The Tikal–Calakmul Rivalry and Star Wars
Calakmul and its allies defeated Tikal in 562, and the two cities spent the next century and a half fighting a war conducted through client kingdoms. The classic Maya lowlands were not an empire and not a set of city-states in the Greek sense. They were dozens of dynastic kingdoms whose inscriptions record a system of overlordship: kings installed by other kings, royal visits, marriages and the supervision of a subordinate's accession, all recorded in glyphs on stone. Tikal and Calakmul are the two that stood at the top of rival networks, and the inscriptions call them by their emblem glyphs, Mutal and the Kaanul or snake kingdom. The defeat of 562 is recorded on a monument at Caracol, a Tikal ally that had changed sides, and it was followed at Tikal by something modern archaeologists call the hiatus: 130 years in which the city raised almost no monuments and recorded almost no dates, while Calakmul's allies expanded around it. Tikal recovered under Jasaw Chan K'awiil, who captured and sacrificed Calakmul's king in 695 and recorded it on a carved lintel, and built the great pyramids that are the ones tourists photograph. Neither kingdom survived the ninth century. The whole political picture was invisible until the glyphs were deciphered from the 1950s onward, when Maya writing turned out to record dynastic history rather than only calendars and astronomy, and the peaceful astronomer-priests of earlier accounts turned into kings who went to war. Calakmul was found in 1931 and largely ignored for fifty years because it is in dense forest a long way from anywhere. It is now known to have had one of the largest populations of any Maya city, and its monuments are mostly limestone that has weathered too badly to read.
- Year: 562 CE
- Category: Military
