Tea at Trianon: An Ancient Mayan Ambassador

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, April 30, 2021

An Ancient Mayan Ambassador

From Live Science:

Ancient hieroglyphics painted in a stairway near a Maya ambassador's burial tell the tale of his elite but tumultuous life nearly 1,300 years ago, a new study finds. The ambassador, a man named Ajpach' Waal, helped broker an alliance between two powerful dynasties — the Maya king of Copán, in modern-day Honduras, and the Maya king of Calakmul, in present-day southern Mexico, according to the hieroglyphics. But when the alliance fell through, Ajpach' Waal's fortunes tanked and he died in relative obscurity.

The finding reveals that playing politics could elevate or plummet the standing of "a nonroyal elite of Late Classic period Maya society (A.D. 600–850)," the researchers wrote in the study, adding that "little is known about their life experiences and mortuary practices." (Read more.)