DISCOVERY OF THE MAYAN MASKS

Through the Mayan masks each God was represented, preserving their image for eternity, the people who used them acquired their attributes and their personality, they were also used to preserve the face of their rulers, the Mayans designed jade masks that were placed on the monarch’s face as funerary trousseau with the intention that upon being received by the Gods he would be recognized; then we invite you to know some Mayan masks discovered and their meaning.

The Mask of Calakmul, a death mask that was found in the state of Campeche, Mexico, in the 1980s in Tomb I of Structure VII of the archaeological zone of Calakmul, in a series of exhibitions called «One piece, one culture», the general director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Teresa Franco, expressed, “that jade face is actually the melting pot of a culture. Each of the elements of the mask has its own meaning and, at the same time, they are related to each other, they are part of a complex sum”.

The curator, Pilar Cuairán, indicated that the main composition of the funerary masks is jade, a stone associated with water, related to the sky and the sea, the main elements of creation, such as symbol of vital breath, fertility and rebirthits design was very complex where some fascinating symbols were included, such as the flower earmuffs with four petals, the fangs of a snake that highlight the lineage of the ruler and some shell elements that evoke the elevation of the soul.

In the Temple of the Inscriptions, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, a discovery was made in 1952, a burial chamber containing a number of valuable objects that accompanied the remains of a ruler known as K’inich Janaab’ Pakal or Pakal «the Great» of the famous Mayan capital, his face was covered with a spectacular jade mask made with 340 pieces of jade of various shades, the three types of minerals used were, cosmochlor, jadeite and albite, according to scientific studies these materials were brought from Guatemala and the shells embedded in it from the Pacific Ocean.

The mask had to be restored, based on a craniometric study in which the real face of this character was identified.a whole multidisciplinary group, made up of anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, physicists, chemists and geologists, among others, carried out the arduous task of recovering this ancestral piece.

In the Petén, Guatemala, there is a Mayan site called Río Azul, an archaeological zone with a large number of tombs where a mask with peculiar shapes was discoveredon the back there is a series of hieroglyphs that reveal the name of the mask “Kinich Ahaw”, patron deity of Río Azul and Tikal, its owner Sak Balam (white jaguar), who was the first ruler of Río Azul, carved in green fusite, shells embedded in his spiral eyes and a triangular tongue typical of the God of the Night Sun.