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.
Figure 1. Variants of the Maya day Ben (a-f) over time, and related signs in Epi-Olmec writing (g-h). Compare especially the trefoils of a, g, and h. Drawings by D. Stuart, I. Graham (e), and P. Drucke (f).Figure 2. Head variant of Ben from Panel 3 at Piedras Negras (Drawing by D. Stuart).
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.
Figure 3. Middle Formative maize motifs, showing cob and flanking leaves, usually atop Maize God’s head.
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].
Figure 4. The maize trefoil motif on Zapotec headbands. Note the headband hieroglyphs show the side-views of the trefoil (Drawings by D. Stuart and J. Urcid)
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).
Figure 5. Maya trefoil motifs as adornments for Maize God headbands. (a) San Bartolo murals, (b) greenstone head, Tikal, Burial 85, (c) Cival painting (Drawings by D. Stuart).
Figure 6. Animated trefoil elements. (c-f) Maya examples; (b) and (d-f) as headband adornments (Drawings by K. Taube [a-d] and D. Stuart [e-f]).
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).
Figure 7. The day sign Acatl, “Reed” in Nahuatl (Aztec) writing. Note the trefoil form within (Drawing by D. Stuart).Figure 8. Zapotec and Ñuiñe “Reed” signs (Drawings by D. Stuart).Figure 9. The evolution of the thirteenth day, from Maize to Acatl and Ben.
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
Andrews, J. Richard. 2003. Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (Revised Edition). University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
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.
For the Late Classic Maya, imagery teased with reality. The space within a frame, the “inside,” flirted with the “outside,” the space from which viewers peered in. Visual clues hinted at the possibility of bridging the two. [1] Several carvings, most from the 8th century CE, showed an arm, scepter, headdress, smoke or fringe edging out beyond a bounded frame. That this feature was uncommon likely boosted its impact. A similar playfulness marked vases from a small group of painters, several named, in the kingdom around Motul de San José, Guatemala. Here and there a human hand or panache of feathers extended up to hide parts of glyphic text passing around the outer rims of vases (Figure 1). [2] But this was a coy game rather than a deep riddle. Informed readers could easily reconstruct the missing glyphs. The intent may have been to make rim texts resemble actual objects in space, obscured by people or things closer to the viewer. In a sense, human figures both impinged on glyphs and dominated them, in much the way that a flesh-and-blood person, vigorous and gesturing, acted in the world “outside.”
Figure 1. Rim band text partly obscured by elements from below, including royal costume and a feather panache. Late Classic, ca. 760–770 CE, excerpt from ceramic with polychrome slip, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1988.1177); photograph by Justin Kerr, K1439.
To some, thinking of non-Maya evidence, the frame could seem a near-irrelevance. Immanuel Kant argued that a frame enhanced the aesthetic appeal of things within it, but mostly, for him, the frame was little more than incidental or inessential ornament. [3] Modernists, if one can generalize, found value in removing it altogether, the better to integrate the viewer “outside” with the world “inside.” Yet the frame had a clear function. It divided the inside from the outside and, in a sportive way, expressed “self-awareness,” a subtle acknowledgement of its own existence. The feathers bursting out and smoke billowing forth implied a “limit transcended…extension rather than closure…release rather than confinement.”[4] As a simile, the frame had even broader use. Georg Simmel, interested in how individuals related to wholes, likened picture frames to acts of social separation and connection. [5] Viewers could go “inside,” and, in a few cases, perceive or construe an internal world seeping out. To Simmel, this recalled the vexed relation between individuals (entities within the frame) and society (those things or people outside it); indeed, he believed the process would be “wearing,” never easy or fully resolvable. Later, the simile would lead to other thoughts about the constitution of reality, from the “frames” of Erving Goffman to those of the Nobelists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. [6] But none of these authors conceived of works, apparently inert, that could spark with innate vitality and volition. [7] That idea always lurked behind Classic Maya imagery: the very term for “image” or “portrait” equated to that for “self,” a potential blurring of signifier and signified, of a depiction with its original. [8]
Frames further established, in theatrical and narrative terms, a mise-en-scène: setting, actors, action! Through visual editing, they sorted the world into information worth showing and that beneath notice, although the meanings of these selected views varied over European history. [9] Victorian photography singled out focal moments in plays, caught as though in the act, with self-conscious poses and explanatory captions. [10] Such displays would then influence stage productions. Perhaps the Maya also anticipated this reciprocal effect. On many Classic pots and some carvings, a defining frame coincided with the ceiling of a palace. Swagged cloth, sometimes gathered by rope or string, sagged down from above; vertical elements dividing a scene fused with palatial walls and pilasters. Frames might also house glyphic captions, where written signs could fit without cluttering the background. Looking in at these scenes, as must have been done habitually, led to expectations about how to behave outside of them. The framed images operated as small primers for elite society. The stylized gestures and poses may even reveal the conventions of Classic dance and sacred theater. [11]
The designer Edward Tufte believed that visual information needed an escape from “flatland.” [12] For him, that meant drawing close, in this or that diagram or display, to the “multivariate,” three-dimensional lushness of our “perceptual world.” Tufte’s aim was to improve communication, in graphic analogy, one presumes, to the spare prose favored by American writers: minimalist, edited to the bone, allergic to the distractions of what Tufte called “chartjunk.” [13] Those traits would have collided with the semantic density and complexity of Maya imagery, but they did accord with fully plastic carvings at places like Tonina, Mexico. Rulers “broke the fourth wall” by looking out, and usually down, towards flesh-and-blood interlocutors. [14] Like humans, the sculptures were said to “stand,” wa’laj, rooted firmly in a plastered floor or stone plinth by a butt or tenon invisible to viewers. [15]
Yet flatland had its purpose. Some figures floated, wreathed in clouds or as partly glimpsed ancestors and ethereal spirits from dreams. But they were an anomaly, and the extent to which they were thought tangible or material is unclear. A “groundline” is far more frequent, as flat and two-dimensional as it gets: a painted stroke of even width, sometimes doubled on a few ceramic scenes, perhaps to signal solidity, or a carved edge on which figures stand, sit or recline on backs or stomachs. Rulers can position themselves directly on the flesh of captives, as on Stelae 12 and 14 from Naranjo, Guatemala, or with bare feet on the uneven contours of a hill, an image from Stela 2 at Nim Li Punit, Belize. But it is the groundline that confirms the inescapability of gravity. In most Mayan languages, to be a child of a woman, a weighty burden for mothers, involved a word that was either a close homophone of “heavy” or cognate with it. [16] This was a condition of gravity-bound humans, from uterus to birth and beyond. Curiously, sky had weight, held aloft by Atlantean figures or humans impersonating them. [17] For gods and their consorts, enthroned kings too, the sky might appear to be kind of groundline, as solid, evidently, as any of earth or stone. Often shown as a band of bounded signs, it was less arching and ethereal than rectilinear and subject to right-angle jags.
Groundlines might be repeated. A Classic Maya vase, from ca. 750 CE, here shown rolled out, has a line at its base, with various crouching or seated supernaturals, including a bug spewing some flowing substance while interacting with an aged god (Figure 2). Above is another groundline. It meanders because it was painted after the figures. A straighter path across the surface would have obscured important details of costume. Figures pair or triple up interactively. A mosquito appears to bite another aged deity, a trope found in a few Maya images, and, as excess or excrement, blood squirts out in blobs from his rear, dribbling over a heedless deity below. [18] In Maya conventions, to appear in the upper part of an image is to be further back in space. To notional extent, the first row, to the bottom, lay closer to the viewer than the row above. One file of beings, some festooned with eyeballs, had no clear contact with the other, although both do eventually come to address a figure on a sky throne to the right. This pattern is found in other images with deities: one line above, another above, both facing the dominant god on his throne. [19]
Figure 2. Groundlines supporting mosquitoes, insects, aged gods, a bird, and spotted youthful deities. Late Classic, ca. 750 CE, excerpt from ceramic with polychrome slip, probably Department of Peten, Guatemala, current location unknown; photograph by Justin Kerr, K9255
The violation of groundlines is an earmark of deities or primordial events. In virtually all instances, a body rising from below occurs solely with supernaturals or with the first couple emerging from an underground cavity. [20] But, in ceramic scenes, there are no figures plunging from above, partly “off-camera” so to speak. Indeed, that would be a case of spatial illogic. The base of a vase sits on firm ground, accessible to ascending things, while its rim opens to a cavity, to nothing. Yet there is a visual paradox, one related to the supposed firmness of matter. In Maya imagery, interred people, signs for completed time, or deities or figures in conversation occur within a quatrefoil, a four-lobed outline that shows them underground, under the earth’s surface yet somehow visible (Figure 3). That space was linked to a “heart,” an ohl, the center of a body, one belonging to a cosmic turtle floating on a primordial sea. [21] Along with other flat surfaces, the carapace defined a groundline that appeared to be impenetrable or difficult to traverse. Through special sight, however, the viewer acquired that capacity. Concealed knowledge disclosed itself, and, by a god-like power, boundaries came to seem porous.
Figure 3. Deceased lord shown underground. Late Classic, possibly 774 CE, area of Lacanha, Mexico, Art Institute of Chicago (1971.895)
Notes
1 I thank Andrew Scherer for comments on a draft of this essay. For general points here: Paul Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 98; Glenn Peers, Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2004), 1; Rebecca Zorarch, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 152.
2 Bryan R. Just, Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2012), figs. 75, 81, 86, 93, 103, 110, 120,121, 123, 126, 129, 140, 141, 148, 149.
3 Bente Kiilerich, “Savedoff, Frames, and Parergonality,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001), 320, 321.
4 Verity Platt and Michael Squire, “Framing the Visual in Greek and Roman Antiquity: An Introduction,” in Verity Platt and Michael Squire, ed., The Frame in Classic Art: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 41, 71. On “limited transcended”: Jeffrey Hurwit, “Image and Frame in Greek Art,” American Journal of Archaeology 81 (1977), 5.
5 Georg Simmel, “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study,” Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994), 16–17.
6 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 10, 11; implementing these concepts in practice, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211:30 (1981), 457.
7 Stephen Houston, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 76–102
8 Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 58–61.
9 Christine Traber, “In Perfect Harmony? Escaping the Frame in the Early 20th Century,” in Eva Mendgen, ed., In Perfect Harmony: Picture + Frame, 1850–1920 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1995), 221, 222.
10 Daniel A. Novak, “Caught in the Act: Photography on the Victorian Stage,” Victorian Studies 59:1 (2016), 36, fig. 4.
11 For an analogy: Stephen Houston, The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 1.
12 Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 12.
13 Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983), 107, 121.
15 David Stuart, “Shining Stones: Observations on the Ritual Meaning of Early Maya Stelae,” in Julia Guernsey et al., eds., The Place of Stone Monuments: Context, Use and Meaning in Mesoamerica’s Preclassic Tradition (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 289–96. Conceptually, they might have been regarded as stone versions of wooden images erected or forced into the ground, as in yookte’l baah; see Tonina Monument 183, yookte’l baah, Ángel A. Sánchez Gamboa, Alejandro Sheseña and Guido Krempel, “Nuevos datos sobre Aj Ch’aaj Naah, Aj K’uhuun de Toniná,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 105: 2 (2019), fig. 2b. 16.
16 Terrence Kaufman and William Norman, “An Outline of Proto-Cholan Phonology, Morphology and Vocabulary,” In John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, eds., Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Publication 9 (Albany: State University of New York at Albany, 1984), 115; Terrence Kaufman, with John Justeson, A Preliminary Maya Etymological Dictionary (2003),1403, http://www.famsi.org/reports/01051/pmed.pdf, accessed, Aug. 18, 2025.
17 Stephen Houston, Andrew Scherer, and Karl Taube, “A Sculptor at Work,” in Stephen Houston, ed., A Maya Universe in Stone (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021), fig. 19.
18 Michael D. Coe, The Maya Scribe and His World (New York: The Grolier Club 1973), pl. 64.
19 Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston, The Maya, 10th edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022), figs. 5.40, 6.8.
20 Michael D. Coe, Lords of the Underworld: Masterpieces of Classic Maya Ceramics (Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1978), pl. 16; see also K8540 in the Justin Kerr database housed at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. On an unpublished vessel in a private collection, a trumpeter rises up, only his torso visible, from the area near the base of mythic tree.
21 Houston et al., Memory of Bones, 36, 186, figs. 1.37, 5.5; Karl A. Taube, William A. Saturno, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst, The Murals of San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, Part 2: The West Wall, Ancient America 10 (Bernardsville, NC: Boundary End Archaeology Research Center, 2010), 72–75, figs. 46–74.
In a few recent studies I have examined how Maya day glyphs visually transformed over the centuries, becoming reduced or abstracted to the point that their original animate forms were obscured, even for the scribes who routinely wrote them. So far, I have looked at the days Manik’, Men and Caban, showing how they originated as specific deities we can identify in Maya iconography. All of the days began this way, as images of recognizable gods. A larger study now in preparation will aim to explore these deeper origins of the Maya days, and how they relate to the day glyphs in other Mesoamerican script traditions. In assessing these developments over the last year or so, I have become increasingly comfortable with the notion that the 260-day Mesoamerican day-count was perhaps even lowland Maya in origin, invented in the Middle Preclassic, and that the day glyphs and names we find elsewhere in Oaxaca or Central Mexico were borrowed from those prototypes, becoming transformed and abstracted even further (this is how Men, once the Principal Bird Deity, became distilled down to a generic “Eagle”).
Here we look at Imix, the first of the twenty named days of the tzolk’in, and the imagery associated with it (Figure 1). In some respects, Imix seems well-understood – at least better than many other Maya days – having established connections to water and to aquatic snakes of mythology. But its graphic history, etymology and deeper meanings deserve further reflection.
Figure 1. Standard variants of Imix over time (400 – 1200 CE)Figure 2. NAAH-KAN, or Naahkan, “First Snake,” a common designation of the Water Serpent.
The day name was Imix in ancient Yucatán, and Imox or Imux still is used among day-keepers in the highlands of Guatemala. In Ch’ol the name may have been Nachan (Campbell 1988, Fox and Justeson, n.d., Kaufman 2020), probably analyzable as naah-chan, “first snake” or “primordial snake.” This word surely corresponds to the hieroglyph that we read as NAAH-KAN which is an integral part of the old name of the so-called Water Serpent. The connection is interesting, for, as we will see, for the Water Serpent was the true visual basis of the Imix sign (Figure 2). It is difficult to know if Imix or Naahchan (or Naahkan) was the name used in the Classic period lowlands, as either seems possible. Cipactli, usually translated as “cayman” or “crocodile,” is the corresponding day name in the Nahuatl system.
The meaning of Imix remains obscure. Its only known appearance outside the day name is in the Books of Chilam Balam, in the names of a set of directional world trees called either imix che’ or imix yaxche’ (Bolles n.d.; Knowlton and Vail 2010, Liljefors Persson 2011; Martin 2006; Roys 1933). In this context, many have translated imix as “abundance” (“abundancia” in Barrera Vasquez 1980). These directional trees, described as “pillars of the sky” (yocmal caan), were each designated by their appropriate color: chak imix che’, “red abundance tree” in the east, zac imix che’, “white abundance tree” (north), ek’ imix che’, black abundance tree (west) and k’an imix che’, “yellow abundance tree” (south). In the world-center (tu chumuk peten) was the yax imix che’, or “green abundance tree.” Roys (1933) noted that this probably refers to the ceiba (yaxche’), which was a symbol of fertility and sustenance. The Diccionario Maya Cordemex (Barrera Vásquez 1980:268) describes the world tree(s) designated by imix as the “origen de la vida.”
Delving into the etymology of the word, I believe that imixand imox may be derivations based on the proto-Mayan root *iihm, “breast.” In Yucatec, im is “breast.” Kaufman (2003) notes the fuller form iimi’iixh as the Mam word for “breast.” The day named Imx is explicitly linked to the word for “breast” in the Mam vocabulary of the Academia de Lenguas Maya de Guatemala (ALMG 2003:47):
Imx. Glándulas mamarias (calendario maya). Imx tb’i jun q’ij toj kyajlab’il qchman. Imx es día sagrado dentro del calendario maya-mam.
A connection to breasts, nursing and sustenance may seem odd at first, but it brings us back to the idea of an “abundance tree” just mentioned. In fact, in Aztec lore, an important cosmological tree was the chichihuacuahuitl, or “breast-tree”, located in the paradise of Tlalocan (the tree name is embedded in the place name Chichihuacuauhco). If imix is indeed derived from “breast,” this would offer a striking parallel to the term imix che’ or imix yax che’.
Figure 3. Flowers of Nymphaea ampla at Cenote Xbatun, Yucatán, and a Classic Maya depiction with Imix element. Photograph by D. Stuart.
The forms of the standard Imix day sign (see Figure 1) show a small inner circle in its upper portion, usually darkened and surrounded by dots, with a series of parallel lines placed below. This has long been recognized as the representation of a waterlily blossom (Nymphaea ampla) as shown in Maya iconography, as first proposed by Thompson (1950:72) (Figure 3). This was discussed at length by Rands (1953) and later by Hellmuth (1987a, 1987b) and Houston and Taube (2011). In all Imix signs this blossom is oriented downward, with the dark spot representing the flower’s ovaries at the center and the lower parallel lines representing the pedals, pistils and stamen the emerge from it. The outer sepals are never shown in the glyph, but they are apparent in many iconographic representations.
Figure 4. Animate variants of the day Imix (a-c), with (d) showing the Water Serpent merged with the imix element (HA’).
There is also an animated form of Imix, which assumes the form of a serpent’s head with an elongated snout (Figure 4d, Figure 5). In Late Classic examples, the blossom that is the standard Imix sign is the upper part of this serpent’s head. This is so-called Water Serpent (or Waterlily Serpent), as first observed by Eric Thompson (1950:145) (Figure 1e-g). Thompson first referred to this being as the “Imix Monster,” which later came to be called the “Lilypad Headdress Monster” (Hellmuth 1987. :160), the “Waterlily Monster” (Schele and Miller 1986:46), the Waterlily Serpent” (Taube 1992:59) or, as I prefer here, simply the “Water Serpent.”
Figure 5. The Water Serpent, the mythic basis of Imix. Note the waterlily blossom on its headband, and the nibbling fish (Drawing by D. Stuart).
The Water Serpent shows several distinct features, among them a waterlily pad at the forehead, a blossom tied to its front, and a fish biting or sucking at the flower. Often the same fish is shown biting or sucking at the tail of the serpent. Its fishy dorsal “fin” evolved over time to be shown as elongated long quetzal feathers (that is, it came to be a “feathered snake” of the water, probably also a conceptual relation or antecedent to K’uk’ulkan). Its body can simply be the undulating water band. This important iconography has been most recently by Coltman (2015), who examined its many connections in Mesoamerica, well beyond the Classic Maya world. In ancient Maya mythology this being was the primordial snake (naahkan) that was the essence of water, and who oversaw the creation and raising of the earth, supported by the four old men, the chantun itzam, at its corners. This role, although not yet well defined in the scholarly literature, is perhaps why he was the first day of the tzolk’in, the source of the world’s first sustenance [Note 1].
Figure 6. The Water Serpent in non-calendrical settings, as HA’ “water,” WITZ’, “splash,” the number thirteen, and (as a variant) HA’B, “year.”
The same Water Serpent head we find as Imix was also used to write HA’ “water” (Figure 6b) and also WITZ’, “sprinkle, splash.” (Stuart 2007, Coltman 2015) (Figure 6c). A similar Water Serpent could also appear as the head for the number “thirteen” (Figure 6d) (Robertson 1990). A certain variant of the Water Serpent showing a dotted volute or spiral on the head was used to write HA’B, “year,” in Long Count dates and Distance Numbers (Figure 6e, f). This latter form never appears as Imix, which always emphasizes the waterlily blossom. These visual differences among various Water Serpent glyphs are subtle but real, and deserve further study, for it is clear that Imix (HA’, etc.) and HA’B took a slightly different developmental tracks (ha’b, “year,” is from ha’, “water, rain, rainy season,” so both the animate signs and the words are related).
One early representation of the Water Serpent at San Bartolo suggests a connection to the imix che’ of the Books of Chilam Balam. On the West Wall, we see a serpent’s body as an undulating water band. From its head emerges a tree that supports the Principal Bird Deity (Taube, et al. 2005) (Figure 7). Given that this portion of the murals is dedicated to directional world trees and year bearers, I suggest this is perhaps a precursor to the imix che’ or “abundance tree” mentioned above.
Figure 7. Depiction of Water Serpent as cosmic tree (imix che’?) from San Bartolo Murals, West Wall. Watercolor painting by Heather Hurst, Proyecto Arqueológico Regional San Bartolo-Xultun.
Thompson reasoned that his “Imix Monster” was a symbol of the earth. In this he was influenced by the ideas surrounding the corresponding central Mexican day named Cipactli, usually translated as “crocodile” or “alligator,” and long considered an earth symbol (Caso 1968:8-9). The Nahuatl word can be applied to a variety of aquatic beasts, including the caiman and the gar. It is important to note that the Maya “Imix Monster” or Water Serpent is never shown as a crocodilian (ayin), only as a watery snake. I suspect that the toothy Cipactli being represents a mythic character with somewhat different associations, and overlaps. As Martin (2009) has noted, crocodiles are important in the Maya iconography of certain world trees of abundance, especially cacao. This takes us back to the imix che’ concept mentioned above. A text from jade vessel excavated in Burial 116 at Tikal refers to the sprouting of a primordial cacao tree on the day 9 Imix, which is probably a symbolic connection to the same idea of earthly abundance and sustenance. The point here is that the Water Serpent was primarily a watery creature, not so much a being of the earth. It nevertheless had strong earth associations revolving around creation narratives and concepts revolving around abundance and growth.
Perhaps implicit in Thompson’s old discussion of the “Imix Monster” was an assumption that it is a visual or conceptual elaboration on the simpler, more common form of the day, the waterlily. Schele noted this relationship more explicitly, in designating the serpent-like head under the Imix and in other examples as the “personification head,” an element used to personify a unit of Maya writing, to give them sacred power (Schele and Miller 1986:44). In this way, the Water Serpent is often considered to be an artistic extension on the “standard” Imix or waterlily, basically its complex head variant. However, I suggest that the relationship is not one of increased elaboration and animation, from simple Imix to complex serpent, but the reverse, from serpent to the waterlily blossom. This involves process that is by now familiar, of visual reduction and simplification, using a part for the whole. The Water Serpent came first as the true essence of Imix, and through scribal practice it came to be simplified and even a bit distorted. Again, this may not be terribly surprising to those who have a deep knowledge of Maya script, but the specific nature of this formal reduction is important to stress, as it pertains directly to how we interpret the nature of the day itself.
Figure 8. Tracking the visual relationship between the Water Serpent and the standard Imix sign, its pars pro toto abbreviation.
As we see in Figures 5 and 8, a diagnostic feature of the Water Serpent is its waterlily pad headband, and large blossom, which is tied to it, protruding outward. usually with a fish nibbling away. Looking at the forms of the Imix day sign, we see the same waterlily blossom is above the serpent’s face. This surely arose form artist-scribes who routinely depicted the serpent with its waterlily. The blossom came to be the “short hand” form of the extremely ornate Water Serpent, which was the true visual origin of Imix. The reduction of the head to the forehead blossom — a headband flower — is the same visual relationship we see in Ahau, where the forehead floral ornament of Jun Ajaw’s (Hunahpu’s) headband becomes the pars pro toto of the full head. (We will eventually take a separate look at the visual history of Ahau, which is sometimes misunderstood, and which also has some surprising turns).
In researching Imix, I took a quick glance at Wikipedia’s entry on the Maya tzolk’in calendar, noting the two basic meanings it gives for the day: “waterlily” and “crocodile.” Neither is accurate. The basic Maya sign represents the waterlily flower, although we should understand this to be only a visual abbreviation, not the meaning. “Crocodile” is never emphasized in Maya names or imagery, but comes from the Nahuatl system (probably a late borrowing from southern Mesoamerica). As we have seen with other Maya days, a meaning is best approached through a systematic look at the deep visual history of the glyphs and iconography. The imagery reveals that the true essence of the Maya day is another important deity — the Water Serpent, with its aquatic flower and distinctive attributes. The snake was a principal actor in Maya creation narratives before 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, embodying the substance of water that sustained life. It had a more formal name as a type of naahkan, “first snake,” but the word Imix or Imox, based on the word form “breast,” also gets to its core function as a source of life, sustenance and abundance. The fishes are always depicted “suckling” upon the serpent’s body and on the waterlily blossom, probably allude to this basic meaning.
Note 1. It is interesting to note that in modern Achi Mayan, the day name Imox is described as “nagual del agua” (ALMG 2001), although this may be a modern understanding based on the HA’ sign. The Water Serpent is named as overseer of this creation episode on Lacanja-Tzeltal Panel 1. described as the “first stone-holding” or “first stone -raising” on 13 Ahau 13 Cumku, perhaps the “first” k’atun station of all (pre-era) on 12.9.0.0.0. This connection to a Period Ending on 13 Ahau probably accounts for the use of the Water Serpent as the head of 13.
References Cited
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ALMG (Academia Linguistica Maya de Guatemala). 2003. Pujb’il Yol Mam. Vocabulario Mam. ALMG, Guatemala.
Bolles, David. n.d. Ti Can Titzel Caan, Ti Can Titzil Luum: A Collection of Papers about the Relationships between the World Directions, the Calendar, Prognostications, and the Mayan Deities. http://davidsbooks.org/www/Maya/WorldDirections.pdf
Caso, Alfonso. 1968. Los calendarios prehispanicos. UNAM, Mexico.
Campbell, Lyle. 1988. The Linguistics of Southeast Chiapas, Mexico. New World Archeological Foundation, Brigham Young University, Provo.
Coltman, Jeremy D. 2015. In the Realm of the Witz’: Animate Rivers and Rulership among the Classic Maya. The PARI Journal 15(3):15-30
Fox, John, and John S. Justeson. 1982ms. A Ch’olan Calendar in the Gates Collection.
Hellmuth, Nicholas A.. 1987a. The Surface of the Underwaterworld: Iconography of the Gods of Early Classic Maya Art in Peten, Guatemala. 2 vols. Foundation for Latin American Anthropological Research, Culver City, CA.
Hellmuth, Nicholas A. 1987b Monster und Menschen in der Maya-Kunst: Eine Ikonographie der alten Religionen Mexikos und Guatemalas. Academische Druk- u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz.
Houston, Stephen D., and Karl A. Taube. 2011. The Fiery Pool: Fluid Concepts of Water and Sea among the Classic Maya. In Ecology, Power and Religion in Maya Landscapes, edited by C. Isendahl and B. Liljefors Persson, pp. 11-37. Verlag Anton Saurwein, Markt Schwaben.
Knowlton, Timothy, and Gabriel Vail. 2010. Hybrid Cosmologies in Mesoamerica: A Reevaluation of the Yax Cheel Cab, a Maya World Tree. Ethnohistory 57(4):709-739.
Liljefors Persson, Bodil. 2011. “Ualhi yax imix che tu chumuk”: Cosmology, Ritual and the Power of Place in Yucatec Maya (Con-)Texts. In Ecology, Power and Religion in Maya Landscapes, edited by C. Isendahl and B. Liljefors Persson, pp. 139-152. Verlag Anton Saurwein.
Martin, Simon. 2006. Cacao in Ancient Maya Religion: First Fruit from the Maize Tree and other Tales from the Underworld. In Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao, edited by Cameron McNeil. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Rands, Robert. 1953, The Water Lily in Maya Art: A Complex of Alleged Asiatic Origin. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 151: 75-153. BAE, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
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pp. 26-31. The Museum Society, San Francisco.
Roys, Ralph. 1933. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC.
Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller. 1986. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.
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Taube, Karl A. 1992. The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 32. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
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In the third-quarter of the 16th century, a Nahuatl-speaking scribe compiled the Cantares Mexic.os [Mexicanos], a set of “Mexican songs” lush with metaphors of beauty, glory, and loss (Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City, MS 1628; Peñafiel 1904). More than just songs, the Cantares implied vigorous drumming and even dance: “Here begin log-drum songs [Nican ompehua Teponazcuicatl]…Tico, tico, toco toto, and when the song ends [auh icontlantiuh cuicatl] Tiquiti titito titi” (Bierhorst 1985:219; Figure 1). The drums were the vertical huehuetl, struck with the hands, and the horizontal teponaztli, hit by mallets tipped with rubber or resin. The finest, most artfully prepared ones appear to have been made of rosewood, a tree now endangered in Mexico, and their intervals did not follow western tunings. For the teponaztli, often equipped with two tongues or sounding boards, the opposed notes tended to be “slightly below a major third, to slightly above a fifth” (Herrera-Castro et al. 2019:1).
Figure 1. Opening lines of Song 44, Folio 26v (Biblioteca Nacional, MS 1628 bis).
The syllables in the quotation — Tico, tico, toco toto…Tiquiti titito titi — are less well understood (Bierhorst 1985:74–79). Known to scholars as “vocables,” sequences like toco, toto appear at the start and close of certain songs or divide the stanzas within them. Clustering into CV or CVC forms, they offer contrasts between alveolar (t) and velar (c) stops joined to close frontal (i) and close-mid back (o) vowels. Thus: ti, to, qui, co, along with the less common tih, tin, toh, ton, con, and coh (Lewy 2015:100). Some occur as disyllables (tico), others as trisyllables (titito).
What do the sounds mean? Most scholars believe they specify drum beats (Nowotny 1956:186–87; Schultze-Jena 1957; Tomlinson 2007:42, 44). Perhaps they were fills, rhythmic passages between stanzas, with each syllable matching a pitch or beat. “Play this sequence of strikes now, before singing ensues.” More likely, however, they established and reinforced the pitches and beats of a whole song or stanza. In this respect, they resemble a percussive solfège, a way of using syllables to signal pitch or rhythm, if somewhat imprecisely. The vocables tease out, not so much a definite series of pitches, as the relation of one sequenced note or beat to another. There is no exactitude of a tuning fork, an invention waiting until 1711, only a reminder of a song “meant to go with words…[in which] the basic unit of music-writing is not the note but the syllable” (Kelly 2015:12, writing of early Medieval Europe). The singer, so nudged, understood what to do and how to perform. Properly cued, the audience would know which song was to come. That the singer and drummer were often the same person is confirmed by a performance in 1551 of what may be an unrelated song (Bierhorst 1985:78). The writer who witnessed it had to watch closely. Otherwise he would miss how the vocalist, Don Francisco Plácido, hit the drum.
The vocable system must have been widespread. John Bierhorst, translator of the Cantares, refers to comparable syllables, apparently sung rather than drummed, among the Cora of Durango, Mexico (Bierhorst 1985:74, 78). An audio from 1968 attests to a reduced number of syllables, alternating between ti and to, ki and ko, but the similarity is too strong to be a coincidence. (Like Nahuatl, Cora is an Uto-Aztecan language, so the roots may go deep.) The same “pattern of percussion,” with exactly the same syllables, occurs in Zapotec texts of the Colonial period, along with (evidently) non-lexical vocalizations between separate stanzas of music (ayao, hiya, hoya, etc., Tavárez 2006:420, 429, 433, 436, 437; ibid. 2017:46).
By one view, the variation in syllables express where a beat was struck. According to an early Franciscan missionary, Toribio de Benevente Motolinía, the vertical drum, the huehuetl, was hit at both the center and edge of its drumhead, which could be tuned by adjusting its tautness (Haly 1986:97). In this way, some of the syllables, with their percussive initial sounds (t, qui, k) and high and low vowels (i, o), might have correlated with different sonorities of drums (see Lelis de Oliveira 2024:133, for similar ideas). This area emitted that sound, over here, struck just so, came another, with two hands at play to create two or three beats. The importance of such “strike zones” and what to label them recall the bol syllables of paired tabla drums in India (Shepherd 1976:65). A fusion of speech and sound, bol derives from Hindi bolnā (बोलना), “to speak.” The syllables, which include tā,te, ra, ka, along with combined forms for two hands, dhe, din, etc., are tied to drum sounds by listeners familiar with the tabla (Patel and Iversen 2003:928; see Mehrabi et al. 2019). A marked degree of onomatopoeia or sound symbolism probably operated behind them (Rowell 1992:141–42).
Of great complexity, the bols are taught not so much individually, but as sequences learned during initial stages of training. For masters like Zakir Hussain, these can be enunciated at staggering speed (view 28:00). Thereafter come decades of intensive practice. Songs or song cycles are identified by long sequences of bols, to be memorized by performers. In Japan, shōga, a series of chanted kana syllables, are also used to transmit orally, with subsequent memorization, how to play Japanese flutes within the centuries-long tradition of nō theater (Anno 2010:132–33, fig. 4). Doing this with a master, as part of ensemble, is crucial to sorting out subtleties and indicating where embellishments might be possible or permissible. Such syllables are just as central to learning the art of bagpiping in Highland Scotland, where musicians used a system of chanted vocables known as canntaireachd (Dickson 2013:46–47). In all cases, syllables and muscle memory work together to fix songs in musicians’ minds. Tabla in particular is notable for its schools, oral transmission, and, for prominent musicians, lines of descent by family and master-pupil relations (Shepherd 1976:table II). In sum, vocables reflect a domain of oral recitation. Records of them appear to have been unusual or incidental to the principal emphasis, that of in-person training by master musicians. Similar kinds of training, oral transmission, memorization, and inheritance may have informed the Cantares and those who performed them.
Maya drums seldom survive in anything but stone, although rare examples are known in wood, if of uncertain date (e.g., a single-tongued teponaztli or tunk’ul shaped as a recumbent figure, its “chest” the resonator, the piece probably a cave-find; Kerr# 7905, now in the Fundación Ruta Maya, Guatemala; see Figure 2a). Most are simply painted, and of varying size. There is a suspicion that, in a pinch, ceramic bowls, covered by skin or jaguar pelage, bound around the rim, could function as drums (Figure 2b, c). Improvised in this way, such instruments could have been far more prevalent—indeed, at least one figurine from Copan documents the use of ceramic bowls or vases (even gourds?) as resonators or amplifiers for percussion; turtle shells struck with mallets could thereby intensify their sound (Figure 3; Zalaquett Rock 2021:fig. 20; for use with a small tunk’ul, albeit in a non-Maya context, see Chinchilla Mazariegos n.d.). Notably, Ch’orti’ Maya describes some drums in terms of their skin or hide covering, pächil te’, from pächij, “skin, hide” (Hull 2016:176–77).
Figure 2. Drums, pseudo-drum, and possible ceramic drum with jaguar pelage as playing surface: a, K7905, Fundación Ruta Maya (photo courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University); b, early Late Classic polychrome vase, area of El Zotz, Guatemala (Denver Art Museum, 1997.351); and c, K3247, detail, drum on wooden plinth (courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, high-resolution image supplied by Joanne Baron).
Figure 3. Dancing musician with ceramic (or gourd?) resonator or amplifier under turtle shell, both supported by a shoulder sling (Zalaquett Rock 2021:fig. 20, photograph by Alberto Soto Villalpando).
Paintings on Maya drums are little studied, but two may appear with vertical bars that could reflect, by visual evocation, a pulse of regular rhythms (Houston et al. 2006:163, fig.4.24). Recordings of songs in highland Guatemala leave little doubt that drums could also have two or three distinct notes, played in combination with other instruments (Yurchenco 1985:48; de Gandarias Iriarte 2013:76). A binary tone is evident in double drums joined into a single object, allowing the hand to play on each with different fingers and, because of divergent size in the drums, resulting in two pitches (Adams 1971:fig. 70c; Inomata et al. 2010:fig. 91a–c, d). The dating seems to be towards the final decades of the Classic period, hinting at some shifts in playing style or instrumentation. That pre-Conquest music had a history should go without saying. Timeless, unchanging practices are inherently implausible: Baroque music and instruments are far from Stravinsky or the agile, jazzy violin of Stéphane Grappelli; Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo lies distant from Madame Butterfly. Why should early Maya music be treated as a synchronic totality? Most doubled drums show attention to ergonomics as well, in that they are at oblique angles to one another. One hand could grasp the drum while the other tapped on the two surfaces. Larger drums would have been far less restrained in audio output. The sonic reach of sizeable examples could have been some kilometers, to judge from the size of painted depiction of a tunk’ul at Ek’ Balam, Mexico, an example in stone found at Copan, Honduras, K4120 in the Kerr Database of images, and colonial-era reports of their acoustic range (Houston et al. 2006:263, fig. 8.14; Carrillo González et al. 2014).
Drums with glyphs are exceedingly rare. A shattered instrument from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, bears a text that names the object, lajab, “thing for clapping, touching lightly,” a drum that seems to have belonged to Yat Ahk, the last major ruler of the city (Holley 1983:530, fig. 69; Houston et al. 2006:fig. 8.11b; for relevant lexical entries, Hull 2016:247). Found on the floor of Structure J-11 in the palace, it provides direct evidence of royal performance (or a claim to it) and points to further proof that, as noted before, drum-strikes could range from solid pounding to lighter taps with fingertips (Ch’orti’ Maya applies the verb t’ojt’i to less robust activities like ringing a bell and tapping a drum; Hull 2016:434).
A drum from Yalloch (Yaloch), Guatemala, doubtless acquired by Thomas Gann, who resided nearby in (then) British Honduras, is remarkable for its Teotihuacan-inflected design and, in the middle of the text, a possible self-reference, the outline of a drum (Figure 4a). Teotihuacan-linked performance and dance are documented on some Late Classic vases from the area of Motul de San José, Guatemala, and there may have been a similar connection here to a particular genre of music: the blats, dissonance, and unsettling babble of foreigners, but impressive or amusing nonetheless (e.g., K5418, K6315; for musical ambivalence, see Ross 2020, on the pervasive love and loathing around the music of Richard Wagner).[1] The other drum is so large, at 42.8 cm in height, that it would have to rest upside down. Its bottom is of precarious, narrow size, impossible to place in a stable position (Krempel and Paredes Maury 2017; Figure 4b). That necessity, to park or store the drum without toppling, probably led to the orientation of its paintings of youthful, male musicians and dancers. (In use, the drum would show them head-down, almost illegibly so.) Some youths hold small rattles, and possibly there is one with a drum, although the image is indistinct (“Individual 6,” Krempel and Paredes Maury 2017:figs. 3, 5). Yet the ceramic itself functions as an ancillary, outsized complement to an image of less noisy, diminutive rattles and turtle-shell resonators. It supplements and out-booms that percussion, appearing to overwhelm the singing by the figures just off-image, to lower right, on the wide body of the drum. It also affirms the role of the young in such performance, their voices, perhaps, higher, piercing, clearer. The owner of the drum was a “great youth,” a chak ch’ok, the others of yet lesser age, seemingly (‘i-tz’i, “younger [brother]”).
Figure 4.Painted drums with glyphic texts: a, Yalloch [sic, for Yaloch], Guatemala, ex-Heye collection, No. 9 /6547, National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), #096547.000, Accession lot: 1919.0014, rendering by M. Louise Baker (Danien 2006:fig. 2.5); and b, Fundación Ruta Maya collection, provenience unknown (Krempel and Paredes Maury 2018:cover).
But the most relevant drum, from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, is incised rather than painted (Figure 5). At this city, almost all legible texts are inscribed, as here, in a style consistent with the ruler named on the shattered drum from Structure J-11 (Houston 2016:419–20). Indeed, this drum comes from a late floor in that very building. The text consists of readable glyphs: wa, ku, possibly infixed with a k’a (see insert for comparison, from a bench-back from Pomona, Mexico, if lacking in the thumb common to that sign). Yet the repetition is nonsensical. The syllables do not spell any possible term for “drum” in Mayan languages. They may be pseudo-glyphs, signs deployed as placeholders for writing but without sense, but the incised texts of this place and ruler trend towards legibility.
Figure 5. Drum from Structure J-11, Piedras Negras, Guatemala (Satterthwaite 1938:fig. 1); insert, k’a syllable from Pomona, Mexico (photograph by Stephen Houston).
A tantalizing possibility is that these are vocables, that the Classic Maya, like Nahuatl singers and drummers of 750 years later, used non-lexical syllables to audiate—to conceptualize rather than hear—a sequence of two-part or three-part drumbeats near the time of the Maya Collapse. The variance from Nahuatl and Zapotec practice accords with the temporal and geographic diversity of notational systems in early Medieval Europe (Rankin 2014:360–61). Comparisons elsewhere, with Nahuatl drummers, Medieval European musicians, Japanese flute-players, and Scottish bagpipers, make such syllables unsurprising or at least conceivable. Syllables, not notes, jibe with human perceptions and segregations of sound; they guide and energize the core task of memorization (e.g., for a Medieval context, see Rankin 2012:387, “le lecteur doit avoir en tête la mémoire du dessin mélodique”; for a phonological explanation related to where vowels are formed, see Hughes 1989:7–9).
Maya vocables fit also with the oral setting in which such music was likely taught and learned. As noted for the Indian bol: it could have been a system that “preserve[d] the music in skeletal form as a spur to memory, but impart[ed] its full details in face-to-face instruction, by demonstration and imitation, teacher seated across from student”…and was hence rare in written form (Rowell 1992:141). Further, the proposed vocables sit well with a writing system suffused by syllables. Their play in readable texts, composed into words, bestowed, perhaps, an intrinsic musicality of cadenced, aesthetically pleasing sound. Was this, in fact, the motivation behind some of the Maya pseudo-glyphs with their readable signs but seeming lack of intepretable words? Regrettably, there is no other direct evidence to buttress the find at Piedras Negras. It stands mute, in ways, during the Classic period, that the drum did not.
[1] Musicians dressed in Teotihuacan costume, “Tlaloc-mask,” and the dark body paint often associated with that city occur on a vase, whereabouts and photographer unknown, but almost certainly from the area of Motul de San José, Guatemala (the pink glyphs and quality of line point to this attribution). The players employ aberrant instruments, including curved rattles of gourd and large spiked trumpets. A fire from criss-crossed paper or sticks radiates curls of flame near the main dancers/singers, consistent with the rituals linked by the Maya to that central Mexican civilization.
Acknowledgements My thanks go to Felipe Rojas, David Stuart, Paul Tamburro, and Haicheng Wang for discussing these ideas with me. Haicheng reminded me of Zakir Hussain’s brilliance with tabla bol, and Paul drew my attention to the essay by David Hughes on a comparative explanation for such syllabic sequences. Ann McMullen at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, helped with accession information about the drum from Yaloch, Guatemala.
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This is the third in an anticipated series of essays on the visual histories and iconographic associations of the Maya day signs, presented in no particular order (previous studies have treated the days Men and Caban).
Figure 1. The standard hand form of the day Manik. (a) UAX: B-XIII murals, (b) NAR: St 43, (c) PAL: 96 Glyphs, (d) COM: Pendant 8A, (e) EKB: Mural of 96 Glyphs, (f) Dresden Codex. Drawings by D. Stuart (a, e, f), A. Tokovinine (b), and M. Zender (d).
In his commentaries on the meanings and forms of the days of the tzolk’in, Eric Thompson (1950:76) expressed a special puzzlement surrounding Manik, the seventh day (Figure 1). In other Mesoamerican writing systems and languages, the corresponding signs and names for the day universally represented a deer (Figure 2). But the Yukatek nameManik, Thompson wrote, shows “no connection with deer; neither does the glyph, which is a hand, shown sideways with thumb and one figure touching or extended with back to the observer.” What Thompson didn’t know at the time is that Maya scribes also occasionally employed a deer’s head to represent Manik, following widespread Mesoamerican practice (Figure 3). As it turns out, the hand and the deer head are interchangeable as Manik, which makes the common use of the hand as the day sign even more vexing. Where does it come from? Here I would like to explore how the Manik hand might have originated early on as an alternate form of “deer,” which came to be used throughout the Maya script, and beyond the context of the day sign.
Figure 2. Deer day signs in non-Maya writing systems. (a) Isthmian script (La Mojarra), (b) Zapotec script, (c) Cacaxtla writing, (d, e) Nahua script (Borgia Codex), (f) Nahua script (Piedra del Sol). Drawings by D. Stuart (a, d, e, f), J. Urcid (b), and C. Helmke (c).Figure 3. Deer head variants of Manik in Maya script. (a) San Bartolo, Xbalanque structure, (b) La Corona, Element 4, (c) Palenque region, stucco glyph, (d) Yaxchilan region, door lintel.
The Yukatek name Manik’ is of obscure origin. Campbell (1988) and Kaufman (2020) reported a probable corresponding form in Ch’olan as Manich’, preserved in baptismal records of Chiapas (day names often were used as personal names, as we see in Nahuatl). Kaufman suggested these may be loans into lowland Mayan from proto-Sapotekan *mmani7, “mammal, large bird,” but I am not sure that this is a secure connection (as Kaufman noted, the attested Sapotekan name for the day is China, “Deer”). In Tzeltlan languages, the day name was Moxik, which is also of unknown origin. I agree with Kaufman’s (2020) suggestion these obscure lowland Mayan names may have had a religious association as the designation of a “deer god,” or as a deified patron of hunting (see Looper 2019:119-152). In highland Mayan languages, the form is consistently keej or a close cognate, corresponding to the generic word for “deer.” This geographical and linguistic pattern is interesting, for the names we see used in the Maya lowlands and Ch’olan-Tzeltalan sources were not the words for “deer” that we see elsewhere. It raises the possibility that the Classic Mayan day name was not “Deer” (Chij or Kej), but a more specific reference.
Figure 3. Late Preclassic Deer variant of Manik day sign from Xbalanque structure, San Bartolo, ca. 300 BCE. Note cartouche border behind the ears and antler. Drawing by D. Stuart.
The deer head was used as the Maya day sign from a very early date. In a recent paper, my colleagues and I discussed the discovery of the earliest known Maya date glyph, a Late Preclassic record of the day 7 Manik from San Bartolo, dating to approximately 300 BCE (Stuart et al. 2022). The form of the day sign is striking and important, for it shows us the head of a deer, much like we know from other Mesoamerican scripts. Its head is turned and faces left, with its neck gracefully bent, perhaps to show the common pose of a deer turned and nibbling at its side. Given its early date, the deer’s head at San Bartolo may represent an early stage in Maya script development before the closed hand emerged as the standard form for the day.
Today we widely recognize the Manik hand sign in non-calendrical settings as the syllable chi, a reading that had been considered off-and-on in the earliest years of Maya epigraphic research. Cyrus Thomas (1892) was the first to do so, noting with great insight that the hand element served as a purely phonetic element, “sometimes to be read chi, as in the symbol for chik’in, ‘west’.” Thompson later rejected this possibility, in keeping with his dismissal of phoneticism in Maya script overall. Ultimately it was Knorosov, six decades later, who resurrected Thomas’s chi value, and applied it to several spellings in the codices. One common variant of the chi syllable in the Classic script is a deer’s head, which can alternate with the hand in several contexts (Figure 4). It is particularly common in the sequence yi-chi in the dedicatory formula of vessels from the El Zotz region. So here we have the same pattern as in the day sign, a free substitution of the two allographs (Note 1).
Figure 4. Alternation of the hand and deer head as the chi syllable (yi-chi) from two vessels from the El Zotz region. (a) Kerr 4357, (b) vessel lid published by Coe (1973:86).
Incidentally, David Kelley (1976) suggested ke as an alternative syllabic reading of the hand, noting that it could stand alone in the codices at times for “deer” (Yukatek keeh), outside the context of the Manik’ day sign. While today ke is not seen as a viable reading for the hand, Kelley was right to note the fluid functionality of the hand sign, and the deer head can be syllabic ke in at least one case I am aware of (Note 2). One case is in the glyphic name of the deer shown coupled with Wuk Sip, the god of hunting, in the Dresden Codex (Figure 5a). This is the same deer we find depicted in some Classic period vases, with the very same name, chan chij winik (4-CHIJ-WINIK) (Looper 2019:138). Zender (2017) has investigated this particular being in the context of a mythic cycle involving the moon goddess, the maize god Juun Ixi’m, and the patron of hunting Wuk Sip. The numeral four on the name suggests a cosmological deer being with aspects in the world quarters. In Classic times the hand could also serve as a logogram for “deer,” as we see in the name caption of a wahy being, an eyeless deer coiled in a snake (Figure 6). These overall patterns demonstrate that the deer head and the Manik hand shared dual functions, both as the logogram CHIJ and as the syllable chi.
Figure 5. A deer god in the Dresden Codex and in Classic period iconography. Note the name glyph with the alternation of the hand and the deer head CHIJ. (a) Dresden Codex, 13c, (b) K8927.Figure 6. The hand as the logogram for “deer,” in the name of a wahy being. Kerr 8733. Drawing by D. Stuart.
On the face of it, the syllabic chi value of the Manik hand seems a straightforward explanation for its use in the day sign, a phonetic allusion to the word chij, “deer.” But there are problems with this, in my view. It raises yet another conundrum, having to account for the near-constant use of a supposed CV syllable as a partial spelling of the word used for the day’s name. No other day sign is ever a syllable cueing a fuller word. Furthermore, all day signs are by nature logograms, so chi as the day seems a strange outlier of a long-standing pattern. What’s more, as we have noted, the day name in the lowlands was perhaps not even Chij, for only Manik’, Manich’ and Moxik are historically attested. In essence, we are still left with Thompson’s old puzzle, as well as the broader question: just how did the hand come to be used for chi, for Manik, and for “deer”? The three functions must be related, but what’s their true connection?
Figure 7. Graphic abbreviations of the Deer day sign at Cacaxtla (a, b) and in the Codex Féjerváry- Mayer (c, d). Drawings (a, b) by C. Helmke.
To begin to answer this, let’s first return to the wider Mesoamerican forms of the “Deer” day glyph. As we know, a deer’s head or body is attested in Maya writing, as well as throughout the rest of Mesoamerica (Figures 2 and 3). Occasionally, we see simplified forms that originated as parts of deer, as pars pro toto replacements. For example, in Nahuatl writing the day Mazatl can be shown as a deer’s hoof or, more commonly, as the antler of a deer (Figure 7c,d). Earlier, at Cacaxtla, we also see an antler used as a simplified way of writing the day “Deer,” in direct alternation with the deer’s head (Helmke and Neilsen 2011:4) (Figure 7a, b). This follows the familiar practice of day signs having simpler and even more familiar forms that originated as parts of these heads, as pars pro toto replacements. We have reviewed some examples of this in our earlier considerations of Men and Caban. Early on in the history of the Maya script, scribes established many of these reduced forms as standard ways to write the days, all of which I believe were first conceived as highly complex iconographic representations of specific deities and supernatural beings (Imix as the Water Serpent, for example, Men as the Principal Bird Deity, and so on).
This practice of visual reduction brings up what I see as an intriguing possibility for explaining the Manik or chi hand. Could this “hand” have originally been a representation of a deer’s antler, just as we see elsewhere, that came to be reanalyzed visually, and misunderstood? If we look at various representations of antlers in Maya art and writing, it seems not too far-fetched to see the odd positioning of the fingers and thumb in Manik as reflecting the visual structure of an antler, at least as the Maya represented it (Figure 8). Some early chi or Manik hands look almost identical, as we see in the spelling of the honorific title K’IN-chi for k’inich, on an altar recently recovered at Tonina (Figure 8e). If this is the case, the antler (later the “hand”) developed out of a standard pars pro toto reduction of the deer’s head, as a variant of what amounts to the same sign.
Figure 8. Antlers in Maya art and Writing. (a-d) Representations of deer antlers in iconography, (3) an antler-like chi in the spelling of chi-K’IN, from Tonina, (f-i) the sign XUKUB for “antler” and its possible head variant (i). Note the general resemblance to the shape of the Manik or chi hand. Drawings by D. Stuart.
One attractive aspect of this proposal is that it would explain cases where the hand serves as a logogram for “deer,” whether in the context of the day sign or elsewhere. It also agrees with the use of the deer’s head as a syllable for chi. That is, both signs work the same way because they are, in origin, the same thing. The syllable derived from the logographic form, I suggest, just as we see in many other signs. The sign for fish (KAY) gave rise to the syllable ka, which could also be written in reduced form as the tail fins (or a dorsal fin) of a fish (that is, Landa’s “ka comb” was originally a fin, but scribes had no sense of its origin even in the Classic period).
As an aside, it is interesting that deer antlers have been noted for their visual resemblance to human hands. The antler of a mature male white-tailed deer (the most common species in the Maya world) often has five points or “tines,” resembling a hand. Antlers can also be “palmated” or flattened in their centers, a term derived from the resemblance to the palm of a hand. Humans, in imitating deer in play or ritual, often place two hands with contorted fingers against the forehead to mimic the form of antlers (Note 3). Stephen Houston has suggested (personal communication, 2023) that a similar hand gesture may have been used as a signal among Maya deer hunters.
A resemblance also exists between the general shape of the chi hand and the logogram for “antler,” read as XUKUB, “antler, horn” (Lopes and Davletshin 2004) (Figure 8, f-i). The head variant of XUKUB seems the image of the hunting deity Wuk Sip (i) (see Grunbe 2012). One wonders if the hand developed as an intentional visual divergence, helping scribes to distinguish the graphic reduction of CHIJ from XUKUB. In any event, by the Classic period, CHIJ “deer” had its deer head and “hand” form, and XUKUB kept its representational appearance.
Conclusion
Here I suggest that the single Maya logogram for “deer” — certainly an old sign in the script — once had two related forms or allographs: a standard deer head, and a common abbreviation in the form of a deer antler. Both were used for the seventh day of the tzolk’in, Manik. However, over time, and before the Classic period, calligraphic practice led to the antler being perceived (misinterpreted) as a human hand with its distinct shape. Their functions never changed despite their graphic separation. The deer head was the logogram CHIJ and the syllable chi, as was its shorthand form (pun intended).Still, it must be said that there is no known archaic form of the day Manik that displays an antler; what I describe here is only a speculative extrapolation, an exercise in “visual etymology” working backward from later forms.
Notes
Note 1. The other common head variant of chi, not discussed here, represents an animate agave plant, based on CHIH, “agave, agave drink.” It too freely substitutes for the hand and deer in yi-chi and other contexts.
Note 2. In one ceramic text I know, a deer head (not the hand) is syllabic ke in the spelling of ke(le)-ma, keleem, “youth.” This spelling can only be be specific to Yukatek, and a local innovation of a syllabic sign.
Note 3. The following is the description of the sign for “deer” in American Sign Language (ASL): “To sign “Deer” in American Sign Language (ASL), extend and spread out your fingers on both hands, resembling a pair of antlers. Move your hands by the sides of your head, ensuring that each thumb touches each side of your head. Each hand should form one antler.”
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