GUATEMALA: Inside a ruined pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known Maya painting, a brightly coloured 10m-long mural depicting the Maya creation myth and the coronation of the Maya's first earthly king.
The paint-on-plaster image, a metre high and nearly 2,100 years old, predates other depictions of the creation myth by several centuries.
"It's the equivalent for the Maya of the Biblical account of Genesis, but it's more than that because it provides a link between the gods of creation and the Maya kings," said archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Vanderbilt University.
That story has passed down almost unchanged to the modern era, said archaeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire, who discovered the mural. "A Mayan today could say, 'This story is the same story I tell my kids'," he said.
The mural was discovered at the remote site of San Bartolo, about two days' hike north of the once-powerful Maya city of Tikal.
In a full palette of colours and in intricate detail, a series of scenes in the mural shows the maize god creating earth, ocean and skies and ultimately crowning himself king.
The final scene shows the similar crowning of the first human king in the company of the gods.
Archaeologist David Freidel of Southern Methodist University, who was not involved in the research, called the painting a "masterpiece". The scenes "are executed with the confidence, compositional imagination and technical perfection of an artist who, while anonymous, must rank with the best the world has ever known".
In a related finding near the mural, Guatemalan archaeologist Monica Pellecer Alecio discovered the oldest known tomb of a Maya king, dating from about 150 BC.
The findings were announced Tuesday in Washington at a news conference sponsored by the National Geographic Society and will be reported in the January issue of National Geographic magazine.
The discovery supports the arguments of many researchers that the social structures and culture of the Maya Classic period, which extended from AD 300 to 900, actually were in place much earlier.
Many archaeologists have argued that the pre-classic societies, dating back to 300 BC, were not fully civilised because they did not have writing and they did not have formal kingships similar to those of later periods.
The new mural discounts both of those arguments "without any doubt", Dr Estrada-Belli said. It shows that they had a sophisticated system of writing and that the kings obtained and exercised their powers with all the trappings and symbols of kingship found in later Maya societies.
Indigenous people began farming the San Bartolo area around 700 BC and started constructing a plaza and pyramids 300 years later, Prof Saturno said. It never became a powerful city and was largely abandoned by AD 100.
Subsequent societies filled many of the early buildings with rubbish and built dwellings over them, he said, but the area did not function as a Maya city again.