On the Reading of Three Classic Maya Portrait Glyphs

Abstract

The PARI Journal 15(2):1-14 © 2014 Ancient Cultures Institute touch upon key themes of general interest to scholars, such as Classic Maya religion and gender identity. Moreover, although the greater part of the confusion has its roots in the earliest scholarship on these signs, it nonetheless continues in much of the literature today, and not least in the very sign catalogs and popular introductions to Maya writing whose aims are the alleviation of confusion for initiates. The goals of this paper are therefore not only to present the evidence for separating three similar signs—which naturally encompasses an investigation into their forms, functions and distribution in the writing system—but also to disentangle the many erroneous references to these signs in the literature, so that the reader may better perceive where recent epigraphic and iconographic work has been founded on misapprehensions regarding the nature and significance of one or more of these signs. Given the complexity of the literature bearing on these signs, and the confused state of affairs with respect to their designations, it has been difficult to find sufficiently neutral labels with which to proceed. For this reason, I illustrate generic forms of these portrait glyphs here at the outset (Figure 1) and refer to them throughout this paper by: (1) a convenient label indicating the iconographic sources of the portraits; (2) their original Thompson designations (despite considerable overlap in these designations); and (3) their reading values and translations. As keyed to Figure 1, the three portrait glyphs forming the subject of this paper On the Reading of Three Classic Maya Portrait Glyphs