Sky Knife is a young man cursed with an unlucky name - a name his mother saw in a vision and pledged that her son would bear, to honor whatever destiny the gods had decreed. He hasn't the luck to take one of the usual paths charted for his people: farmer, soldier, merchant - all these roads are closed to him. The only hope for him lies in service at the King's Temple, where - he hopes - the gods will make clear his purpose in the world. But as a novice priest he has little hope of fulfilling his destiny. That is, until a human sacrifice goes horribly wrong, priests begin to die, and the skies fill with dangerous portents and visions. Magic of all sorts seems to cling to Sky Knife like a shroud, but if he is daring and lucky enough, he may just find out the answer - and, in doing so, win a place among his people. Sky Knife is a compelling and evocative portrait of ancient Mayan culture. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"Art historian Carolyn Tate presents, in a well-organized and amply illustrated two-part format, a holistic treatment of a single archaeological site—the great ancient Maya city of Yaxchilan.... This is the most successful attempt to relate [art and architecture] within a Maya site that I have seen." —Ethnohistory As archaeologists peel away the jungle covering that has both obscured and preserved the ancient Maya cities of Mexico and Central America, other scholars have only a limited time to study and understand the sites before the jungle, weather, and human encroachment efface them again, perhaps forever. This urgency underlies Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City, Carolyn Tate's comprehensive catalog and analysis of all the city's extant buildings and sculptures. During a year of field work, Tate fully documented the appearance of the site as of 1987. For each sculpture and building, she records its discovery, present location, condition, measurements, and astronomical orientation and reconstructs its Long Counts and Julian dates from Calendar Rounds. Line drawings and photographs provide a visual document of the art and architecture of Yaxchilan. More than mere documentation, however, the book explores the phenomenon of art within Maya society. Tate establishes a general framework of cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge likely to have been shared by eighth-century Maya people. The process of making public art is considered in relation to other modes of aesthetic expression, such as oral tradition and ritual. This kind of analysis is new in Maya studies and offers fresh insight into the function of these magnificent cities and the powerful role public art and architecture play in establishing cultural norms, in education in a semiliterate society, and in developing the personal and community identities of individuals. Several chapters cover the specifics of art and iconography at Yaxchilan as a basis for examining the creation of the city in the Late Classic period. Individual sculptures are attributed to the hands of single artists and workshops, thus aiding in dating several of the monuments. The significance of headdresses, backracks, and other costume elements seen on monuments is tied to specific rituals and fashions, and influence from other sites is traced. These analyses lead to a history of the design of the city under the reigns of Shield Jaguar (A.D. 681-741) and Bird Jaguar IV (A.D. 752-772). In Tate's view, Yaxchilan and other Maya cities were designed as both a theater for ritual activities and a nexus of public art and social structures that were crucial in defining the self within Maya society.

Twelve-year-old Taemon struggles with the fallout from his role in ending the city of Deliverance's ability to use telekinetic powers and embarks on a dangerous journey with Amma to find his missing father in a Republik.

An illustrated introduction to Mexico's historical and contemporary issues, problems and events.

This 17th book named as "The Esoteric Collections - The Magical Wisdom of Solomon - Book VII" is an important book, which contain some of the evolutionary wisdom long forgotten upon this planet earth, which still exists in the ''Universal Ethereal library'', which includes the divine wisdom of the Great Prophet King Solomon. This book contain various outlines and glimpses of the valuable information, which has been previously unknown to many, and are mostly related to the unrevealed history of the human Root races, as well their sub and branch races, who for eons are evolving upon this planet earth as the incarnated members of various casts and creeds, for their gradual conscious expansion according to the evolutionary plan, which is based upon the universal law of ''will to do good''.

The key to the study of the language and history of the Classic Maya (A.D. 293–900) is the verb. Maya Glyphs: The Verbs is a comprehensive study of the verb morphology and syntax of the Maya writing system. Linda Schele's summary of methodology makes available in a single place many important discoveries and approaches to the Maya language. Hers is the first sourcebook to include so broad a range of dates and to identify for the first time so many Maya rulers and events. The admirably lucid text provides an excellent introduction to Maya hieroglyphics for the beginner, and, for the experienced Mayanist, it offers a fascinating explanation of methodology, including paraphrasing, and important information about syntactical structures, special verbal constructions, and literary conventions. Schele's extensive catalog of known verbal phrases is useful for a variety of purposes. Because it is organized according to verbal affix patterns, it provides the only available source for the distribution of such patterns in the writing system. At the same time it registers the date of each event, its agent and patient (if recorded), the dedication date of the monument on which the glyphs occur, and a pictorial illustration, rather than a T-number transcription, of each example. Extensive notes treating problems of dating, interpretation, and dynastic information contain theories about the meaning and function of the events recorded in the Maya inscriptions.