DAVID STUART THE INSCRIPTIONS FROM TEMPLE XIX AT PALENQUE The Inscriptions fromTempleXIX at Palenque A Commentary The Inscriptions from TempleXIX at Palenque A Commentary By David Stuart Photographs by Jorge Pérez de Lara The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute San Francisco ©2005 by The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute All rights reserved Designed by Chip Breitwieser and Dawn Glenn for Precolumbia Mesoweb Press Printed in China on acid-free paper Library of Congress Control Number 2005936998 ISBN 0-934051-10-0 Contents Acknowledgments 6 A Note on Orthography and Hieroglyphic Transcription 8 Introduction 11 Chapter 1. The Alfarda Tablet 17 Chapter 2. The Sculpted Pier 21 Chapter 3. The Platform 59 Chapter 4. The People 113 Chapter 5. K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Nahb: His Name Glyphs and Historical Setting 148 Chapter 6. A New Look at Palenque’s Mythology 158 Chapter 7. The Weight of Time 186 Appendix A. Transcription of the Temple XIX Inscriptions 190 Appendix B. Transliteration and Prose Translation of the Temple XIX Platform 196 Bibliography 201 Acknowledgments My research on Temple XIX and its texts benefited from the help and insights of many friends and colleagues. Above all, my warmest and most heartfelt thanks go to Merle Greene Robertson. Her invitation to me to participate in the Temple XIX work brought me back to Palenque after many years, to the place where so much of my interest and enthusiasm for the Maya began to develop seriously in the late 1970s. Merle’s constant encouragement and help in those years started me off on a wondrous path with the Maya, and for that she has my everlasting love and appreciation. Perhaps I can express a little of these thanks by dedicating this study to her, as well as to her long-lasting contributions to the study of Palenque and the ancient Maya. Alfonso Morales, who oversaw the excavations of Temple XIX, has been a constant source of encouragement as well, and without his generosity and support the present work would simply not have been possible. Over several months I eagerly awaited his “chocolates” in email form—images of the inscriptions and tablets sent soon after they were unearthed. He is a true pioneer of “cyber-archaeology.” Among the excellent team working alongside Alfonso I would like to thank in particular Ed Barnhart, Julie Miller, Christopher Powell, and Kirk Straight. Jorge Pérez de Lara kindly made available his stunning photographs of the Temple XIX platform, without which this study could not have been made. Needless to say, the ideas and musings in this work are my own, but over the past few years I have benefited from the feedback and observations of many epigraphers. I would like to particularly acknowledge (in alphabetical order) Karen Bassie-Sweet, Guillermo Bernal Romero, Stanley Guenter, Stephen Houston, Alfonso Lacadena, Simon Martin, Jorge Pérez de Lara, Werner Nahm, Christopher Powell, John Robertson, Joel Skidmore, Karl Taube, Alexander Tokovinine, Erik Velásquez García, and Marc Zender for the many emails ex- changed over the details of the Temple XIX inscriptions. Indeed, it is difficult to adequately acknowledge their fertile contributions to my own thinking and interpretations, and no doubt many of their individual insights will find their way into print in other venues. Chris- topher Powell, for example, has discerned a number of fascinating astronomical patterns in the dates of Temple XIX (personal communication 1998), which hopefully will find their way to publication soon. Clearly the Temple XIX texts will be discussed for years to come, and with this study I can only aim to help get the ball rolling. Acknowledgments 7 Much of this work was written over two summers at the Center for Maya Research in Barnardsville, North Carolina, among the seemingly limitless books of my father’s library on things Mesoamerican. I can think of no better place to enjoy the serenity of life than in the cradle of those mountains, and I thank my dad, George Stuart, and his wife Melinda for the time I passed there, and the good company and hospitality they provided. Several people at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge offered their views and kind sup- port during the last few years. I particularly thank William Fash, Barbara Fash, Evon Vogt, and Ian Graham. Ian has been remarkably patient while I took time away from the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Project to focus on the Palenque material. Students and other participants in my seminars have been sources of insight and inspiration over several years, among them Gerardo Aldana, James Fitzsimmons, Darcie Flannigan, Tom Garrison, Lucia Henderson, Sarah Jackson, Allan Maca, Laura O’Rourke, Shannon Plank, William Saturno, and Alexander Tokovinine. Most of all, I offer thanks and love to my wife Bridget, who encouraged me to complete this work before even more time passed after the discovery of the Temple XIX materials.* My sons Peter and Richard lured me away from my writing and drawing on countless occasions, much to my betterment. I would not have had it any other way. * Editor’s note: The text of this book is essentially that of a manuscript submitted in February, 2004. The delay in publication was attendant upon Dr. Stuart’s move to the University of Texas at Austin and the completion of the drawings and captions. The few changes to the text arose from the editorial process, and only existing citations were updated. A Note on Orthography and Hieroglyphic Transcription Many readers are no doubt aware that publications in Maya epigraphy are highly inconsis- tent when it comes to transcribing hieroglyphic signs. Specialists are equally conscious of the situation, and all who actively pursue or follow Maya glyph studies struggle with the seemingly constant changes and refinements found in the literature. Any single orthography and its idiosyncratic features can never be perfect, since it is forged from an array of difficult (and sometimes unanswerable) questions involving linguistics and epigraphy. For these reasons I am well aware that the system adopted here, different from others used in recent years, will frustrate some readers, confuse others, and perhaps satisfy few. Even so, I believe that the system used in these pages, based as it is on earlier and well established conventions, will be a manageable one for students and colleagues to follow, even if not widely adopted for future use. Generally speaking, the changes in orthography chosen by epigraphers reflect the rapid changes and refinements in hieroglyphic research. Nearly two decades ago, Fox and Justeson (1984) outlined the basis for the glyphic transcription system that came to be adopted by most specialists in subsequent writing. George Stuart (1988) modified these slightly when establishing conventions to be used in the Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, and this system came to be widely adopted. Justeson (personal communication 1997) has rightly noted that the ancient script differentiated between the fricatives h and j, as reconstructed for proto-Ch’olan (Kaufman and Norman 1984). Many epigraphers, including the author (see D. Stuart 1987b), had failed to take this into account, influenced perhaps by the long-lasting focus on Yucatecan languages in epigraphic research (in their early history Yucatecan lan- guages lost this distinction, with both proto-Mayan *j and *h merging as h). Internal evidence for the j and h distinction in the hieroglyphic script has been strengthened considerably in recent years, and the two consonants were no doubt separate in the phonology of “Classic Mayan,” or Classic Ch’olti’an, as the language of the inscriptions has recently been dubbed (Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 2000). In following the orthography adopted by the Research Reports, I have chosen one slight modification from earlier conventions by using tz and tz’ in place of ts and ts’. Also, there is now good evidence that the language of the inscriptions distinguished between long and A Note on Orthography and Hieroglyphic Transcription 9 short vowels (Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 1998). In the transcription of signs and the transliteration of texts, I have chosen to mark long vowels by doubling the letter: aa, for example, in contrast to short a. Vowel length can be marked in one of several ways, and in some previous works I and others have employed a vowel letter followed by a colon (a:, u:, etc.). My preference for doubled vowel letters stems from a desire for visual simplicity, and it is strengthened by its recent use by Martin and Grube (2000) in their remarkable book on Classic Maya dynastic history. Discussions continue about whether glottal stops attached to vowels in word-initial position should be represented in glyphic orthography (e.g., ‘AJAW), and how this is best done if so. Traditionally this has not been marked in the older epigraphic literature, but it is standard practice in various linguistic orthographies and now often used in glyphic transcriptions. I have opted to omit the representation of pre-vocalic glottals, since these are not marked in the ancient script (as post-vocalic glottals are, as in tz’i-i, for tz’i’, “dog”). This has the added advantage of simplifying the transliterations and transcriptions somewhat, but I realize that others may well prefer to indicate it. In the same vein, I have opted to omit the apostrophe in the implosive b’, which, while phonetically more precise, does not contrast with an unglottalized b in Mayan languages. The orthographic conventions underlying Maya epigraphy certainly have been in flux for several years, but with improvements in the understanding of the script and its own linguistic conventions, I am confident that the dust will settle. Good communication among scholars will be key in seeing this come about. Also, the recent inauguration of the Maya glyph dictionary project, generously funded by FAMSI, will provide an excellent chance for epigraphers and linguists to collaborate on a consistent and hopefully satisfactory system.