Some dozens of meters away, we saw a triclinium formal dining room for funerary banquets and an amphitheater to house games in honor of the dead. The ancient Mediterranean has a long tradition of such games. Their hands exchanged some heavy punches, landing with painful crunches on their jaws. Ian Johnston. Ultimately, the tradition passed to the Lucanians at Paestum, south of Naples βwhere the scene of a gladiatorial fray embellishes the walls of a tombβto what may be the first gladiatorial contests, also funerary, held at Rome in BC Potter In all such cases, the games pulsed with recollection of once-vibrant dead.
As John Bodel, a friend and Latin epigraphist reminds me, the nuances were further layered to include the most basic struggle of all, between life and death see Ville Was some Maya ballplay of a mortuary nature too?
Did the hurly-burly of sacred sportβa celebration of chance but also of preparation and athletic skillβlink to royal tombs? The grimmer features of the Post-Classic to early Colonial ballgame bear repeating. The Xibalba of the Popol Vuh , an abode of gods with names like mortal diseases, thudded with ballplay. It was in a ballcourt that the lords of Xibalba buried the defeated brothers One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu Christenson The Popol Vuh , a much later source, does not always resonate with practices and beliefs of the Classic period.
Yet here it might, in what appear to be precise or notional alignments between the central axis of a ballcourt and a known royal tomb. The sculptures on the ballcourt, Panels 11 and 12, deploy a version of the Dos Pilas Emblem that dates a generation or so later than the pyramid Houston Figures , It aligns almost exactly with Burial Conceivably, the earlier ballcourt dictated the placement of Burial , which is off-center in the pyramid, below ground level and towards the front.
Again, the crypt lines up with the axis of Structure 5D st and 2 nd. AD , has a central axis that points to the front stairway of the Margarita tomb, and to the vicinity of Hunal, the probable tomb of the founder Figure 3; Sharer et al.
