In the art of the ancient Maya world, some portrayals of women use the iconography of warriors. Women hold weapons, summon supernatural spirits of war, and wear the uniforms of soldiers. Two women in particular stand out among the many dynamic women of the Classic era of Maya history as possible ‘warrior queens.’
Maybe you’ve heard the term ‘warrior queen’ in pop culture. A recent movie about Boudica, a British ruler, was even named Warrior Queen.
But let's be real. It's a dicey term. Not every king who ever ruled led troops into battle. I'm sure many of them went out to the battlefield to give a li'l wave of encouragement. Others avoided the battlefield at all costs. So a king who is also a warrior was not a given. Why don't we talk about "warrior kings?"
Also, since none of us were there, we don't know for sure they were warriors! Whatever your gender, dressing up as a soldier and talking about the victories that happened during your administration doesn’t mean you stabbed folks on the battlefield. We know Isabel I of Spain went to the battlefield; she rode around on horseback majestically and inspired soldiers. But she didn’t stab folks.
Warrior queen is loaded, too. For example, I like to play around with AI illustrators. If you ask most to give you a “Maya warrior queen,” the image it provides is usually something a teenage anime fan would hide in a secret folder under his bed. As AI only repeats cultural biases, it makes me wonder if the term is useful.
But even in academia, folks sometimes talk about warrior queens. So are there any ancient Maya queens I would call warrior queens? There were at least two women who were happy to associate themselves with war in the Classic Maya era … and they might’ve been friends.
The great queens of Coba
In the late 600s CE in the city of Coba in the Yucatan Peninsula, the people erected a stela. Stelae are carved stones that show off the accomplishments of leaders. This wasn’t unusual during the Classic Maya era.
What was unusual was that, on the back of this one, they included a woman. The front was the ruler and the back was his wife. Before that, stelae usually featured one protagonist--the ruler of the local city-state. (He was called an ajaw in ancient Mayan).
The inclusion was part of a broader cultural change in artistic conventions. And it seems to have been the beginning of new possibilities for female rulers.
A generation or two after this shared monument, the people of Coba dedicated Stela 1. It was a long and intricate description of a ruler known to academics as Ruler B for many years. But the local limestone was junk, so much of the description has eroded into illegibility.
But we can read part of Ruler B's name, and it starts with Ix, which is ancient Mayan for ‘Lady.’ The full name is maybe Ix K’awiil Ek? Ajaw? (Question marks represent uncertain decipherment.) Sometimes Ek’ seems to come first, so maybe her name is Ix Ek’ K’awiil Ajaw. Heh. We’ll call her Ix K’awiil Ek’. As my old professor would say, “Don’t tell me how to spell it, tell me what it means.”
And what it means is, Ruler B was a woman. She’s one of very few Maya queens who seem to have ruled alone. This time, she’s on the front … and possibly the back, too. She may have been married, but her husband doesn’t seem to have had much political power.
On Stela 1, Ix K’awiil Ek’ holds a serpent bar, an emblem of leadership. This may have represented the ruler’s ability to serve as a conduit between this world and other worlds. While the image is eroded, she seems to wear a huipil, the long dress common among ancient Maya women.
But she is also standing on two guys. Another two people with ropes around them are bound at her feet. These are prisoners of war captured during skirmishes with Coba’s rivals. It is one of the only times a woman is portrayed this way.
I know, gaining the traditional male privilege of standing on your enemy’s back isn’t, perhaps, the most inspiring example of feminism in action. But it suggests, though certainly doesn’t prove, that she took those prisoners on the battlefield.
So Ix K’awiil Ek’ was in charge, and she may have been a warrior, too.
And she wasn't alone.
There’s a date on Coba Stela 1 that appears at another place: 9.12.10.5.12 4 Eb 10 Yax. This was in late August, 682 CE.
Of course, a date appearing two places could be a coincidence. The event itself is too eroded to read. The thing is, this date also appears on the stela of the queen of Naranjo, the other major ‘warrior-queen’ of Maya history.
Lady Six Sky
I’ve written about Lady Six Sky before. She was the daughter of the lord of Dos Pilas. He, in turn, was descended from the lords of Tikal. But after a little disagreement and a few “mountains of skulls and rivers of blood,” he founded his own dynasty.
When her dad conquered the city of Naranjo, he needed someone to rule it, and he picked her.
As ruler, she, too, stood on the backs of captives on her stelae. She took it a step further than Ix K'awiil Ek'. Instead of a huipil, she wears clothing associated with warriors. As she mentions conquests that happened early in her administration, it's possible she went onto the battlefield. #girlboss
We don’t know when she was born, but on 4 Eb 10 Yax (August, 682 CE), she entered the city of Naranjo as its new queen with a royal retinue around her. It was the same date Ix K'awiil Ek' put on her Stela 1 at Coba.
This event was obviously important in the life of Lady Six Sky--it’s when she walked into the city she would rule for decades. Since Lady Six Sky probably died in 741 CE, she was probably pretty young in 682 CE.
But we don’t know why it was important for Ix K’awiil Ek’. She probably wasn't celebrating her bestie's accession to the throne, since they had a big age gap. Ix K’awiil Ek’ was at least 30 in 682 CE. Unless Lady Six Sky was in her 90s when she died (not impossible but unlikely), Lady Six Sky was in her early teens in 682 CE.
So why would two warrior queens mention the same date--a date that, as far as I know, doesn’t get mentioned in any other contexts?
Astronomer Queens?
Maybe the warrior part of all this isn’t even that important. Maybe the key has to do with religious beliefs about the stars and the passage of time.
The Classic Maya were really into time. Some folks say they were “obsessed.” But those folks forget we live in a society where you can get fired from certain jobs if you arrive at ten hours and five minutes after the arbitrary division of the night into halves instead of ten hours after said arbitrary division.
But the Maya were certainly interested in it (and some still are). They used the mathematics of time to express philosophical and spiritual ideas about the world. How you counted the calendar said a lot about you as a person.
Ix K’awiil Ek’ was interested in sacred numerology. Stela 1 has one of the longest long counts in the Maya world. A long count is a count of the days since the present world was created.
The Classic Maya long count calendar counts from a day in 3113 BCE. Long counts commonly look like “9.15.0.0.0,” for example. This is read “nine baktuns (or 400-year-periods); 15 k’atuns (or 20-year-periods); 0 tuns (or years); 0 winals (months); and 0 k’ins (days) since the creation of the earth.”
The long count on Coba Stela 1 has numbers higher than baktuns. In other words, it counts time bigger than 400-year-periods. It counts a period of 8,000 years, 160,000 years, 3,200,000 years, and more! It counts a truly massive amount of time. So the universe in Maya conception was billions and billions of years old, although this ‘phase’ of the earth only got going in 3113 BCE.
The world as we know it probably wasn’t built by supernatural beings in 3113 BCE. (Probably). But Lady K’awiil Ek’ still understood the impossibly grand scale of time that scientists today grapple with.
Considering Ix K'awiil Ek's interest in time, we can assume she usually didn't pick a date for a celebration at random. So we can also say she wasn't celebrating 4 Eb at random. That's the date that appears on both the inscriptions at Naranjo and one at Coba.
Today, the people who still follow the Maya calendar in Guatemala say Eb is a great day for new beginnings. 4 Eb is particularly good. So Lady Six Sky’s choice of 4 Eb as a date to enter into a new city was probably not accidental, and Lady K’awiil Ek’ may have even been the one to recommend it.
Like Ix K'awiil Ek', we know that Lady Six Sky was really into counting stuff. She changed the way moon cycles were counted, for example. She was a competent astronomer with an interest in the passage of time, and her choice of the name Six Sky was likely no accident. (Rulers chose their regal names.)
So maybe Ix K’awiil Ek’ was an astronomer as well. If scholars are right that her name should include the word ajaw at the end, her name includes the phrase "Star Lord." Her extra-long long count is evidence she was interested in time in a more profound way than many of her peers.
Since she is the elder of the two, she may have served as an inspiring figure for Lady Six Sky. Maybe she even taught her. While Coba and Naranjo are far from each other (eight and a half hours by car today), both women may have visited the city of Calakmul.
Calakmul was a massive city, and it was the big boss for many smaller Maya cities. As children of important leaders, both rulers did not have a choice but to visit Calakmul sometimes.
They may have even gone to school there. If the schools at Calakmul were like the schools in other parts of Mesoamerica, they would have learned many things. They would have been well-educated in astronomy, religion, and why Calakmul was the best city ever.
One being in their early thirties while the other being in their teens, they may have had a mentor-mentee relationship. Ix K'awiil Ek' may have taught the younger Lady Six Sky about being a warrior and how to navigate being a woman in a male-dominated space. But she also would have taught her about the sacred calendar and the way the movement of the stars could be used to track time.
In the end, while warrior queen initially sounds pretty badass, it takes away some of the amazing things these two women did that did not involve standing on their enemies. We could as easily call them astronomer queens.
Hola, AG! Nice that you were able to include recent photos from your Maya adventure to Coba. Can I incorporate a shorter version of this in the July Explorer and July Aztlander?