Episode notes
Tikal, known to the Maya as Yax Mutal, grew to as many as 90,000 people in the Guatemalan rainforest with no river, lake, or accessible groundwater. Its builders plastered their limestone quarries into waterproof reservoirs and paved the plazas at slight gradients so every rainstorm drained into them. They kept the water drinkable with dot-leaf water lilies and, at the Corriental Reservoir, filtration layers of imported zeolite and quartz. Then on January 14, 378 AD, King Chak Tok Ich'aak, Great Jaguar Paw, died on the same day a foreign general named Fire is Born arrived, sent by a ruler called Spear-Thrower Owl from Teotihuacan, about 400 miles away. Within a year a boy named First Crocodile sat on Tikal's throne.
Tikal became a hybrid superpower, installing its own dynasty as far away as Copan, until Calakmul, the Snake Kingdom, allied with Caracol and crushed it in 562. A hiatus of about 120 years followed, ended when Jasaw Chan K'awiil I took the throne in 682, defeated Calakmul in 695, and began the building boom behind Temple I, Temple II for his wife, and later the 70 meter Temple IV. In the ninth century drought, deforestation, and warfare hit the whole Maya region, and at Tikal the red paint on the temples made things worse. The jungle took the city until it was documented in 1848, and a 2018 LIDAR survey found over 60,000 unknown structures around it.
- How water lilies shaded the reservoirs, pulled out nitrogen, and hosted predators that ate mosquito larvae
- Zeolite, the porous volcanic mineral still used in home water filters, trapping microbes and heavy metals
- Kings carved in Maya style but holding Teotihuacan spear throwers and shields bearing the rain and war god Tlaloc
- Stelae deliberately smashed by the victors during Tikal's century of humiliation
- Cinnabar, a mercury sulfide, washing off the temples and into the drinking reservoirs until the lilies died and cyanobacteria took over