The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art
by Linda Schele, Mary Ellen Miller

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Book Reviews of The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art

Book Review: Understanding the Ooze of LIfe
Summary: 5 Stars

The book begins with a history of the road to understanding the Maya culture, complete with its meadering and diversions. This "age" delights in knowing that the Maya are filled with blood, both their own in bloodletting and those of captives that they sacrifice, unlike previous interpretations of a more peaceful existence. Blood, the ooze of life, was offered to eh gods in hopres that they would continue to give their ooze of sap, rain and other life-sustaining things. The book is based on 8 sections of art and interpretation: person, accession rites, courtly life, bloodletting, captives, the ballgame, and death, and the kingship of the Maya Cosmos. Of note as weel is the colors on p.158 where one can get an interpration of what the colors might have been in the Classic period.

In this book Coe prefaces the book commenting on the profound understandng that the world of the Maya is filled with notions of death. But the myth of the Mayas is that the hero twins went to the underworld and by trickery defeated death and those rose to take their place in the Mayan night sky. Perhaps these indiscernible Maya have continued to trick us as well in our attempts to traverse the road of their culture-- and their greatest preoccupation, enscribed on their ceramics and reliefs ---is not death, but life, in all its oozing forms.

Summary of The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art

"[A] work as remarkable for its text as for the photographs and drawings that illustrate it."?Octavio Paz, The New York Review of Books

Art History Books

• Books > Subjects > Arts & Photography
• Schools, Periods & Styles > Ancient & Classical
• Byzantine