Yuknoom Ch'een II

Maya · mortal · classic · mortal

The Kaanul kings ran the only thing in the Maya lowlands that looks like an empire, and they ran it by clients rather than by administration: install a king here, back a rebel there, marry a daughter into the third place, and hold the rivers. Yuknoom the Great is the height of it, fifty years of it, and the registry carried neither him nor the kingdom. The rivalry with Tikal that this record makes legible is the organising fact of two centuries of Maya politics, and until this batch the corpus had neither side of it.

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