by David Stuart (The University of Texas at Austin)
In this essay we take a close look at the thirteenth Maya day, called Ben (or Been) in Yucatan, or Aj in several highland Guatemalan calendars. Throughout Mesoamerica, the corresponding day is almost universally understood as “Reed” (one of the meanings of aj) but the visuals of the Maya sign point to a different origin and meaning. And as with the other days we’ve examined, a deeper examination of the sign’s graphic history allows us to understand more about out its conceptual origin, specifically as a deity. Long ago, Eric Thompson (1950) linked Ben to concepts of young maize. He was generally right in this assessment, as we will see, even if he wasn’t aware of all the evidence for the idea, nor of the nature of the day sign as a specific deified form. As I hope to show, the sign’s visual history reveals the day’s close connections to the Middle Formative maize god, and to associated imagery of maize cobs or elotes. It was from this connection that “reed” and “green maize” later developed both graphically and semantically.
The name Ben or Be’en was the name of the day in Yucatec Tzeltal, Chuj, and Q’anjobal, and a possible cognate form was Bin, in Ch’ol (Campbell 1988:375). These similar forms have no obvious etymology or meaning. In modern Chuj, Be’e’n is reported as the name of a deity, a “dios de los pícaros” (Diego and Juan 1998). The semantics of the highland day name Aj, on the other hand, are much clearer, and it is universally translated as “reed” (caña). This corresponds to day names we find elsewhere in Mesoamerica, as in Nahuatl is Acatl, “Reed,’ referring to a variety of tall aquatic grass or bamboo species, and to the stiff reeds used to make arrows, which late examples of the Nahua day glyph emphasize [Note 1]. It is important to note that aj has a wider range of meanings in K’iche’ and other highland Mayan languages, as elote, “corn cob.” For example, in his colonial vocabulary Ximenez (1993:59) glosses ah both as “la caña” and also as “la mazorca tierna” (young ear of corn), as well as “la coronilla de la cabeza” (crown of the head). Similarly, in Kekchi’ Mayan, aj is both “elote” and “palo de carrizo.” These may have originated as two completely distinct Mayan words, from Proto-Mayan *ajn, “elote,” and Common Mayan *aaj, “reed,” respectively.
The Maya glyph for the thirteenth day was uniform during the Classic period, showing a simple geometric design with a horizontal line, two or more vertical lines in its lower half, and two small loops above (Figure 1a-f). The standard Ben of the Late Classic is a slight abstraction of an earlier type that assumed the shape of trefoil, almost flower-like in its outline. We see this in a very important early example on Stela 114 of Calakmul, roughly contemporaneous painted examples from Uaxactun and Rio Azul (Figure 1a). By the end of the Late Classic, the lobed trefoil or floral shape was replaced by a more abstracted form, which is the common Ben with which we are most familiar. One head variant (Figure 2), unique to my knowledge, displays what may be a Maize God, vaguely resembling animate forms of the day Kan (a maize tamale in its origin). This face displays the “IL” marking on its cheek, often a diagnostic feature of the young Maize God.
The Early Ben Sign
The early examples in Figure 1 (a-c, g and h) provide an important clue to the day’s deeper iconographic connections. First, the trefoil of Ben is clearly the same sign that we see in the sign for the thirteenth day shown on the Chiapa de Corzo fragment, an Isthmian or Epi-Olmec text bearing a partial Long Count date (possibly 36 BCE) (Figure 1g). Here the three “leaves” of the trefoil are more prominent, emerging from a lower base that is obscured. It is also identical to the day sign we see at Cerro de las Mesas, Veracruz, which Kaufman and Justeson (2001:30) identify this day as “Reed,” the same as Ben (Figure 1h). The visual resemblance to the Maya day is clear, for they are all one sign, having a common origin.
The Maya Trefoil
Extending the array of connections further, these early examples of Ben or “Reed” are likely derived from a motif we see in Middle Formative iconography, showing the trefoil usually with a square or circular base (Figure 3a-d). Peter David Joraleman (1971:13, 59) first identified this as an abstracted symbol of maize, showing a leafy cob, and this became an essential diagnostic of many maize gods throughout Mesoamerican art (Taube [1996]2022). Virginia Fields (1991:171) later noted that the trefoil design in Maya art and writing “clearly arose from an Olmec iconographic complex, identified here with maize vegetation.” In all of the instances illustrated above, we see the elote and the corn leaves emerging from the top of the head of the snarling Maize God, or placed above his face in some manner. Sometimes this can also assume the form of a forehead element attached to a headband, as found in Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec art. In Early Zapotec writing and iconography, where both the maize cob and the more abstracted trefoil can also be seen (Figure 4) [Note 2].
Virginia Fields (1991) also established that the trefoil atop the Olmec Maize God was the basis of the later Maya “Jester God,” or at least one version of it (Figures 5 and 6). This often adorns the headbands of Maya rulers, as we see in a well-known example on the Dumbarton Oaks celt (see Figure 6d). The greenstone head from Burial 96 at Tikal, dating to the very Early Classic period, is another example, without the face below (Figure 5b). Later in the Early Classic, both the animated and reduced forms (showing the trefoil alone) appear as a common headband element, and this can be traced to a few Late Classic examples as well (Figure 6f). These simplified and animated trefoils are the iconographic correlates of the Ben day sign, which is to say that the day sign started as the trefoil representation of a maize cob (see Figure 1a), and of the Maize God itself (Figure 6c being the earliest Maya example I know). It is his portrait that we see in the sole head variant of the day (compare Figures 2 and 6f).
The much later “Reed” or Acatl day sign of Postclassic Nahuatl writing holds vestiges of the old trefoil maize design (Figure 7). This appears to have been visually derived from the trefoil form in Classic Zapotec and Nuiñe writing, which in turn evolved from the Formative trefoil we have described (Figure 8). Nahua scribes appear to have modified the basic trefoil to be an upright “reed” image, going so far as to sometimes show it as an arrow made from a reed. The Acatl sign contains vestiges of its actual maize sign, nonetheless, and establishes how the signs for Ben and Acatl, so vastly different in form by 1500 CE, derived from a common prototype that was in use in southern Mesoamerica at least two millennia earlier (Figure 9).
In conclusion, if the imagery of the thirteenth day is anything to go on, the sign began as a representation of the personified elote, reduced to a maize cob with two flanking husks. Here, the attested highland day name Aj, meaning “elote,” becomes a perfect match for the image of the hieroglyph. As we have noted, in K’iche’an languages, aj was also applied to other tall, grass-like plants, including reeds of various kinds (“caña de los maizales, cuando verde”). Did “Reed” in other Mesoamerican calendars come about as an imperfect borrowing from Mayan aj, giving preference to one possible translation over another? This would raise yet more issues that still need to be pondered, and the spread and diffusion of the Mesoamerican days (both the names and the glyphs) still presents many unanswered questions. However this semantic disconnect came about, it nevertheless suggests that “Reed” was not the original meaning of the thirteenth day among the early Maya. Rather, the Ben sign was first conceived as the animated elote which came to be visually simplified over time, so much so that by the Classic period most if not all scribes had again already lost sight of its true visual origin (Figure 9). Although the word Ben remains obscure, its glyph seems best understood as a distant reference to an archaic maize deity that can be traced back to the Middle Formative era of Mesoamerica, bolstering Thompson’s old interpretation.
Notes
Note 1. The aquatic nature of acatl is indicated by its parsing as (a-ca)-tl, referring to an “entity associated with water (atl).” See Andrews (2003:284).
Note 2. In some examples the Zapotec headband maize element bears a striking resemblance to the “trapeze and ray” design or “year sign” found in Teotihuacan visual culture. I suspect that the latter was a highly abstracted form derived also from the maize trefoil from Formative Mesoamerica. In early central Mexico, this design came to be used in the representations of headbands and crowns, as an essential symbol of rulership (Nielsen and Helmke 2019). The maize trefoil is also the headband jewel we see in worn on the forehead of the deified portrait of Moteczomah Xocoyotzin on the Aztec Piedra del Sol.
References Cited
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Campbell, Lyle A. 1988. The Linguistics of Southeast Chiapas. Papers of the New World Archaeological Foundation, no. 50. NWAF, Brigham Young University, Provo.
Diego, Mateo Felipe, and Juan Gaspar Juan. 1998. Diccionario de idioma chuj. Chuj-español. PLFM, Antigua Guatemala.
Fields, Virginia. 1991. The Iconographic Heritage of the Maya Jester God. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, 1986, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Virginia M. Fields. The University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Joralemon, Peter David. 1971. A Study of Olmec Iconography. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.
Kaufman, Terrence, and John Justeson. 2001. Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing and Texts. Notebook for the 2001 Texas Maya Meetings, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin.
Nielsen, Jesper, and Christophe Helmke. 2019. Crowning Rulers and Years: Interpreting the Year Sign Headdress at Teotihuacan. Ancient Mesoamerica 31(2):1-16.
Taube, Karl A. [1996]2022. The Olmec Maize God: The Face of Corn in Formative Mesoamerica. In Studies in Ancient Mesoamerican Art and Architecture: Selected Works by Karl Andreas Taube, vol. 2, pp. 99–132. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco.
Thompson, J. Eric S., 1950. Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington. D.C.
Ximenez, Francisco. 1993. Arte de las tres lenguas, kaqchikel, k’iche’ y tz’utujil. Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, Guatemala.