one such example. There the residents built a long, plastered platform that bordered the eastern edge of a large square. On top of this platform were three structures arranged along a north-south axis, with roofs high enough to rise above the floral canopy of the rainforest.
In the center of the square, west of the platform, they built a radially symmetrical pyramid. From there, observers could monitor the sunrise behind and between the structures on the platform over the course of the year.
At one level, the first E-Group complexes served very practical purposes. In preclassic villages where these complexes have been found, such as Ceibal, populations of several hundred to a few thousand lived based on “milpa” or “slash-and-burn” agricultural techniques that are still practiced today in pueblos throughout Meso- America. Farmers cut down the shrub vegetation and then burn it to fertilize the soil. This requires careful attention to the rainy season, which in ancient times was monitored by tracking the position of the rising sun on the horizon.
However, most sites in the Classic Maya core area are located in flat, forested landscapes with few prominent features along the horizon. Only a green sea of the flower canopy meets the eye of an observer standing on a high pyramid.
By highlighting the horizon, the eastern structures of E-Group complexes could be used to highlight the solar extremes. The sunrise behind the northernmost structure of the eastern platform would be observed during the summer solstice. Sunrise behind the southernmost structure marked the winter solstice. The equinoxes could be marked halfway, when the sun rose due east.
Scholars still debate the main factors of these complexes, but their religious significance is clearly proven. The caches of finely worked jade and ritual pottery reflect a cosmology oriented around the four cardinal directions, and possibly coordinated with the annual division of the E-Group.
Fading knowledge
However, the citizens of K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil would have been less attuned to direct sky observations than their ancestors.
By the seventh century, the political organization of the Maya had changed considerably. Copan had grown to a population of as many as 25,000, and agricultural technologies were also changing to keep pace. Classic period cities practiced multiple forms of intensive agriculture that relied on sophisticated water management strategies, offsetting the need to closely monitor the sun’s horizon movement.
E-Group complexes continued to be built in the Classical period, but they were no longer oriented towards the sunrise and served political or stylistic purposes rather than celestial views.
I think such a development has resonance today. People pay attention to the changing of the seasons and know when the summer solstice takes place thanks to a calendar app on their phone. But they probably don’t remember the science: how the Earth’s tilt and its orbit around the sun make it appear as if the sun itself is moving north or south along the eastern horizon.
United by ritual
By the mid-seventh century, K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil had developed ambitious plans for his city—and astronomy offered one opportunity to help realize them.
He is now known for his extravagant burial chamber, an example of the success he eventually achieved. This tomb is located at the heart of a magnificent structure, fronted by the “Hieroglyphic Staircase”: a record of the history of its dynasty that is one of the largest single inscriptions in ancient history.
Looking for opportunities to transform Copan into a regional power, K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil sought alliances beyond his local nobility and reached out to nearby villages.
Over the past century, several scholars, including myself, have investigated the astronomical component of his plan. It appears that K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil commissioned a series of stone monuments or ‘steles’, placed in the city and in the foothills of the Copan Valley, which followed the sun across the horizon.
Like E-Group complexes, these monuments involved the public in solar observations. Taken together, the stelae formed a countdown to a major calendar event, orchestrated by the sun.
In the 1920s, archaeologist Sylvanus Morley noted that from Stela 12, east of the city, you could witness the sunset twice a year behind Stela 10, on a spur to the west. Half a century later, archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni recognized that these two sunsets defined twenty-day intervals relative to the equinoxes and the sun’s zenith passage, when shadows cast by vertical objects disappear. Twenty days is an important interval in the Mayan calendar and corresponds to the length of a “month” in the solar year.
My own research revealed that the dates on several stelae also commemorate some of these twenty-day interval events. Furthermore, they all lead to a once-in-20-year event called a “katun ending.”
K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil celebrated this katun end and set in motion his plans for regional hegemony in Quirigua, a growing, influential city some 30 miles away. There is an image of him on a round altar, commemorating his arrival. The hieroglyphic text tells us that K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil “danced” in Quirigua, cementing an alliance between the two cities.
In other words, K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil’s solar stelae did more than just track the sun. The monuments brought communities together to witness astronomical events and shared cultural and religious experiences that span generations.
Coming together to appreciate the natural cycles that make life on Earth possible is something that – I hope – will never fade away with fashion.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
It was written by: Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Gerardo Aldana does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.