Ancient Mayan sun temple found in Guatemala

Archeologists have uncovered a 1,600-year-old Mayan temple dedicated to the “night sun” on top a pyramid tomb in the northern Guatemalan forest near the border with Mexico.

“This building is one that celebrates this close linkage between the king and this most powerful and dominant of celestial presences.” Carbon dating places construction of the temple at the early part of that era, somewhere between 350 and 400 AD, the archeologists said.

Archaeologist Edwin Roman posing in front of a base-relief depicting the ‘Night Sun’ found under a pyramid at the Zotz archaeological site, in the Peten jungle, 550 km north of Guatemala City.

“The sun was a key element of Maya ruler ship,” lead archeologist Stephen Houston explained in announcing the discovery by the joint Guatemalan and American team that has been excavating the El Zotz site since 2006.

“It’s something that rises every day and penetrates into all nooks and crannies, just as royal power presumably would,” said Houston, a professor at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Archaeologists say the temple was likely built to honor the leader buried under the Diablo Pyramid tomb, the governor and founder of the first El Zotz dynasty called Pa’Chan, or ‘fortified sky’. Mayan civilization, which spread through southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize, was at its height between 250 and 900 AD. Excavations by the Guatemalan and American team began at the El Zotz dig in 2006, but the temple wasn’t uncovered until three years ago.

Mayan masks were representations of Mayan gods , as well as part of a very sacred funeral ritual in the Mayan Classic Period from 250 to 900 AD. These were placed over the face of an important ruler when he died. Mayan masks endowed the rulers with the status of a divine being as the “Tree of the Universe”.

The funeral masks protected them while descending into the underworld “Xibalba” in order to defeat the gods of death and to be able to ascend as the Mayan “God of the Corn”.

It is ornately decorated with massive stucco masks, 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall, each depicting the phases of the Sun as it moves east to west, and a painted stucco frieze that the team described as “incredible”. And more than half the temple is still to be excavated, co-project leader Thomas Garrison of the University of Southern California told a press conference at Guatemala City’s National Palace of Culture.

“The temple probably had 14 masks at the height of the frieze, but only eight of them have been documented” so far, which is why excavations must continue, added University of Austin archeologist Edwin Roman.

This temple resembles the Maya city of Tikal. Which was completely covered under jungle, one of dozens of large cities scattered through present day Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras and Southern Mexico.  The Maya civilization collapsed fairly rapidly around 1000 AD; it’s thought that over-population or ongoing wars between the cities hastened the end.

It wasn’t until around 1850 that this city was explored and became known to the wider world, partly because of the difficulty of reaching its location in North-Eastern Guatemala.  When explorers did arrive, all that was visible was huge mounds such as the one below, covered in undergrowth and large trees. Under the vegetation, however, the ruins were still in good condition, with even some wooden door lintels still well-preserved. Excavation and well thought out restoration work now gives a good balance between how the structures looked when rediscovered and how they looked when the city was still inhabited.

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