9. Telling Time: Historical Thinking and the Ancient Maya
| Dublin Core | PKP Metadata Items | Metadata for this Document | |
| 1. | Title | Title of document | 9. Telling Time: Historical Thinking and the Ancient Maya - Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World |
| 2. | Creator | Author's name, affiliation, country | Simon Martin; University of Pennsylvania Museum; |
| 3. | Subject | Discipline(s) | Ancient History |
| 4. | Subject | Keyword(s) | ancient history; ancient civilization; historiography; cultural memory; historical consciousness; collective memory; cultural heritage; myth; ritual; Maya texts; Mayan historiography |
| 5. | Subject | Subject classification | Ancient Near Eastern Studies; Sinology; Biblical Studies; Classics; Maya Studies |
| 6. | Description | Abstract | The ancient Maya were the only civilization of the Americas to develop a script that comprehensively recorded language, and they made prodigious use of it to create durable records. That legible inscriptions reach back to at least 300 AD means that we have a rich resource both for historical analysis and for engaging with an indigenous historiography and historical consciousness. This chapter examines some related issues. Maya texts offer data on the continuities and the contrasts between myth and history, in ways that touch on ‘mythistory’ as a non-judgmental term for approaching concepts of time and agency. They also provide evidence for the organizing principles they applied to past events, in which monumental discourse lacks an emphasis on narrativization and focuses instead on a highly formulaic ordering through chronology. This is part-and-parcel of a semantic ‘thinness’ that confines recorded events to a select number of tropes that are often presented without causation or consequence. Discussion of possible reasons for this focus revolves around the social and political purposes of the texts, which are expressed in a material form that ensured that they could broadcast a patrimonial rhetoric through time. These displays of identity and achievement did not simply reflect the historical events and current social realities they record; they also constituted them. Maya writing cannot easily be separated from the context of the numerous competing kingdoms in which it was practised—indeed that context seems to be the very reason why monumental writing took the form that it did. |
| 7. | Publisher | Organizing agency, location | Equinox Publishing Ltd |
| 8. | Contributor | Sponsor(s) | |
| 9. | Date | (YYYY-MM-DD) | 10-Jun-2019 |
| 10. | Type | Status & genre | Peer-reviewed Article |
| 11. | Type | Type | |
| 12. | Format | File format | |
| 13. | Identifier | Uniform Resource Identifier | https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/books/article/view/33725 |
| 14. | Identifier | Digital Object Identifier | 10.1558/equinox.33725 |
| 15. | Source | Journal/conference title; vol., no. (year) | Equinox eBooks Publishing; Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World |
| 16. | Language | English=en | en |
| 18. | Coverage | Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.) |
world, ancient world |
| 19. | Rights | Copyright and permissions | Copyright 2014 Equinox Publishing Ltd |