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An Inscribed Block from Pajaral, Guatemala

Pajaral block

In the bodega of the Museo Sylvanus Morley in Tikal, Guatemala, are a number of odds-and-ends of Maya sculpture recovered from looters over the last few decades. One piece is the block illustrated here, known to many epigraphers since its publication some years ago by Karl Herbert Meyer. Its place of origin has long been a mystery, so I was happy to learn a few years ago that Ian Graham was the first to ever see the stone, in the course of his initial explorations of the ruins of Pajaral, Petén, Guatemala, in the late 1970s. He included a quick but recognizable sketch of it in his field notebook, now in the archives of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. So, the block is certainly from Pajaral, and I therefore suggest a new designation for it, following the standards of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions: Pajaral, Miscellaneous 1. I believe one or two other stones in a similar style, also looted, may be from the same inscription.

The glyphs show a partial Long Count date, best reconstructed as [9.16.]10.0.0 1 Ajaw [3 Zip] (March 11, 761).

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