We can easily see how it is constructed in the same way as names for Nun Yax Ahiin and his wife: a hand holding a spearthrower together with an easily recognizable element such as a warrior, an altar or an owl. Since we have seen how the writer has given Teotihuacan related names for the top ranking royals of his time, dead or alive, Spearthrowing Owl can be deducted to be nothing else than a similar Teotihuacan name for Siyaj K'ak', lifted from a Teotihuacan spirit that was claimed to have escorted the late king in his funeral. He, together with his son and his son's wife, quite probably the daughter of late king Chak Tok Ich'aak, formed a sort of triad with one having the title of the king, one having the royal legitimacy and one having the real power, emphasized here by using a uniting spear throwing hand in each one's names.
Confusion around the identity of Spearthrowing Owl can be traced to Stela 31. It uses both names Siyaj K'ak' and Spearthrowing Owl separately as if they were two distinct persons. Upon closer examination, however, we can see how all mentions of Siyaj K'ak' appear in two sections describing events of 378/9 while all mentions of Spearthrowing Owl appear in parts contemporary to writer's own time. Since the events mentioning Siyaj K'ak' took place over 60 years before the stela was planted, it is quite evident that the writer did not create the text out of living memory, but rather copied it from earlier archives. Thus Siyaj K'ak's original name, as written in the archives, reappeared in the stela, while the writer used his later name Spearthrowing Owl in all contemporary sections which he probably created specifically for the monument.
The copious nature of historical sections is evident in the glaring mistake at F8 where the author has written Nun Yax Ahiin's ascension date as 10 Kaban while it should be 5 Kaban, clearly not aware that the date he's written is not even possible. The mistake probably took place when number five was copied from one text to another and got mistaken for ten, both visually similar. Important for us is how the author failed to make a sanity check for his own text.
After Marcador was established in 416, there is no mention of Siyaj K'ak' in relation to any later event. Respectively, there is no mention of Spearthrowing Owl in relation to any earlier event, apart from the original Teotihuacan spiritual being allegedly appearing in king's funerary stone binding. Other Teotihuacan names for Tikal royals appear to have been short-lived and do not come across in later monuments, but Spearthrowing Owl stuck with Siyaj K'ak'.
We can spend some words thinking how the original pronunciation of this enigmatic name was.
The placeholder English name "Spearthrowing Owl" is based on the fact that the logographic instance of the glyph presents a spearthrowing hand together with an image of an owl. In Marcador, there are three instances of the name Spearthrowing Owl, each written differently from one another.
Figure 4.2. Three ways of writing "Spearthrowing Owl" in Marcador. a) Purely logographic at C3. b) Purely phonetic at E3-F3. c) Partly logographic, partly phonetic at E9-F9. Note how the spearthrower glyph is complemented with pronunciation helpers syllable "ma" and sound repeating double-dots.
The first instance is purely logographic at C3. The next instance at E3-F3 is purely phonetic. The third instance at E9-F9 is partly logographic, partly phonetic. Spearthrowing Owl seems to have been a new entity in Tikal, and the writer wanted to introduce him thoroughly.
Based on the picture of an owl in the name and its phonetic counterpart ku' at F3, the latter part of the name quite certainly is pronounced as Ku'h, meaning owl.
The first part of the name, a hand holding a spearthrower, appears to be more difficult to decipher. At F3 it clearly starts with ja (T181) on the left side, but is then followed by an otherwise unknown looking glyph on the right side.
Solution seems to lie in the two dots that are added to the spearthrower at E9. Like we noted, the glyph at E9 is partly logographic including the picture of a spearthrower, but also partly phonetic having syllable ma. Now, we can assume that both the dots and syllable ma are intended to help how to pronounce the spearthrower.
Double dots usually indicate that the sound value of the glyph they are attached to is repeated. The dots are missing from the purely logographic glyph at C3 and are not added to any other presentation of the spearthrower (H8, H9) in the text, so we can assume them being related to the pronunciation of the name.
As spearthrower was a Mexican import, we need to keep in mind its original Nahuatl name, ahtlatl. It means "throwing water". It can easily be misheard consisting of two similar sounds repeated one after another, which also is the common way of writing it today (atlatl). This adds credence to our suspicion that the repetition of two sounds and the Mayan name for a spearthrower are linked.
Mayan word for water is ha', pronounced basically the same as ja, a syllable which we certainly know to exist in the name. If Mayans simply thought that the Nahuatl name for spearthrower was based on the word for water repeated twice, they could just easily have done the same in their own version of the name, thus repeating ha' twice, or jaja. Syllable ma, present at both E3 and E9, was then added to the end, if not for any other reason then just to make it easier to pronounce and end in a consonant like the original Nahuatl name.
Upon inspecting the glyph at E3 again, we can see that the strange right side is not so strange after all. Like we earlier noted, the left side is T181, pronounced as ja. Now, if our conclusions about glyph at E9 are correct, the right side should have the same sound value ja. This makes it easy to see that the right side with its bigger and smaller dots separated by a double line is probably nothing but a slightly rearranged and infixed T683, pronounced also as ja. The cartouche around the T683 elements seems to match the shape of the ajaw glyph as written at F7. Apparently it has but a decorative purpose, similar to the god head on its right side accommodating the ku glyph. The same shape for ajaw also reappears in Stela 31 many times.
Figure 4.2. a) Glyph E3 in Marcador. b) Glyph T683, ja.
To put the syllables together, Spearthrowing Owl's name can be spelled as ja-ja-ma KU. Thus, we have fairly good evidence that the Mayan name of Spearthrowing Owl was pronounced as Jajam K'uh, "spearthrower owl".
No comments:
Post a Comment