Wanita di peradaban Maya

Wanita peradaban Maya klasik merujuk pada catatan atau informasi mengenai aktivitas dan peran wanita pada periode Maya klasik (200-900 Masehi) di wilayah Mesoamerika. Sumber rujukan mengenai peran wanita dalam peradaban Maya klasik dapat berupa simbol-simbol atau hieroglif, lukisan, ritual-ritual, dan lain-lain.

Pada peradaban Maya klasik, wanita telah mendapatkan peran yang cukup beragam dalam masyarakat, bahkan di era ini telah ditemukan beberapa wanita yang menjabat sebagai pemimpin kota dalam wilayah kekuasaan Bangsa Maya. Kajian lebih lanjut terhadap peran wanita Maya pada periode ini ditujukan untuk mendapatkan informasi spesifik mengenai aktivitas, peran, dan persepektif masyarakat Maya saat itu terhadap seorang wanita.

Latar belakang

Bangsa Maya dikenal luas sebagai pembangun dari berbagai kota-kota kuno megah di wilayah Mesoamerika. Bangsa ini berkuasa di wilayah Mesoamerika antara kurun tahun 200-900 Masehi, dan kemudian mengalami kemunduran.

The Maya were builders of great cities filled with temples and palaces.

They rose to power in Meso-America between 200 and 900 CE, and then

declined. The Maya realm formed on the Yucatan peninsula, but it never

coalesced into a single centralized state. Instead, city-states grew, analogous to those in the Classical Greek society. These Maya city-states were

governed by elite families who sometimes ruled for generations, and

they fought among themselves incessantly. These families made up the

Maya aristocracy, from whose ranks priests were also drawn. Commoners

included artisans, peasants, merchants, and slaves.

Most Classic Maya cities were fairly uniform. A city’s “downtown”

had elegant structures carved and painted, pyramids, platforms, and residences. Large numbers of people could meet together in the open plazas

surrounded by terraced pyramids and temples. Pyramids were built to imitate mountains and were lofty platforms for political and religious rituals.1

Maya city-dwellers even enjoyed the sports arenas of the time: ball courts,

shaped like an I, with a flat playing surface surrounded by walls. Both

pyramids and ball courts placed Maya squarely in long-standing MesoAmerican traditions. Maya buildings were covered in hundreds of stone

sculptures depicting god masks, human figures, undulating serpents,  

and astronomic symbols. The sculptures probably communicated messages to Maya people almost like political posters communicate to us

today. Other sculptures on buildings show how the Maya lived: that

they worshipped beside shrines, ate near the small vegetable gardens

next to the thatched homes of commoners, and cleaned themselves in

sweat baths.

Classic Maya civilization existed from the third through the ninth

centuries CE, but most of the sources about women are drawn from the

later years of this period, a time scholars refer to as Late Classic Maya

(700–900 CE).

Citra ideal wanita pada peradaban Maya klasik

The ideal female of Maya civilization can be explored through the creation

myth recorded in the Maya text Popul Vuh. In it, twin brothers magically

created a garden with the help of their grandmother, Xmucane. To make

people, “the substance of human flesh,” Xmucane ground her corn (maize)

and mixed the resulting flour with water.2 Thus, this myth illustrates that

food processing was central to the ideal female and to female identity

and sacred in the Maya worldview: It was through food production by a

woman that humanity originated. Classic Maya civilization placed women

in an usually high position in religious spheres, in some cases even equal

to men. In fact, one of the most important Maya gods was the ancestor

god Totilmeiletic, “Father-Mother,” which suggests that the Maya may

have seen the cosmic order in terms of an androgynous figure. This may

imply a belief in mutual dependence among men and women.

IDEALS OF ELITE FEMALE BEAUTY Evidence suggests that Maya aristocracy went through elaborate physical changes in order to achieve an ideal

look. Unlike the foot-binding women of Song China, however, their mutations did not hamper movement, and many of their alterations were also

undertaken by males. For instance, the elite considered sloping foreheads

and crossed eyes beautiful, and thus the heads of newborns were bound

to wooden boards to flatten their foreheads, and a small bead was tied to

children’s bangs, encouraging crossed eyes. Female aristocrats tattooed

themselves, painted their bodies in red paint, and carefully styled their

hair around their flattened foreheads. They decorated themselves with

hair ornaments that resembled sprouting plants and with ear and neck

jewelry of jade, shell, or precious jewels. Some aristocratic women filed

their teeth to points and inlaid them with iron, fool’s gold, obsidian, jade,

or shell.3 The fact that the most drastic of physical changes were made

by both genders again suggests a kind of parity unusual for premodern,

settled societies.

Pertumbuhan dan perkembangan

From birth to adulthood, Maya social customs shaped the experience of

women, and here archaeology allows us to analyze the lives of commoners as well as aristocrats. Burial sites suggest that Maya girls were fed

less nutritiously than boys were, because the bodies of adult women were

much shorter than men’s. Despite this disparity, Maya children of both

genders were seen to have worthy roles, as rituals celebrating the place

of girls and women demonstrate. For instance, the Maya ritual hetzmek

occurred when a girl was three months old. During the ritual, her family displayed a miniature loom and corn-grinding stones for the baby’s

future work.4 If daughters survived, at 12 years old they participated in an

elaborate rite marking the beginning of adolescence. Older women were

assigned as godmothers to help expel evil spirits from girl children as

they became women.

Menikah

Marriage was essential for both men and women, allowing each to

fulfill their potential for mutual dependence in Maya society. The prominent position played by a bride’s natal family as well as the ease with

which a woman could divorce were both customs used to Maya wives’

advantage. As with many premodern civilizations, aristocratic men could

have many wives and slave concubines, but monogamy was practiced

by commoners. Girls were usually married at 14 or 15 years of age, and

boys at 18. Marriage was arranged by the parents: The father of the groom

found a matchmaker and, once marriage arrangements were complete,

the father of the bride gave a marriage banquet. Notably, matrilocal marriage was practiced among commoner families in many regions, whereby

the new husband moved to his wife’s family, assisting his father-in-law

and proving his abilities. As with many Southeast Asian cultures, adult

common women benefited by living with their birth families because

they avoided domination by the groom’s family. Furthermore, Maya

common marriages could be dissolved rather simply by a declaration by

husband or wife, and a woman continued to control her possessions after

divorce.  

Wanita sebagai seroang ibu

Classic Maya society defined motherhood as biological reproduction,

and her pregnancy and labor amounted to a sacred blood sacrifice. In fact,

birth was seen as a battle in which an infant could kill its mother; during

labor an image of Ix Chel, the goddess of childbirth, was placed under a

laboring woman’s bed. Ix Chel was a wizened midwife who supported

the mother as she fought between life and death. The association of labor

with a battlefield is borne out by archaeological records, as many excavations show that women’s life expectancy was shorter (35 years old) than

men’s (45 years old), possibly because of the young marriage age and  

Pekerjaan

A Maya woman’s economic position seems to have been much stronger

than that of her peers in other cultures. Daughters could inherit property

from their families, though sons were favored as inheritors, and the textile

work of a Maya woman gave her an important place in her society and her

city-state. Home was a common Maya woman’s domain and the typical

setting for her work—though she would occasionally work in the fields,

and her husband might occasionally work in the home. Common women

carried out three main activities in the home besides child bearing and

rearing: producing cloth, tending small gardens, and processing food.

The work of elite women held an unusual degree of importance in

Maya society. As in the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean and

Tang and Song China, they were recognized for their textile work. Among

the Maya, however, some aristocratic women became matchmakers, artists, craftspeople, or scribes (keepers of the books); two examples are

Noble Lady Scribe Sky of Yaxchilan and Lady Jaguar. Such women were

often highly trained and educated. Indeed, elite female matchmakers had

to painstakingly consult historical and tribute rolls, so they had to be proficient in reading.7 Few other civilizations we have examined offered even

elite women the rich education evidenced by the Maya female scribes and

matchmakers  

Produksi tekstil

TEXTILE PRODUCTION Weaving was women’s central occupation and

even featured prominently in the sacred Maya cosmology, in a manner

analogous to Tang and Song China. The Maya weaving goddess carried

spindles in her hair ornaments in much the same way that the Chinese

weaving goddess wore a loom headdress. When women wove, they were

following the lead of the Moon Goddess, the inventor of weaving and the

special patron of women.

Commoner women most often wove their cloth from a fibrous plant

called maguey, which involved extremely time-consuming work. In fact,

the creation of maguey cloth was so demanding that community-wide

workshops developed to process it. First the women’s teams softened the

plants’ leaves with heat, and then they scraped and beat the leaves to separate fibers and flesh. Some cloth was famous for being made of maguey  

with spines intact, but other cloth was made from single maguey spines.

Women met in a processing and weaving building, or outdoors, weather

permitting. They worked in public spaces that were also associated with

community festivals and celebrations.

Cotton cloth was made and worn only by aristocrats and was important for Maya social, religious, and political life. Use of cotton in ritual

activity ranged from its employment in ceremonial costumes, to providing offerings to gods, to wrapping sacred objects. Cotton textiles were also

important as gifts of tribute to other city-states or for exporting in trade,

thus forming an essential component of the government’s economic wellbeing. Evidence for this comes from Maya vases, which regularly show

stacked heaps of cloth for use in political transactions.

Wealthier Maya women worked with elevated materials, such as

feathers, pearls or beads, and expensive dyes—cochineal from tiny red

insects living in the prickly pear, purple dyes from snails, or blue from

indigo. High-ranking females may have supervised and controlled highquality textile production similarly to elite Tang Chinese women’s oversight of silk works.  

Pekerjaan lainnya

OTHER WORK: FOOD PROCESSING AND PREPARATION, FARMING, AND

CERAMICS The centrality of common women’s role in food provision for

Maya communities was probably a major reason for their strong position

in their civilization. They were associated with the production of flour, the

tending of small gardens, and the raising of deer for venison. Processing

dried corn into maize flour required persistence and patience on the part

of Maya commoner women, who had gnarled knees, calcified toe bones,

and powerful arms from years of kneeling to grind maize. Indeed, one

of a Maya common girl’s first possessions as a child was probably her

stone-pounding kit of mano (tubular hand stone) and metate (flat grinding

stone). Every day, women first soaked and boiled maize kernels in lime to

remove the hulls and release the nutrition in the plant; then, after straining the maize, they knelt in front of a grinding stone on the ground and

ground the kernels with their manos on metates.

Maya women also tended small gardens, where they grew a variety

of vegetables and fruits: beans, squash, cotton, sweet potatoes, tomatoes,

chili peppers, avocados, papayas, cacao, and other medicinal plants. For

meat, women raised many animals, but perhaps the most significant

were deer. Women tamed wild fawns and brought them into the household compounds to be raised, and venison in some cities accounted for 90

percent of all animal meat consumed. According to the Maya text Popul

Vuh, deer were the first creations of the Divine Mother, before jaguars and  

humans. In Maya communities, half the women were buried with deer

bones, showing the important association of deer farming with women.

Maya women’s participation in farming changed after 700 CE when

agricultural intensification occurred in some regions. In the earlier Maya

communities, making tools and preparing food was done in the same

outside space. Women cooked in large open bowls preparing soups and

gruels, which were not very time-consuming meals. Men, women, and

children participated collaboratively in many aspects of farming.8 After

700 CE, terracing began and agricultural productivity intensified, and

eventually women invented new kinds of food processing, including making tortillas, which demanded more time than corn gruels of earlier centuries.9 Other occupations of Late Classical Maya common women included

helping men to produce pottery and clay products, sculpting stucco, and

creating latticework on rooftops.  

Wanita Maya dan politik

Wanita dalam ritual dan kepercayaan Maya

Rituals performed only by women, the essential role of goddesses, and

the sacred power of women’s fertility gave female spirituality a high place

in the Classic Maya world. Furthermore, in elite Maya households, as in

Chinese households, ancestor worship—which included deified men and

women—was also a signifi cant component of religious life.

In the Classic Maya civilization, many goddesses existed, and they

were referred to as either “mother” or “grandmother,” which shows

the sacred reverence Maya had for the power of female fertility and the

wisdom of aged women. Two in particular stand out: the moon weaver

goddesses, O (Ix Chel or sometimes Chak Chel) and the young goddess

I (Ix Tab). The Maya revered the moon and credited it with governing

women’s menstrual cycles and the planting of maize, and thus these two

deities held considerable powers. Although the elder O was affiliated

with the waning moon, and the younger the waxing moon, the goddesses

were sometimes blended in Maya thinking and practice. In fact, the physical trinity of earth, moon, and maize was known as “Our Mother.” The

Maya, in this way, associated conception with sowing. Maya goddesses

not only embodied a loving life force that could offer guidance when

needed, but also personified chaos and dangerous heralds of death.

CROSS-DRESSING ROYALTY AND FEMALE RITUALS In their rituals, Maya

kings and queens impersonated gods and goddesses in a way that combined male and female powers of the cosmos. The way in which kings

impersonated the most important god, the Maize God, in special rituals to commemorate his birth, sacrifice, death, burial, and resurrection

show how important was female power in Maya civilization. The Maize

God was androgynous: He was the first father, but he also wore a net

skirt, albeit not in the style typical for Maya women. On his cheek the

hieroglyph “Il” was written, a variant of “Ix” (which meant “goddess”).

He also wore a fertility seashell in the center of a Xoc monster belt. (This

monster refers to the Maize God’s rebirth underwater.13) The Maya perhaps understood the anatomy of maize itself—that the plant possesses

both male tassels and female ears and silk and is thus able to fertilize and

give birth in the same body. In Copan, King Eighteen Rabbit wore skirts

for his bloodletting rituals to combine male and female power. Shedding

blood from the penis imitated the menstrual cycle, and he appropriated

such female fertility symbols to strengthen his power. Female rulers also

impersonated male deities. In Palenque, Queen Zac K’uk sometimes

wore a male haircut and a loincloth when impersonating the Moon Goddess. Mixing gender meant that the rulers, especially female, could break  

from the normal domains of common Maya and become deities to wield

extraordinary power.14

Many city-state occasions required rituals and ceremonies in which

women participated. We have already discussed the bloodletting of the

Maya political scene. On some occasions women were charged with special religious duties. For instance, some women were thought to be able

to bring rain in a time of drought. Carvings and vases suggest that Maya

women participated in other rituals in many ways. Festivities included

paying respect to the gods, praying, and burning copal. Women assisted

men engaged in consuming mind-altering substances, such as peyote, or

consumed such substances themselves. Women gave intoxicating enemas to men. Ceremonies often required sexual abstinence and purification techniques before rituals. Following rituals, women danced, feasted,

and drank balche (an alcoholic beverage). In these ways women played a

prominent public spiritual role in the Classic Maya city-states.  

Wanita di akhir periode klasik peradaban Maya

The Maya world view placed women in a high position for their reproductive powers. Women were respected for their blood sacrifice and resulting children and thus had a strong position in their families, although

common women were nutritionally deprived. Maya women contributed

to the economies of their families and city-states in many ways, such as

weaving cloth and preserving and processing food. Royal consorts played

critical roles in the political scene, whether through religious bloodletting

rituals, forming political alliances, or as outright leaders. Female goddesses with multifaceted power were important to Maya society for their

fertility and wisdom.15 Not only did the Maya cosmology require mutual

dependency between men and women in marriage and society, but

kings also needed access to female spirituality in various ways to wield

power. Although Maya women had many more paths open to them compared with women in other civilizations, some evidence suggests that

even their status was gradually declining compared with earlier MesoAmerican civilizations. For example, Maya women had been prominent

players in the ancient Meso-American ball game, but they ceased playing

by the eighth century. The farming techniques of common women had

become more time-consuming by this time too. Regardless of this trajectory, by the end of the tenth century, the Maya civilization faded rapidly

and somewhat mysteriously, although the increasingly destructive inter

city-state warfare probably played a role.  

Daftar pustaka

Buku

• Ardren, Traci (2002). Ancient Maya Women (dalam bahasa Inggris). Rowman Altamira. ISBN 9780759100107. 
• Clay, Catherine; Senecal, Christine; Paul, Chandrika (2008-01-22). Envisioning Women in World History: Prehistory to 1500 (dalam bahasa English) (edisi ke-1 edition). Boston: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages. ISBN 9780073513225. Pemeliharaan CS1: Bahasa yang tidak diketahui (link) Pemeliharaan CS1: Teks tambahan (link)