The nine lords of the underworld, in Maya religion,
were known as the Bolon ti ku (“Nine of them,” or “Nine in Holiness”).
We do not know the Maya names of these gods, but the glyphs corresponding to
these deities are well-known, and were worked out by Thompson in the late 20’s
(Thompson, 1929).
In the absence of proper
names, these lords of the underworld were assigned G designations.
We can
make some attempts at identification, though:
there is good evidence that G4
is Wuk Ah, an agricultural deity (Frumker, 1993).
G7
may be
identical to the patron god
of the month Pax
, and
G9
is almost certainly a pauahtun
(Taube and Miller, 1993).
These glyphs are nearly always used with Glyph F
,
which Linda Schele believes to be the Headband/Jester God,
and are frequently combined with
F into a single glyph block, as in G3f
.
G
Glyphs are usually the very first glyphs
seen on monuments after the tzolkin, and form a continuous 9-day cycle. G9 operates
as G0 would if there were such a thing,
which is why they’re shown in the sequence they are.
“It now seems fairly clear that Glyph F and G record a series of nine headdresses worn by the patrons of the particular day.” (Schele, Grube and Fahsen, 1992). Perhaps a clearer way to say this might be that Glyph G records the patron of the day or night, and that Glyph F is a verb meaning something like “wears the Jester Headband.”
The mathematics of Glyph G are pretty simple. If you have the last two digits of a long count, then
G = ((2 · LC[1]) + LC[0]) % 9
As an example, for LC 12.19.4.11.9 11 Muluk 7 Sak, the last two digits are:
LC[1] = 11
LC[0] = 9
thus,
G = ((2 · 11) + 9) % 9
G = (22 + 9) % 9
G = 31 % 9
G = 4
G = G4
Long Count 12.19.4.0.0 3 ’Ahaw 3 Kumk’u:
LC[1] = 0
LC[0] = 0
therefore
G = ((2 · 0) + 0) % 9
G = (0 + 0) % 9
G = 0 % 9
G = 0
G = G9
Another way to find the same answer is to just take the MDAY % 9, where MDAY is the Julian Period Day (2450754 in the case of our first example, above) minus the Correlation Constant (CC), or 584285:
MDAY = JPDAY - CC
MDAY = 2450754 - 584285
MDAY = 1866469
G = MDAY % 9
G = 1866469 % 9
G = 4
G = G4
| Aveni, Anthony, Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, University of Texas Press, 1980. | |
| Davoust, Michel, L’Écriture Maya et son Déchiffrement, CNRS Éditions, Paris, 1995. | |
| Frumker, Bruce, “Wuk Ah, The Fourth Lord of the Night,” Texas Notes on Precolumbian Art, Writing and Culture, No. 51, March, 1993. | |
| Frumker, Bruce, “Nights Errant: A Look at Wayward Lords of the Night,” Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 43, Center for Maya Research, Washington DC, 1999. | |
| Schele, Linda, Workbook for the 1991 Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, with Commentary on the Inscriptions of Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, Art Departmant, University of Texas, 1991. | |
| Schele, Linda, Nikolai Grube and Federico Fahsen, “The Lunar Series in Classic Maya Inscriptions: New Observation and Interpretations,” Texas Notes on Precolumbian Art, Writing and Culture, No. 29, October 1992. | |
| Taube, Karl and Mary Miller, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames and Hudson, 1993. | |
| Thompson, J. Eric, “Maya Chronology: Glyph G of the Lunar Series,” American Anthropologist n. s., 31, 1929: p. 223-31. | |
| Thompson, J. Eric S., “Observations of Glyph G of the Lunar Series,” Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology, No. 7, July 25, 1942. | |
| Thompson, J. Eric S., Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction, Third edition, University of Oklahoma Press, 1971 (first edition 1950). | |
| Yasugi, Yoshiho and Kenji Saito, “Glyph Y of the Maya Supplementary Series,” Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 34, Center for Maya Research, Washington DC, 1991. |
The upper set of glyphs for G6 is, at best, speculative. Thompson (1971) put forth the
idea in his discussion of the 819 Day Cycle, but he said then that there
was no real evidence supporting it; the situation, as far as I know, has not changed.
The lower pair of glyphs has been suggested for G6 by Yasugi and Saito. See
The Z and Y Glyphs of the Lunar Supplementary Series
for details.
|
|
|
Main web site: http://www.pauahtun.org
