The anthropologist claims that manual positions on the 1,300 -year -old Mayan altar have a deeper meaning
The Mayans used the “sign language” on an altar approximately 1,300 years ago, and these signs can represent important dates in the Long -long Maya counting calendarA new study says.
“This is the oldest text where, to my knowledge, whoever could show that there is a real well -defined” script “using hand panels that are equal with other types of author of the writing study Sandoval richA linguistic anthropologist at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, told Live Science. “Other researchers and I are quite confident by saying that the conventions of these signs of the hand are rooted in sign language.”
In the study, published on March 8 in the journal Transactions of philological societySandoval analyzed AUTTH QA rectangular stone altar from the end of the eighth century of Copán, an archaeological site in Honduras. The four finely sculpted sides of the Q -altar represent a total of 16 Copán leaders, each with specific hand positions, as well as hieroglyphs.
The researchers have studied altar Q since the mid -1800s, and now Sandoval – which calls it “one of the most legendary artifacts of the old mesoameric” in its study – written that we can know more about this classic period (250 to 900 AD 900) by looking at the hands of the leaders. In fact, he noted that leaders have special positions in a large part of Mayan art.
“Almost everywhere you see [Maya] Hieroglyphs, you see a figure, often in the middle, at least one figure, sometimes several figures, holding very unique forms of hand, “Sandoval said live in a voice note.” So I deciphered these hand forms as a hand signs with very specific meanings. “”
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His interpretation suggests that the MayaIncluding civilization in certain parts of southern Mexico and Central America prospered during the classic period, had a writing system that used two written scripts, said Sandoval.
“Many researchers previously thought that the hieroglyphic script was the only script in the Mayan writing system,” he said. His research shows that “there are two scripts in the writing system,” added Sandoval, “so it’s much more complicated than we thought.”
Maya writing system
The known Maya writing system consists of more than 1,000 hieroglyphs representing words and syllables, many of which are always not specialized or misunderstood. Because altar Q presents both hieroglyphs and handboard, Sandoval used it as a kind of rosetta stone – an old Egyptian decree Translated into three old scripts. However, Sandoval thinks that, unlike Rosetta stone, the signs of the hand on altar Q communicate different types of information that his hieroglyphs, which means that they are not translations of each other.
According to the study, the signs of the hand on the east, west, southern and northern sides of the altar, or west, or north, represent dates 9.0.2.0.0 (November 27, 437), 9.19.10.0.0 (April 30, 820), 9.16.13.12.0 (October 21, 764) and 9.17.5.0.15 (January 7, 776). In order for these dates to have a meaning, it is important to understand how the Long counting calendar work.
The dates of the long -term calendar are represented by five “blocks” of days separated by periods. From left to right, these blocks are called b’ak’ttun, k’atun, tun, uinal and k’in. The date of long counting 9.19.10.0.0.0, for example, represents nine b’ak’tuns, 19 k’atus, 10 tuna, zero uinals and zero k’ins. A k’in is one day; A uinal is 20 k’ins, or days; A tun is 18 uinals; A k’atun is 20 tuna; And 1 b’ak’tun is 20 k’atnesor 144,000 days. The Mayans believed that 13 b’ak’tuns (13.0.0.0.0) constituted a complete cycle of creation. December 21, 2012marked the end of the cycle that started on August 13, 3114 before JC
It was already known that the hieroglyphs of the Q -altar, in their description of a 64 -day ritual, imply the use of the long counting calendar. The start date of this ritual aligns with an end of the period – a long date of counting which ends with at least two zeros, representing an important step in the calendar. As the experts had also indicated previously, the hieroglyphs indicate that the Copán dynasty began and ended roughly at the beginning and the end of the ninth Bak’Tun – yet another reference to the long counting calendar.
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Sandoval, however, highlighted a quirk. There were no long calendar dates expressed directly anywhere on the altar hieroglyphs, which was very unusual for a royal Maya text.
As for signs of the hand themselves, the anthropologist focused on the free hands of the 16 leaders. (Most of them hold something in the other.) By comparing the 16 signs of the hand to the hieroglyphs, he noted two crucial characteristics: that two distinct signs resemble variants of hieroglyphs known to the zero number, and that their distribution models compared to the other signs of the hand are similar to those of the zeros in the long term.
Sandoval thus supposed that the two signs of hand represent zeros and that the 16 signs of the hand constitute four long counting dates falling in the ninth B’Ak’ttun. “The involvement is that the hand panels of each panel code the K’atun, Tun, Winal [an alternative spelling for uinal] And the values of K’in of a long date of count, read from left to right, “he wrote in the study.
As for the B’Ak’ttun value, Sandoval claims that it is represented by the upper edge of each panel and the heads of the four leaders – a configuration of bar and bar which resembles a hieroglyphic upside down. The number 9 and the upside down are associated with death and underground males, according to the study.
Tie up together
At this stage, Sandoval returned to hieroglyphs, which included dates written in the calendar cycle, another Mayan calendar system which deals with shorter time cycles. He found a surprising prevalence of the number 16. For example, the coefficients of the round dates of the calendar for the first and the last ascent of the leaders to the throne and the death are added up to 16.
“16 is the most important number on this thing,” said Sandoval. Other advice on calendar dates included directional associations with monumental texts nearby and the hypothesis that each date was to be linked to the underground world.
In the end, he linked each long calendar date to an important event or situation. The panel is the date of death of the first sovereign; The western panel is the date of death of the last sovereign; The date of the southern panel is associated with the owner divinity of the 16th sovereign, and the date of the north panel comes 16 days after the start of the 64 -day ritual of the altar Q.
“The reason why I am so confident in my initial deciphering here and why it was so convincing for the examiners is that I have several evidence which are independent of each other, but they all support the same observation,” said Sandoval. “They are a little weak, but together, they serve as very strong support,” he added. “Observations work as a verification because they do not depend on each other.”
“Incredible” result
The Mayan writing system is incredibly complex; He uses text and art design to integrate two scripts, said Sandoval, adding that “it is a unique system in the world”. Previously, he sought how the speakers of Arapaho – an Amerindian tribe that had roots in what is now Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas – Language and speech of mixed signs.
However, not everyone agrees with their conclusions. “It looks very improbable,” Alexandre CurrentAn anthropological archaeologist with a specialty in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Alabama which was not involved in the study, told Live Science. “The visual and textual data seem to be manipulated to adapt to the author’s hypothesis.”
Nevertheless, Sandoval suggested that his partial decryption underlined future decryption efforts.
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