纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 051玛雅宫廷放血仪式浮雕（7）（在线收听）

For the Maya, blood-letting was an ancient tradition, and it marked all the major points of Maya life - especially the path to royal and sacred power. In the sixteenth century, 800 years after this lintel was carved, and long after the Maya civilisation had collapsed, the Spanish encountered similar blood-letting rites that still survived, as the first Catholic bishop of Yucatan reported:

"They offered sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting themselves around in pieces, and they left them in this way as a sign. Sometimes they scarify certain parts of their bodies, at others they pierce their tongues in a slanting direction from side to side, and pass bits of straw through the holes with horrible suffering. Others slit the superfluous part of the virile member, leaving it as they did their ears."

The unusual thing about our sculpture is that it shows a woman playing the principal role in the ritual. Here's Virginia Fields, expert on Maya iconography and art:

"This particular lintel at the British Museum is just an extraordinary example of the kinds of rights and ceremonies that a queen would engage in, they are extremely unusual. We don't have a series like this from another Maya city.

"We know that the royal women were part of lineages in every city. Lady K'abal Xook actually is from a local lineage in Yaxchilan, but by taking her as a wife, they may have been joining two powerful lineages. And then bringing in another wife from a foreign city extended the alliances that he had been creating with different powerful cities around the realm."

K'abal Xook's husband, Shield Jaguar, had an immensely long reign for the age, but within a few decades of their deaths, all the great cities of the Maya were in chaos. On the later Maya monuments, warfare is the dominant image, and the last monuments we know are around 900 AD. An ancient political system that had lasted for more than a thousand years had disintegrated, and a landscape where millions had lived became desolate. Why, remains one of the great historical mysteries.