culture
A sacred Mayan stele returns to Guatemala following two years in a New York museum
The Mayan stele Wak Chanil Ajau returns to our country to the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.
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The Mayan stele returns to Guatemala, its country of origin. (Photo Prensa Libre: EFE/ Mariano Macz)
A limestone stele created by a Mayan artist in 702 returned to the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography of Guatemala on Saturday, following spending 2 years and 11 months on display in various cultural centers in the United States.
The Wak Chanil Ajau, which means ‘Lady Six Heaven’, returned to its enclosure in Guatemala, where it had remained since its discovery in 1976, before being loaned in 2021 to various museums in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, according to the Ministry of Culture and Sports.
The stele, considered sacred and the image of a Mayan princess from the late classical period (600-800 AD), returned to Guatemala with a ceremony sponsored by Mayan priests and with a renovation of its space within the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, according to the same source.
“The arrival and integration of Lady Six Heaven not only strengthens the country’s cultural offering, but also the link between current generations and the ancient civilizations that populated these lands,” explains the Ministry of Culture.
The stele is a stone relief, with a shallow depth, a height of almost two meters and weight of more than two tons, it was discovered by Guatemalan archaeologists in 1976 at the archaeological site of El Naranjo, located in the department (province) of Petén, in the far north of the Central American country.
The “lady of the six skies” was a kind of deity who was prayed to during military campaigns once morest neighboring peoples and the attire with which she was sculpted in stone has details of sacred ornaments and plumage of the quetzal, a native bird associated with Mayan cosmology and adopted as the national bird of Guatemala.
According to studies related to the figure, this giant stone was located in a Mayan ceremonial plaza, which served as a public monument to document political histories and accompany the ritual celebrations of the civilization.
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