Palenque

Notes on Palenque’s “Del Rio Throne”

David Stuart4 Comments

The elegant carved throne that once stood inside of Palenque’s House E, in the center of the Palace complex, exists today mostly as a few battered fragments stored in the archaeological bodega at the ruins. In 1787, the explorer Antonio del Río came across the throne (although he was not the first), which he described as a “plain rectangular block, more than two yards long by one yard and four inches broad and seven inches thick, placed upon four feet in the form of a table, with a figure in bas relief in the attitude of supporting it.”  The throne was clearly in situ as del Río described it; he and his Maya laborers quickly set about dismantling the monument so that he could send one of the supports back to Spain, thus offering material proof of his remarkable discoveries at the ruins. The throne itself was probably broken and damaged at this time, and its fragments no doubt suffered considerably more in the ensuing years, strewn about the floor below the famous Oval Tablet. At some more recent point a few of the remaining fragments were taken to the Palenque bodega, where Peter Mathews and Linda Schele eventually photographed them. They published this useful drawing of the throne and its carved faces and supports, shown here (by Schele, from Mathews and Schele 1979). 

The modern reconstruction drawing offers a reasonable view of the throne’s form, but I would like to suggest some modifications that might convey a better sense of its original design. Schele positioned the fragments so that the inscription opens on the front, with a record of K’inich Janab Pakal’s accession to office, on the famous day 5 Lamat 1 Mol (marked as columns A and B in her drawing). This of course makes good sense, except for the fact that the inscription almost surely began on the left side of the throne, not on the front. As we see in Schele’s drawing, the surviving right front corner of the throne shows the hieroglyphic text running around onto the right side; without a doubt, then, the inscription must have had a corresponding section on the left side of the slab. I therefore suggest that columns A-F still are the initial portions of the text, but that they originally were found on the throne’s left face.

It seems reasonable to suppose that there were four such equal sections of the inscription placed around the throne — one on each side and two on the front, making a total of 24 columns. The two front portions of the text originally flanked a central rectangular image of a person wearing a heron headdress, perhaps the ancestor Pakal himself. Of the front text panels, only the right-hand portion remains, which I suppose might now be designated as columns M-R. All told, much more of the text seems to be missing than previously supposed.

To summarize the arrangement of the incomplete text:

Left side: columns A-F

Front: columns G-L (missing) and M-R (formerly G-L)

Right side: columns S-X (formerly M and N, with U-X missing)

At first I considered that a second profile may have originally been part of the central image, facing the portrait one that now partially survives. But Almendáriz’s drawing, inaccurate as it is, clearly shows just one head in the central location between the glyph panels. Also, taking the old drawing into account, along with the new placement of A-F glyph columns, I think we can extend the width of the original throne slightly more than Schele showed in her published drawing, perhaps another by 10-20 cms., if not more. This would accomodate the somewhat larger iconographic image that is indicated by Almendáriz’s sketch.

All these ideas remain speculative until one can again directly examine the stored fragments at Palenque, but until then I think we may have a slightly better understanding of the throne’s original look and format.

Source cited:

Mathews, Peter, and Linda Schele. 1979. The Bodega of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

Palenque’s Two of a Kind?

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Some years ago I came across an obscure publication on the shelf of my old office in the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, cataloging some of the holdings in storage at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City (Cardós de Méndez 1987). In it I was suprised to find a photo of an eroded limestone panel I had never known before, depicting two standing figures and a band of illegible glyphs at the top (at right in photo below). Despite the poor preservation, the large thin relief sculpture clearly had a Palenque look about it, especially in the distinctive proportions, poses and profiles of the two men. The photograph was subsequently reprinted by Mayer (1995: Pl. 218) who in his catalog also noted a likely Palenque attribution.

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It struck me at the time that the panel could be related to a far more familiar Palenque sculpture, a similar sized panel now on display in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. (in photo at left). There we see a young K’inich K’an Joy Chitam dancing “on the hill” as an impersonator of Chahk, the god of rain and storms (the king is not shown postumously, as was once widely beleived). The preservation of the Dumbarton Oaks carving is nearly perfect, but I’ve long wondered if it was part of some larger sculptural program. The feet of the seated figures (both proud parents) seem to be cut off at the edges of the stone, as of they continued on to adjacent sections. The inscription too might be considered incomplete; although it is self-contained in terms of content, describing the scene below, it seems to start rather abruptly, as if something came before. The last glyphs, recording a temple dedication, also seem somewhat short-winded.

Comparing the photographs again the other night, I was reminded how the two look similar enough to be partners, perhaps part of a larger sequence of relief carvings that graced the rear wall of a temple. The two standing figures on the Mexico City panel face away from each other, as if looking on to other scenes to each side. The photo posted here arbitrarily places the Dumbarton Oaks panel to the left, but the opposite arrangment is equally plausable. There is certainly not enough here to discern a true fit of sculptural details, but the band of glyphs above the two men does seem a good visual match. Perhaps, then, another still-missing component shows a layout like we see on the Dumbarton Oaks panel, providing a balance within the larger and complex composition of the monument, whatever it was.

Again, confirmation based on measurements and on a direct inspection of the Mexico City panel will be necessary to confirm the connection.

* * * *

The Mexico City panel has been published in:

Cardós de Méndez, Amalia. 1987. Estudio de la colleción de escultura maya del Museo Nacional de Antropología. Collecion Catálogos de Museos. Mexico D.F.: INAH

Mayer, Karl Herbert. 1995. Maya Monuments: Sculptures of Unknown Provenance, Supplement 4. Graz, Austria: Academic Publishers

For discussions of the Dumbarton Oaks panel from Palenque, see:

Coe, Michael D., and Elizabeth P. Benson. 1966. Three Maya Relief Panels and Dumbarton Oaks. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, Number 2. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks

Miller, Mary, and Simon Martin. 2004. Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya. Singapore: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Stuart, David. 2005. The Palenque Mythology: Sourcebook for the 3oth Maya Meetings. Austin: Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin

The Stucco Portraits on the Temple of the Inscriptions (Part I)

David Stuart1 Comment

This is the first of several anticipated postings about new interpretations of the various stucco sculptures associated with Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions.

First the piers of the upper temple.

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The last published interpretation of the piers appears as Chapter 3 in The Code of Kings, by Linda Schele and Peter Mathews (1998). I’ve reproduced their illustration above, which nicely summarizes their thoughts on the identities of the four standing figures on Piers B, C, D and E. Flanking the central doorway are a female (Pier C) and a male (B), both of whom are heavily damaged. The outer portraits are somewhat better preserved, showing key details in their headdresses. As has been known for many years, the figure of Pier E, at far right, wears a fused snake-and-jaguar helmet, clearly a name glyph corresponding to Kan Bahlam, “Snake Jaguar.” Schele, Mathews, and many others (myself included) have equated him with Pakal’s distant predecesor Kan Bahlam I.

Detail of the headdress from Pier B, showing the name glyph of K'an Joy Chitam (Sketch by David Stuart).
Detail of the headdress from Pier B, showing the name glyph of K’an Joy Chitam (Sketch by David Stuart).

The headdress on Pier B is also fairly well preserved, although I was recently very surprised to see that all previously published drawings are innacurate in many important details. My own sketch of the head of the Pier B figure is reproduced here above, based on a careful examination of the Maudslay photograph taken in early months of 1890. This portrait exhibits is another name glyph headdress, identified by Schele and Mathews as the lineage founder K’uk’ Bahlam I. However, the details of the photo, as indicated in my sketch, clearly show it to be a peccary head with an infixed k’an cross in the eye. This can only be K’an Joy Chitam, the name of another early ruler of Palenque as well as the second of Pakal’s sons.

I take the woman and man on the innermost piers (C and D) to be a wife and husband pair, possibly Ixtz’akbu Ajaw and K’inich Janab Pakal, or alternatively Pakal’s parents, Ix Zak K’uk’ and K’an Hix Mo’. I see no way of choosing between these options, but I doubt there are other possibilities to seriously consider. As earlier interpretations have suggested, the outer figures, now identifiable as K’an Joy Chitam and Kan Bahlam, could represent earlier royal ancestors, but I now believe another possibility is well worth considering. The two outer figures on Piers C and E may also be portraits of Pakal’s two important sons, one of whom (K’inich Kan Bahlam or Kan Bahlam II) oversaw the completion of the Temple of the Inscriptions. This king is named prominently in the interior tablets of the temple, as well as in the surviving portion of the long stucco text on Pier F. Both of Pakal’s sons were well into adulthood at the time of their father’s death, and I suspect their portraits on the piers, possibly in the company of their deceased parents, helped convey a strong sense of dynastic continuity.

My next post (Part II) on the Temple of the Inscriptions stuccoes will focus on the infants cradled by each of the four figures, widely interpreted over the last few decades as images of the deified K’inich Kan Bahlam.

More on Galindo’s glyphs

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Following up on my earlier posting on “Galindo’s Glyphs”:

Sabastian Matteo of the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Historie in Brussels kindly wrote me with the news that photos of at least two of the four stucco glyphs collected by Galindo in 1831 do in fact exist, among the Heinrich Berlin archival materials he is now cataloging. The actual stucco glyphs are presumably still in the collections Musée d’el Homme in Paris, although I have no direct confirmation of this. Anyway, a big thanks to Sebastian for sending this image along and allowing me to post it here.

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A tablet fragment from Miraflores, Chiapas

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miraflores.jpg

Here’s a drawing of an inscribed tablet fragment from Miraflores, an important subsidiary center of Palenque. It will appear in my upcoming Palenque book to be publsihed in 2007 or 2008 by Thames and Hudson.

This and a few other carved panel fragments were seen by Heinrich Berlin, who published photos in his Ethnos article “News from the Maya World” (see my previous Michol Celt posting for the full reference). Karl Herbert Mayer later published good enlargements of these and other Berlin images now archived at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Author Karena Shields took a photograph of this piece as well sometime in the 1950s, details of which were key in producing this drawing.

The text identifies the standing figure as a Yajawk’ahk’ — a priestly or military office of some sort — who was a Sajal of K’inich Janab Pakal.

Its current location is unknown.