Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics

Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics

https://decipherment.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/stuartceramictexts.pdf

Glyphs on Pots

Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics

Materials for presentations by David Stuart, Barbara Macleod, Yuriy

Polyukhovich, Stephen Houston, Simon Martin, and Dorie Reents-Budet

A section of the 2005 edition of the Sourcebook for the

29th Maya Meetings at Texas, The University of Texas at Austin

March 11-16, 2005

Glyphs on Pots:

Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics

Contents

I. Historical Background

by David Stuart

II. Selected Topics

by David Stuart

1. Tagging Objects

2. The Dedicatory Formula

3. The Dedicatory Formula on Vessels

4. Vessel Dedications as History

5. Vessel Typology and Terms

6. Vessels with Proper Names

7. Vessels as “Houses”

8. Overview of Drinks and Vessel Contents

9. Iximte’el kakaw

10. The Mythical Origin of Cacao

11. Rare Varieties of Cacao

12. Ul, atole (maize gruel)

13. What is tzih?

14. Where’s the pulque?

15.. Dedicatory Verbs

16. The Nagging –ich

17. Carved or Painted?

18. Vessel owners as Deified Impersonators

19. The Way Beings

III. Deciphering the Initial Sign

by Barbara Macleod and Yuriiy Polyukhovich

IV. Metamorphosis in the Underworld: The Maize God and the Mythology

of Cacao

by Simon Martin

Part I. Historical Background

David Stuart

The study of glyphs on Maya pottery more or less parallels the advances in Maya

decipherment over the past two decades. In fact, one could easily make the case that the

rapid progress in the decipherment in the 1980’s and early 90’s was driven by the

detailed analysis of repetitious and highly formulaic pottery texts. When the same words

are written by hundreds of scribes over several centuries, the variations and substitution

patterns are bound to reveal the basic workings of the script. The patterns that led to the

“code breaking,” as it were, were relatively easy to spot within such a well-defined and

restricted environment.

Of course, the seminal work in the structural analysis of pottery texts goes back to

Micheal Coe’s The Maya Scribe and His World (1973) wherein he identified of the socalled

“Primary Standard Sequence” (what many simply call the “PSS”). Mike was not

able to read the PSS inscriptions at that time, but he set the stage for all later structural

and phonetic analyses. He simply noted that Maya pottery often bore the same glyphs

over and over again, and in a fairly rigid order of appearances. Some were long and

some were short, but all of the inscriptions followed a standard and discernable

arrangement. Mike continued to study the PSS through more and more examples that he

published in several other catalogs of Maya pottery – all considered classics in Maya art

and archaeology. Throughout this time, in the 1970s and early 80s, the stimulus for the

study of art and writing on Maya ceramics was Justin Kerr, who was steadily compiling

his now famous photographic archive (see www.mayavase.com). Together, Mike and

Justin laid the foundation for all work on Maya pottery, and it should become clear to all

that this in turn had profound effects on Maya decipherment and iconographic

interpretation in general.

Another key publication in this time was The Maya Book of the Dead, by Francis

Robicsek and Donald Hales. The interpretations within have not necessarily stood the

test of time, but again it was the countless images by Justin and others that gave

epigraphers and iconographers the raw material for making advances. I well remember

Linda Schele, Peter Mathews and I sitting on a couch in San Cristobal de las Casas in

1981, pouring our eyes over every page and coming up with several exciting

observations. By the mid-80s, enough examples of the formulaic texts on pottery had

been compiled to make important strides in decipherment.

The story of deciphering glyphs on pots begins a few years earlier, with Peter

Mathews’ seminal discovery of a hieroglyphic nametag on a jade earspool from Altun

Ha, Belize. He noticed one phonetically transparent glyph u-tu-pa, which he read as utuup,

“her earspool.” John Justeson soon noticed precisely the same term on jades from

Chichen Itzá, and in 1982, I noticed that many of the bones from Burial 116 at Tikal