[BqTyG9eS]

Lambayeque Tomb.jpg

Archaeologists in Peru have excavated the grave of an important noble from the Lambayeque culture, dating to the 12th or 13th centuries AD. It was discovered about eight miles west of the city of Chiclayo on Peru's northern coast.

The individual (of presently undetermined sex) was buried with dozens of offerings, signifying high rank in the Lambayeque culture, including an ornate chest plate made of gold, silver and copper. The figure was found buried below the only known female from the culture to have been entombed in a similar elaborate style.

What makes the tomb especially interesting is that it was deliberately dug below the water table, thereby flooding it. Archaeologists believe that this reflected the importance of water to the Lambayeque culture. In many traditional communities, water is seen as the route to the otherworld and also the afterlife. The excavators speculate that this burial may have been of a religious specialist. He or she may therefore have been afforded a direct route to the afterlife via the water in the tomb.

The link provides a video highlighting the excavation of the tomb http://tv.ibtimes.com/archaeologists...peru/7369.html

[Dastyh]

Interesting, Mike. I know they're not the exact same people, but there was an exhibition a couple of years ago which showed the strong links between the Mayans and the Mythic Sea. It's as if they regarded the sea to be their home to which they would return at 'death'. We also know they used marine fossils to express their cosmological beliefs. Here's a post we had on it at the time:

August 2010

There is a new exhbition which is making an effort to move away from the usual obsession with the perceived Mayan 'thirst for blood' and looking at their spiritual relationship with the element of water: The Maya and the Mythic Sea.

(There is still, however, the usual crowd pleasers for those who're fascinated by the blood letting with ye olde traditional sting ray spikes pierced through genitals.)

.... This exhibit is about the Maya's physical and spiritual relationship with water and covers a span of 2,000 years. from the first millennium B.C to the European invasion in the 1500s.

About 20 years ago, the Maya glyph for water was deciphered by pre-Colombian scholars and almost immediately a whole new meaning was given to a slew of Maya artifacts. This new scholarship is what is on display at the Kimbell, items that heretofore might have been misunderstood or misattributed. There are more than 90 works in the exhibit, some recently excavated and many never exhibited before in the United States.

The exhibition has a great opener -- a cast of a temple facade that fills the Kimbell's barrel vault, depicting a god of rain and lightning at the top and a god of lakes, rivers and oceans in the middle. It provides a big welcome to the watery world of the Maya.

Deciphering the Mayas

The Kimbell does its usual lovely job of displaying the objects, from the giant temple cast to the tiniest barbed stingray tails used for blood-letting. There are many ceramics and stone works as well as a national treasure from Belize, a 10-pound jade head of the jester god that is so important to the nation's heritage that it is depicted on its money.

But there is awkwardness within the collection on display. Some pieces, such as the items excavated from a tomb in 2006, seem to have little connection to water. The curators from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., the organizers of the exhibition, wanted to include these newly discovered relics, and although some of the figurines are captivating in their variety and expression, their presence seems a little forced. The aqueous connection is almost vaporous at times, often because it is difficult to read the Maya iconography.

To aid our poor acuity for all things Maya, there are plenty of visual aids. Detailed drawings accompany pieces whose imagery is difficult to decipher or whose incising is worn with age. For a generation that desires multimedia learning there is a large circular screen of the ocean with creatures swimming across the surface. Touch them and their glyphs and the objects on which they appear pop on the screen.

Stories in the carvings

The best pieces, or the ones that seem most remarkable, are the relief carvings. These large plaques, which were used to decorate walls, are spectacular in their intricacy and overall design. Two in particular should not be missed. One panel with 160 glyph blocks tells of a king's pilgrimage to the sea. Maya words are formed from combinations of nearly 200 signs, with each sign representing a full syllable -- so that a list of signs is called a syllabary, not an alphabet. The panel reads from left to right two columns at a time. Another panel with few glyphs is a dramatic presentation of a ritualistic blood-letting. Commissioned by the chief wife of a king on the day of his accession to the throne, it shows her having pierced her tongue with a stingray spine. She allows the blood to be absorbed by bark paper, which is burned as an offering to the gods. Above her, emerging from the smoke, is Chahk the Rain God.

For those who like their Maya art bloodied, there is an area of the show with the grisly instruments of sacrificial bloodletting. There is a collection of stingray spines on display along with figurines that depict them being inserted into the genital tissue of men and the ear lobes or tongues of women.

Many of the objects were retrieved from cenotes, open pools that connect with underground springs or aquifers. They were life-sustaining water sources as well as the sites of rituals and ceremonies related to cycles of rain and fertility, life, death and rebirth. Jars, pots, plates, bowls, incense burners, needles, jewelry, jade plaques and precious metals have been dredged from cenotes. Skeletons have also been found, but only in bottle-neck cenotes that end in a water-filled cavern, suggesting that they were used as burial grounds or sites of human sacrifice.

Gaile Robinson is the Star-Telegram art and design critic, 817-390-7113 Thanks to the Star-Telegram for this article.

(For further reading, we also have a post on how the Maya used marine fossils in their rituals to express their cosmological beliefs.)

[Kimeoffessyr]

The Osirion, tomb of the mythical god Osiris, can be found at the rear of the Temple of Seti at Abydos in Egypt. The tomb is built from carefully squared granite blocks of enormous size and is, like the tomb described by Mike, built below the water table. Imagine a central, closed sarcophagus placed on an island surrounded by water. The tomb is near to the Nile River, which flooded annually. This was before man-made dams regulated its flow. The sarcophagus would be totally submerged by the rising water table, then, as the flood subsided, the sarcophagus would slowly emerge as if rising from the watery realm below. This was a replay of the Egyptian myth of creation where the land rose out of the waters. In another parallel belief of the watery nature of the realm of the dead, the sun god Ra is depicted making his way from the west (where he set) back to the east (where he would rise) on a boat or barque through the watery Duat or netherworld. So there is significant support for a watery realm through which the dead must pass to get to the afterlife. Parallels of course with normal birth from a watery womb through a corridor to the new birth.

[treawittelf]

Very interesting connections Mike and Holmesesq, thanks - a question here might be 'have the water table levels changed since the time that these sites were installed?'