Reviews for Dress Clothing of the Plains Indians, Vol. 140

The average rating for Dress Clothing of the Plains Indians, Vol. 140 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-24 00:00:00 Carol Driscoll IT HAS AGED BUT IS STILL OUTSTANDING This exhibition catalogue is a turning point in Maya revival, in fact the second turning point. The first one was the new method to decipher Maya writing as a syllabic phonetic system. The glyphs could of course have hieroglyphic values but they most of them also had purely syllabic phonetic values. That was in the USSR (Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov) in the early 1950s. It will reach the USA in the early 1960s (Tatania Proskouriakoff) but will encounter the absolute warlike hostility of Sir Eric Thompson who considered Maya writing not as writing but as pure art, in other words, decoration. Sir Eric Thompson died in the early 1970s and rebels in the USA could finally work without any institutionalized hostility. We are here in this book ten years after and it shows tremendously. Of course, we cannot criticize what they could not know in 1986 because it had not been yet discovered or deciphered. But we can and must clearly say that in 1986 Maya research was still not as much advanced as it should have been because Sir Eric Thompson imposed a dictatorial management in the field in the USA and in the UK. I am going to follow the book and bring up the most important questions that are for some of them still questions, and I will do it in the most modern possible way: I will look at it with more than forty years of research since its publication. I will also look at it from a linguist's point of view and I will try now and then to give the important analysis of the glyphs themselves. I will speak of the language with the glyphs. The book gives a lot of these glyphs and quite a good number of written contributions in the various works of art studied here. These works of art are only reliefs, ceramics and pots, hence carving and painting on various durable media, excluding books because only four of the many thousand books that existed when the Spaniards arrived, have survived the big autodafe, meaning their destruction by fire as if at a symbolical stake, after them being confiscated by force, meaning military force, under the authority of a Spanish Bishop. The texts or excerpts from the monuments and durable objects this book gives are not always, far from it, in the three forms they should be: in glyphic form, in transliterated form (Latin alphabet) and translation, when possible. It depends on the instances but many of these glyphic texts exploited by the authors mix the various extensions of the glyphs, and at times do not give the glyphs at all neither the glyphs nor the transliterated Latin spelling, just the English equivalent. That makes the deciphering of the meaning very difficult. What's more, maybe because they are post-Thompson authors, they never refer to the T-numbers of the glyphs that enable us to decompose the composite glyphs, to use dictionaries that list the T-numbers and thus to approach the meaning of these composite glyphs, and we must state from the start that most of the glyphs are composite, even when they are only one basic glyph because any basic glyph can conflate one symbol into itself and this symbol (generally one representative part of a basic glyph, like the basic symbol of the sun, of various colors, or day and night) and these conflated symbols keep their meaning. This is a shortcoming because it forces us to spend a lot of time and energy to make the glyphs explicit, their meaning at times meanings clear, or at least clearer, and to enrich the art itself with a story, a caption, a commentary. Note, and I will not repeat it the color illustrations (123 plates) are absolutely outstanding and the commentaries on these plates that give both explanations and sketches of the drawings as well as, when necessary, some indications on the texts these plates contain, with of course the remark I have already made about the absence of the three levels of presentation: glyphs, Latin transliterations, translations, plus T-numbers. These notes and extensions make the reading of this book very pleasurable and satisfying, and indeed a lot more than just the semantic satisfaction we can get from a catalogue and the anecdotic pleasure we can get from a simple collection of beautiful pictures or spiritual and mental articles. The articles, the smaller illustrations inside these articles, the notes on the articles and their inner illustrations, plus the collection of plates and their vast commentaries with sketches of visual elements and of glyphic compositions in them turn this book into a labyrinth of wisdom, all the more pleasurable that we have to add a personal effort to get into some secret or sibylline elements. I will skip any discussion of the fate of this civilization that was on the decline two or three centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards (after three thousand years of development, emergence and flourishing, from 2000 BCE to AD 1200). The arrival of the Spaniards brought tremendously lethal epidemics that eliminated a tremendous proportion of the Maya in 1521. Then the military conquest started in 1524, finished in 1541 for the highlands and the last Maya stronghold in the lowlands fell in 1697. In 1562 the burning of all codices that were confiscated, and of all wooden or burnable objects, without considering the great number of other decorated objects that were destroyed was a real cultural genocide. All that in the name of God and to eradicate Satan. This book does not specify the tremendous resistance the Mayas opposed to the Spaniards, explaining that the lowlands will only be completely conquered and under controlled 170 years after the arrival of the first Spaniards. They also resisted by keeping their language, though in Latin transliteration. Moreover, they kept their oral culture, hence their mythology, literature, plays and music, including their music instruments, like wooden trumpets and slit drums. These "traditions" were tolerated after a while by the Spaniards, provided they were made compatible with the Christian faith that was compulsory. That's a point this book does not consider. The mythology they explain very well is perfectly compatible with Christianity, with Jesus. Jesus like the Maize God was sacrificed by decision - and mission - from God himself. The Eucharist is a symbolical blood sacrifice in which the audience takes part, drinking some of Jesus' Blood (transubstantiated wine) and eating some of Jesus' flesh (transubstantiated unleavened bread or wafer). This is a symbolical substitution for the blood-self-sacrifice we are going to speak of later on. Hence the Maize god (Jun Nal Ye) could easily become Jesus Christ who dies and resuscitates every day in the daily Eucharist of the priest. Note here the comparison seen as the equivalence between the Mayas and the Aztecs is not exactly possible. The Aztecs were a morbid blood civilization erecting enormous walls of skull racks ("tzompantli") though apparently in the later period of their civilization in Chichen Itza under the influence, if not migration of people from Mexico, hence closer to Aztec influence, some skull racks were found and mentioned recently in May 2019 in a research Journal (article Price TD, Tiesler V, Freiwald C. "Place of origin of the sacrificial victims in the sacred Cenote, Chichén Itzá, Mexico." American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 2019;1-18. doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23879). The Mayas were practicing blood self-sacrifices and sacrifices in a highly ritualistic way that did not reach the level in numbers the Aztecs reached. But more about it later. The Maya writing system must have taken several millennia to be devised and the first forms of it probably started appearing in Mesoamerica 5000 BCE but on non-durable media and they got lost. Note the four codices we still have in the world would be probably inexistent today if they had not escape fire since many codices were considered as burial goods to guide the dead on their way through the Underworld, Xibalba. We only got traces of such codices in various tombs. The paper used is definitely biodegradable. So, if they had not been burned many of them would have anyway disappeared over the five or six centuries of Spanish and Christian domination. But these codices and the writing system itself (representing the language as such) depict a world that is in perfect agreement with what the reliefs, carvings, paintings, frescoes and other decorated artefacts. The Maya society was a highly hierarchical but not centralized civilization based on religious rituals dealing with blood and sacrifice and mastered by the sacred Tzolkin calendar, itself managed by the Death Lords (the Gods of the Underworld), the celestial gods like the Sun, the Moon and Venus (in perfect phase with the triple goddess of many other civilizations, a trinity or triad that is probably universal), and of course the sacrificed Maize God who is dying every fall after the harvest and resuscitating every spring with the new sowing (note human blood is necessary for this new harvest to grow and prosper, just like in many civilizations menstrual blood is scattered or sprinkled over the sown field for it to prosper: for example in the Myth of Medea in Colchis, one country and civilization integrated from the Turkic Old European population of today's Georgia into the Greek Mythology). This is founded on the ternary nature of the world according to the Mayas. The book quotes this fact but does not develop its consequences. The universe is cut in three hierarchical worlds, the Underworld (Xibalba), the Middleworld (the human surface of the earth), and the Upperworld (the celestial residence of the gods and the individuals who manage to go through Xibalba after their death, defeating the Death Lords and reemerging into the Celestial Upperworld in the North. The human world is thus taken in-between the celestial Upperworld that can only be reached after death, maybe, but that governs the human world through the sun and the moon, aka. day and night, aka. light and darkness; and Venus that governs, with her 8-year cycle, the lives of the humans. And the Mayas knew everything about it. 1. 9.5 months (plus a few days)- A conjunction with the Sun occurs every 9.5 months alternating from inferior to exterior conjunction 2. 19 months - 1.6 years = 584 days = One synodic cycle of Venus. From one inferior conjunction to the next. Synodic meaning the meeting of Sun/Earth/Venus. Venus will return to the same phase of its cycle every 19 months. 3. 48 months - 4 years - Venus makes a conjunction with the Sun in the same Star Point position as it did 4 years prior, but 4 years before it was in the opposite position, for example, Venus made a conjunction with the Sun in Capricorn in Jan 2018, but it was an exterior conjunction and the last time before an exterior conjunction was made at the Capricorn star point was January 2010. 4. 96 months - 8 years - The Venus Return - It takes 8 years for Venus to return to the same place in the zodiac as well as the same place in relation to the Sun, as in this retrograde in Capricorn at 21 degrees, 8 years ago occurred at 23 Capricorn. All returns are within 1-2 degrees. It takes 5 synodic cycles to create a Venus Star around the zodiac, 8 years. 5. The magic of the Venus cycle unfolds with every loop, with one synodic cycle, it forms a rose petal, also a heart shape and then another and another every 1.6 years. A magnificent rose begins to form around the zodiac and our astrology chart. Were the Mayas conscious of this "rose pattern"? It is hard to say but Venus is a divine entity they constantly come back to. In the Dresden Codex six pages are dedicated to Venus and its heliacal (relating to or near the sun 'used especially of the last setting of a star before and its first rising after invisibility due to conjunction with the sun, ) rises. See Venus rose at Every 19½ months Venus gets to her inferior conjunction with the sun and disappears from her Morning Star period (be visible before sunrise) and the next apparition on the other side of the sun this time as the Evening Star after sunset. This moment of inferior conjunction is seen as favorable for wars which target the capture of prisoners for the second event favored by Venus shortly after when it reappears as the Evening Star, i.e. the sacrifice of these prisoners. This Venus calendar is not explained in this book though they explain three calendars: the tzolkin of 13 times 20 days, the haab of 18 months of 20 days plus a 19th month of five days, and the Long Count Calendar based on only years of 18 months of 20 days piled up in successive groups of 20. The Venus calendar (cf. the Dresden Codex) is not compatible with the other cycles since the months of our calendar have 28, 30 or 31 days, the year of our calendar has only twelve months and 365 days to compare with the Tzolkin (260 days), the Haab (365 days) and the Long Count year (360 days). Venus as a complete cycle of 8 of our years and the inferior conjunction appears every 19 ½ months, hence 584 days (synodic cycle). This book does not give such details and the place of Venus is thus not clarified. But more later. Maya society is hierarchical, but it has no draught animal to carry burdens or people, and no cart of any sort, in fact no wheels. That means the population is regrouped in cities for many reasons, among others security, and they only control and work in the territory they can reach on foot, or by rivers and dug-out canoes, in a certain short amount of time, knowing let say a normal human person walks five kilometers an hour, and such going out session have to be collective, once again for security against animals but also against some stray human beings including soldiers for the next city that needs a few prisoners for some rituals. Sir Eric Thompson totally refused this vision and considered the Maya were basically a peaceful people. He naturally refused to decipher what was written on the monuments or walls and pots. This explains why the Maya never managed to have a centralized organization. A main center had some not too far satellites and the king remained in the main center and had a representative in every satellite town taking care of the business of the state there (rules, rituals, security and taxes). These were called "cahal". They were the political and military elite. This elite had another body, the scribes and artists, "aj tzi'b'a," "he of the writing," "scribe," "artist's title," or "itz'at," "sage," "wise man," "learned one," "in general artist." The particle "aj" in the name is a shorter form of "ajaw" which is a nobility title. Beyond this elite you have the soldiers, not specified as for their recruiting, then the workers of different trades and particularly the soil, hence farmers. [... Full study published soon.]

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-21 00:00:00 Kevin Wilkinson An excellent resource for understanding the complexities of Mayan glyphs- particularly strong for classroom projects.