according to the spanish, the maya offered blood to appease their gods. maya nobles committed excruciating acts of self-mutilation. here, a woman pulls a rope embedded with thorns through her tongue. by spilling blood, the nobles believed they could communicate with powerful ancestral spirits. this monument commemorates another bloodletting -- but whose ? stuart: in the glyphs that follow, we have the name of the person who is the subject of the sentence -- the one who let the blood. and in this case it's the king of copan. he has various titles that tell us that, for instance, here -- the number "13" -- that he was the thirteenth king in the sequence. now lastly, we have the personal name of the king. and you can see here another number using, in this case, three dots with three bars, being 18. and then finally a head of an animal, which is a rabbit. and this is the name of "18 rabbit." keach: "18 rabbit" -- an odd name. but he was one of copan's greatest kings. he reigned from a.d. 695 to 738. on monuments, he's portrayed as a great warrior and shown to

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each stela shows the king in the guise of a different maya god. the hieroglyphs on the back and side describe the ritual he is shown performing. he is the same king who performed the flayed skin ritual. less than a year after that ritual, eighteen rabbit traveled to the small maya kingdom of quirigua, some 50 miles from copan. some think he went to quirigua on a raid to capture sacrificial victims, but something goes wrong. the king of quirigua, one cauac-sky, erects a giant stela claiming to have performed the axe event on the king of copan. eighteen rabbit is captured by cauac-sky, who sacrifices him in 738 and then never ceases to brag about it afterwards. all of his monuments -- which become much larger and more grandiose, even though his political system is a fairly small one -- mention the fact that he captured the glorious king of copan, eighteen rabbit. keach: by erecting stelae, cauac-sky capitalizes on the sacrifice. his prestige increases and his tiny kingdom grows, but he does not take over copan. he simply does not have the manpower t

read these carved hieroglyphs, most scholars thought these larger-than-life figures represented maya gods. but we now know they are portraits of copan's rulers, with names like butz chan... smoke shell... and the most powerful of all, 18 rabbit. the maya called them "c'ul ahau," or divine lord. the title was inherited. we call them kings since they passed their power to brothers or sons. a dynasty of 16 kings ruled copan for 400 years. how did they first acquire their power ? and how were the maya governed before the kings ? to answer such questions, archaeologists discuss their ideas of political change. which says, here's the resolution, but you've got no enforcement. who's the arbitrator ? the arbitrator is the chief. keach: everyone in this group is guided by the same basic model of political evolution. it says that as a society evolves, fewer and fewer people control the wealth, and the rest provide the labor. as distinct classes emerge, rulers centralize political power. political organization changes as populations grow. small bands and tribes evolve into chiefdoms, and finally int

maya kings styled themselves as gods, as their divine representatives onarth. the crucial importance of corn, the staff of life throughout mesoamerica, led to depictions of nobles and rulers as the mae god. eternally young and beautiful, the god of maize was a metaphor for life itself. portraits of the maize god and pakal share the same upswept hairdo that mimics the foliage and flowing corn silk of the maize plant. pakal and other rulers were buried with masks and jewelry made of green jade-- the color of the maize plant. just as maize died at harvest and returned to life with each new growing season, maya rulers also hoped for life after death. the lid of pakal's sarcophagus shows him being lifted up into the sky as the maize god. what we see is pakal emerging theaws of the uer he is lying in a sacrificial plate. he is in the pose of the young child because he is being born from below. what he has done is he has triumphed over death. he has outwitted the gods of the underworld. and he is being reborn into the sky. (narrator) courtly life at palenque and other