Courtesy of Kevin Johnston OSU anthropologist Kevin Johnston's research on Maya culture has included field work in Guatemala. Above, he's pictured with a Maya carving of a jaguar head.

Writers for defeated Maya kings met cruel fate

By Jeff Grabmeier

New research sheds light on the cruel fate that awaited official scribes for Maya kings who had been conquered by rivals.

These scribes -- the rough equivalent of today's public relations writers -- would have their fingers broken and then be executed after their kings were defeated in battle.

"The conquering Mayas were not interested as much in the executions as they were in this seemingly bizarre practice of destroying the scribes' fingers," said Kevin Johnston, assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio State.

"By breaking the fingers of scribes, what they were really doing was muting the ability of scribes to write politically powerful texts for their defeated king."

Johnston discussed his findings in a recent issue of the journal Antiquity.

The Maya civilization, which reached its height from about A.D. 600 to 900, occupied parts of present-day southern Mexico, northern Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras.

Johnston made his findings by examining new, computer-enhanced photographs of murals painted in Maya buildings. While the paintings have been studied for many years, he said these new photographs showed details of the paintings that were not visible earlier. "I first saw the new photographs of murals in an issue of National Geographic," Johnston explained. "I saw some things that I wanted to investigate further."

For example, one mural found in the Maya site of Bonampak, in the Chiapas state of southern Mexico, shows nine captives crouched at the feet of the site's victorious king and his supporters. In the mural, red paint signifies blood dripping from the broken fingers of some captives. The murals depicted some of the scribes having their fingers twisted and their fingernails removed. But the new photographs also showed a detail that had not been visible before: One captive is holding up a quill pen, as if recording his capture and execution.

"We've long known that these people in the mural were captives, but no one had thought much about their status -- who they were in Maya society," Johnston said. "The new photographs clearly suggest that these men were scribes."

Johnston also found five other works of Maya art that support his thesis that scribes were tortured and killed for their politically powerful role supporting conquered kings.

The fact that these kings' scribes were specifically targeted for torture and execution showed the importance they played in Maya society, according to Johnston.

Maya city-states were only weakly centralized, and kings had to use persuasion as much as direct power to exercise control over their kingdoms. Scribes played a key role by producing texts to both threaten and cajole citizens into supporting their king. These texts would extol the virtues of the king and promise material rewards to those who supported him. Texts would also describe the terrible consequences for those who were insubordinate.

"Texts were a way that kings asserted and displayed power, and so the scribes who produced them were targeted during warfare for destruction," he said. "The captors emphasized through finger mutilation the destruction of their rivals' ability to produce politically persuasive texts."

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