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The Blood of Kings
Linda Schele & Mary Ellen Miller
*The Blood of Kings* was a landmark—the 1986 Kimbell Art Museum exhibition and book that helped rewrite how the world understood the ancient Maya. Drawing on the then-recent decipherment of Maya glyphs, Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller showed that Maya art was not serene abstraction but a vivid record of real kings, dynastic politics, warfare, and the ritual bloodletting through which rulers touched the sacred. Pairing superb photographs of carvings, vessels, and figurines with newly readable inscriptions, the book made a difficult scholarly revolution genuinely gripping. Schele's fierce clarity and Miller's eye for the objects combine into something that reads like detective work. Decades on, it remains a touchstone—both a beautiful art book and the moment Maya civilization stepped out of myth and into documented history.
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The authors
Linda Schele (1942–1998) was among the most influential figures in the decipherment of Maya writing, a charismatic scholar who trained a generation. Mary Ellen Miller is an art historian of Mesoamerica long based at Yale. Together they brought epigraphy and art history into a single, powerful reading of Maya imagery.
The book
The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art accompanied a 1986 exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, co-published with George Braziller. Organized around themes—kingship, the court, warfare, the ballgame, bloodletting—it uses spectacular objects to demonstrate that Maya art narrates specific historical and ritual events.
How it has aged
It stands as a genuine turning point; much later scholarship builds directly on it. Some readings have since been refined as decipherment advanced, but the core argument—that the Maya recorded real history—won the field, and the book is still widely cited and taught.
For more context
The volume distills the epigraphic breakthroughs of the 1970s and 80s and pairs well with Sabloff's survey of the same era's 'new archaeology.'
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Linda Schele & Mary Ellen Miller
- Publisher
- Kimbell Art Museum / George Braziller
- Place of publication
- Fort Worth; New York
- Year
- 1986
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine