Maya Rise and Fall (4)

Behind the cloak of ritual, the Maya cities acted like states everywhere, making alliances, fighting wars, and trading for goods over territory that ultimately stretched from what is today southern Mexico through the Petén to the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Well-worn trails and stucco-paved causeways crisscrossed the forest, and canoes plied the rivers. But until Fire Is Born arrived, the Maya remained politically fragmented, the city-states charting their own courses in the jungle.

By 378 Waka was a prestigious center, boasting four main plazas, hundreds of buildings, temple mounds up to 300 feet (90 meters) tall, ceremonial palaces clad in painted stucco, and courtyards graced with carved limestone altars and monuments. A trading power, it occupied a strategic location on the San Pedro River, which flowed westward from the heart of the Petén. Its market was filled with Maya foodstuffs such as maize, beans, chilies, and avocados, along with chicle harvested from sapodilla trees to make glue, and latex from rubber trees to make balls for ceremonial games. Exotic goods found their way to Waka as well. Jade for sculpture and jewelry and quetzal feathers for costumes came from the mountains to the south, and obsidian for weapons and pyrite for mirrors from the Mexican plateau to the west, the domain of Teotihuacan.

A sprawling metropolis of 100,000 people or more—perhaps the largest city in the world at the time—Teotihuacan left no records that epigraphers have been able to decipher. But its motives in dispatching Fire Is Born to the Maya region seem clear. Waka sat on a promontory overlooking a tributary of the San Pedro with a protected harbor, excellent for berthing large canoes. "It was a perfect staging area" for military action, notes Southern Methodist University archaeologist David Freidel, co-director of excavations at Waka. Which may be precisely what Fire Is Born had in mind.

Waka appears to have been key to the envoy's mission: to bring the entire central Petén into Teotihuacan's orbit, through persuasion if possible, force if necessary. His principal target was Tikal, a kingdom 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Waka. Tikal was the most influential city-state in the central Petén. Bring Tikal into the fold, and the other cities would follow.


cloak - 面具
alliance - 同盟
stretch - 伸，拉伸
stucco - 粉饰灰泥
pave - 铺装
crisscross - 十字交叉，纵横交错
ply - 定期往返
fragment - 分解
prestigious - 有声望的
boast - 自夸，引以为豪
mound - 山          a mound of letters
clad - 镀过金属的，覆盖的
altar - 祭台
strategic - 战略上的
avocado - 牛油果
chicle - 糖胶树胶
glue - 粘合剂
latex - 乳胶
exotic - 异国的
jade - 翡翠
quetzal - 绿咬鹃
obsidian - 黑曜石
pyrite - 黄铁矿
plateau - 高原
domain - 领土
epigrapher - 碑铭研究家，金石学家
dispatch - 派遣
promontory - 岬，海角
tributary - 支流
berth - 泊（船）
envoy - 使节
mission - 使命，任务