Talk about bad luck. According to the Penn Museum here, which has mounted a major exhibition that manages to be at once tantalizing, illuminating and frustrating, that day is close at hand. Though many experts calculate it to be Dec. 21, 2012, the museum curators believe it is Dec. 23, 2012. And this show, “Maya 2012: Lords of Time,” opens with a teasing potpourri of tabloid headlines, movie disasters and television news reports invoking the imminent catastrophe (though the exhibition is expected to remain open after the world ends, until mid-January 2013).
It’s a setup, of course, because we soon learn that the Maya civilization (which once extended over modern-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador; built major cities by 500 B.C.; and reached its peak before A.D. 900) had no such idea.
In fact, the Maya Long Count Calendar, the focus of the show’s first part, has no end (and no real beginning). Maya kings erected monuments to themselves using that eternal calendar, combining an immense sense of centrality with an immense sense of immensity.
In the exhibition the apocalyptic premise is so easily overturned that it seems like a straw man, a pretext to draw crowds. The theme is also resurrected at the end: The Maya didn’t believe that the world would end in 2012, we are reminded. And we are asked to vote: “Do you?”
I had other questions. And they had nothing to do with the end of the world but with a civilization that left behind ruins of pyramids, sculptured monuments called stelae and populations scattered over Central America whose languages and cultures can be traced back a millennium to when the Maya reigned supreme.
The overall sensation created here, though, is of mystery. Given the length of time that the Maya thrived — their classic period was A.D. 250 to 900, predating the Aztec and Inca empires — it is astonishing how little is known about them. It is also surprising how much has been pieced together only in the last 50 years, with University of Pennsylvania scholars and the Penn Museum playing central roles, excavating Copán, Honduras (with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History).
That involvement is the reason that the exhibition is mounted here, though many of its objects are copies, the originals being too heavy or fragile to travel. The show’s main curator, Loa P. Traxler, is co-author, with Robert Sharer, of an essential history, “The Ancient Maya.” One of her co-curators, Kate Quinn, the museum’s director of exhibitions, has introduced clever interactive displays. One touch screen translates familiar dates into the exotic Maya calendar; another lets you explore the extraordinary Copán ruins.
As for artifacts, one jade carving almost tenderly shows the maize god nestled in a seashell, as water and earth join to yield fertile promise. A mysteriously etched pig’s skull from the seventh century shows two lords engaged in an unexplained “calendar ritual.” Most powerful are the hieroglyphic carvings, in which human faces, weapons and ornaments seem manically compressed to fill rectangular molds, saturating available space with bulbous images.
Some of the figures are fearsome. Others seem almost comic: When we see a seventh-century image of the Copán dynasty founder wearing a mask of goggles and a set of fake teeth, we are told that this is meant to invoke Tlaloc, the storm god of central Mexico, but we suspect some whimsy at work. Did the Maya have a sense of humor?
If so, it’s not apparent elsewhere. Stingray spines here, found in fifth-century tombs, were used for bloodletting ceremonies. Blood-colored cinnabar was used to coat the dead and is found throughout the royal tombs. And perhaps because of the hieroglyphs, the sense here is of taut compression and not a little ruthlessness.
One altar (a reproduction) pictures an entire dynasty of kings, created for Copán’s last ruler. A dead jaguar was interred to represent each ruler. The kings used that creature’s fearsome persona as well, perhaps to command the human chattel who created the pyramids that archaeologists have been excavating in the Honduran jungles.
Partly because of the show’s theme, the emphasis here tends to be on Maya culture’s rational aspect. We learn that the Maya are best known for their calendar. But nothing revealed here about it is particularly astounding, and an astronomer interviewed in a video kiosk, Anthony F. Aveni, points out that the Maya did not even have a telescope.
Yet the result is intriguing. The Maya typically used a base of 20 for counting (as we use a base of 10). Their numerals have a systematic simplicity: a vertical bar was a sign for 5 and dots adjacent to it added 1 each — the bar representing, perhaps, a flat outstretched hand, and the dots extended digits for counting. And just as we use days, weeks, months, years, the Maya used cyclical calendar categories (like baktun, kin, winal, tun).
“Maya 2012: Lords of Time” is on view through Jan. 13, 2013, at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-4000, pennmuseum.org.
