Quirigua, Guatemala
Today we visited the ancient Maya city of Quirigua. This city, though small, is filled with extraordinary sculptures. Most famous are the stelae, which tower here to unprecedented heights. These sandstone monuments, depicting kings, stand twenty-five and thirty feet high, making them the tallest monolithic sculptures in the Pre-Columbian world!
Less impressive, yet somehow even more amazing are the carved zoomorphic boulders. These colossal stones, ten feet high and twenty across, illustrate the shamanic or hallucinogenic vision of a king emerging from the open maw of various fantastical beasts. The sculptures writhe with complexity. Gods and feathers, kings and fires, blood and smoke mingle in a mythological tangle that takes hours to contemplate.
One glimpse of Zoomorph P illustrates the intellectual depth of these sculptures. Here we see the foot-high depiction Chak, the god of thunder, lightning, and by extension, rain. Water flows from the god in vine-like swirls. This is a particularly toothy illustration of Chak, giving him a serpentine look. This is likely no accident, since the Maya word for snake, “chan”, also means sky. Hence, the whole represents a rainy sky. Chak holds a rounded glyph that says “ts’aam”, which means to make wet or soak - another reference to life-giving rain. But there’s more. “Ts’am” is the Maya word for throne, perhaps referring to the entire sculpture, which illustrates a seated king.
The sculpture of Quirigua was beautiful, and so was the forest the surrounds it. From leafy branches, we heard the hoarse calls of mot-mots, the weird whinnying of oropendolas, and the matter-of-fact “Cheerio” whistles of clay-colored robins. Later in the day we saw a more expansive forest. Trees cover cliffs and mountainsides around the Rio Dulce. As we boated down the river, we had time to admire the trees, and to contemplate the overlapping layers of life that they contain. It is said that tropical rainforests are not just more complicated than we think, they are more complicated than we can think.
The world is rich with natural complexity and beauty. Nowhere is this more evident than in Central America. It is a joy to experience this firsthand.
Today we visited the ancient Maya city of Quirigua. This city, though small, is filled with extraordinary sculptures. Most famous are the stelae, which tower here to unprecedented heights. These sandstone monuments, depicting kings, stand twenty-five and thirty feet high, making them the tallest monolithic sculptures in the Pre-Columbian world!
Less impressive, yet somehow even more amazing are the carved zoomorphic boulders. These colossal stones, ten feet high and twenty across, illustrate the shamanic or hallucinogenic vision of a king emerging from the open maw of various fantastical beasts. The sculptures writhe with complexity. Gods and feathers, kings and fires, blood and smoke mingle in a mythological tangle that takes hours to contemplate.
One glimpse of Zoomorph P illustrates the intellectual depth of these sculptures. Here we see the foot-high depiction Chak, the god of thunder, lightning, and by extension, rain. Water flows from the god in vine-like swirls. This is a particularly toothy illustration of Chak, giving him a serpentine look. This is likely no accident, since the Maya word for snake, “chan”, also means sky. Hence, the whole represents a rainy sky. Chak holds a rounded glyph that says “ts’aam”, which means to make wet or soak - another reference to life-giving rain. But there’s more. “Ts’am” is the Maya word for throne, perhaps referring to the entire sculpture, which illustrates a seated king.
The sculpture of Quirigua was beautiful, and so was the forest the surrounds it. From leafy branches, we heard the hoarse calls of mot-mots, the weird whinnying of oropendolas, and the matter-of-fact “Cheerio” whistles of clay-colored robins. Later in the day we saw a more expansive forest. Trees cover cliffs and mountainsides around the Rio Dulce. As we boated down the river, we had time to admire the trees, and to contemplate the overlapping layers of life that they contain. It is said that tropical rainforests are not just more complicated than we think, they are more complicated than we can think.
The world is rich with natural complexity and beauty. Nowhere is this more evident than in Central America. It is a joy to experience this firsthand.
