UXMAL, the ruins of an ancient Mayan capital city of the new empire about 5o m. S. of Merida, in Yucatan, Mexico; in 89° 42' W. and 18' N. It was one of those frontier Mayan cities that did not rise to prominence until shortly before A.D. moo when the League of Mayapan was formed with three cities, Mayapan, Chichen-Itza and Uxmal dominant in "the New em pire" of the Mayas. With the earlier fall of the Old empire in Guatemala and southern Mexico the Itza established themselves at Chichen (The mouths of the Wells), the Cocom made Mayapan their capital, and the Tutul Xiu, a kindred tribe, settled at Uxmal. The period subsequent to the formation of the League of Maya pan constitutes the golden age of the New empire of the Mayas, when peace and plenty provided favourable opportunity for the development of trade and religion and science and art, particularly architecture. Great stone temples and colonnades elaborately carved and ornamented rose in every city; religion flourished; the sciences, especially astronomy and mathematics, were fos tered ; and a renaissance of culture held sway for over two cen turies. The buildings of this period at Uxmal surpassed those of the other cities in their grandeur and elegance. When the New empire crumbled under internal dissension and the conquest of the Aztec-Toltec imperialists from central Mexico, about the middle of the 15th century, Uxmal succumbed with the rest, and it is reasonably certain that only vagrant tribes lingered about the old ruins at the time of the Spanish conquest.
The region of the Uxmal ruins, like most of Yucatan, is a dry grass savanna, in places rather heavily wooded as about Uxmal. The relief is negligible, the terrain for the most part being as level as a floor, though a range of low hills lies between Uxmal and Ticul, the railway station about 20 m. eastward. The water supply of the city was furnished by "cenotes," or wells, within the city, or by pools some distance to the west, now partly filled up and vanished, but in the rainy season so marshy as to be the breeding-places of myriad mosquitoes that spread malaria, fever and disease. It may have been some of the mosquito-borne pes tilences that destroyed the Mayan civilization.
The main ruins occupy an area not much over 160 ac., but out lying remnants indicate a residential district much larger, for which the central group, massive and extremely impressive, merely constituted the religious and civic nucleus. The stone used in the structures is the pale, yellowish and reddish-grey limestone, obscurely marbled, which was probably obtained not far from the city, though the quarry has not yet been definitely located. The body of the walls and the framework of the temples is generally of fragmental stone set in a whitish mortar of excellent composi tion made of lime burned in the neighbourhood. The facings and ornaments are all cut exquisitely yet daringly, and in view of the fact that the Mayan artisans laboured without metal tools, the ex cellence of their work is amazing. The faces and edges are graved and hewn with perfect precision and the joints are in many cases so perfect as to conceal the mortar. Much plastering was done,
and nearly all surfaces, and apparently even the intricate details of mouldings and sculptures were smoothed painstakingly by white plaster and finished in many colours.
The walls are massive, averaging 3 ft. in thickness, but in some ruins 9 ft., approximately vertical on the exterior to the full height, and to the spring of the arch inside. Few recesses or projections disturb the smoothness of the exterior walls, but elaborate orna mentation relieves the monotony. Rigid mouldings divide the walls into upper and lower zones, the latter faced with smooth stone except for a narrow band of design near the base, and the former, a development of the entablature, compositely graven and bordered by a heavy band of mouldings at the top. The shoe shaped coping stones held the level cement roof. The corners of the buildings were square or rounded. No windows or other open ings admitted air or light (or mosquitoes). The doorways, con fined to the lower panel of the wall, were simply constructed and of medium to large size. The jambs were faced with cut stone and the longer lintels were of zapote wood dressed square or par tially so.
The buildings were generally long rectangular with one, or more usually two, ranges of rooms ; and as a rule these buildings were arranged in groups of four forming a quadrangle. None of the buildings was over one storey in height, and nearly all were built on terraces or pyramids of varied ground plan and profile. The rooms were high and spacious, with vaulted ceilings formed of the usual wedge-shaped arch built from horizontally laid stones cor belled and bevelled with the slope. Stairways were numerous, wide, steep and well built of cut stone.
Five principal buildings or groups of structures were the pyra mid-temple of the Magician crowning a majestic pyramid 8o ft. high and 240 by 18o ft. at the base; the Nunnery quadrangle composed of four large rectangular buildings enclosing a court, all on a terrace 30o ft. square and 15 ft. above the level of the plain, and all divided into numerous small rooms probably occupied by the priesthood; the Governor's palace, an imposing structure set upon a triple terrace, and said to be the most important single unit of its kind in America; the House of the Turtles, a smaller struc ture distinguished by a frieze of sculptured turtles on the mould ing; and the House of the Pigeons, a quadrangle like the Nun nery quadrangle, of which one building carries a peculiar roof comb of colossal size perforated by hundreds of openings which make it appear like a great dove-cot, and which may have been occupied by statues like the roof-combs of Palenque. Besides these a number of smaller or less important ruins or groups of ruins dot the locality and help to create a scene of ancient power, prosperity and culture, probably unsurpassed in Yucatan and certainly rivaled only by Mayapan and Chichen-Itza.