[Aztlan] T528 as "stone" (David Stuart's Response)

[David Hixson]

The following is a response to my query by David
Stuart (forwarded with permission):
-----------------
There has been a good deal of confusion about "year"
glyphs in general, with T528 often and incorrectly
analyzed as either HAAB' or TUUN'.  Thompson's
insightful identification of the "drought" glyph in
the Dresden Codex is a good starting point -- there,
both signs are used in spelling the expression
k'intunyabil (k'in-tun-y-(h)ab-il).  The question has
been, though, which sign is TUUN and which is HAAB'?
(By the way, the long vowels I use to transcribe the
signs are not reflected in the standard colonial
Yucatec orthography used by Thompson and others, and
represent a more "archaic" Classic-era Ch'olan
phonology).  Thompson had T528 as HAAB and T548 as
TUUN, but we now know he had it backwards.  John
Justeson and John Fox corrected Thompson's analysis in
1980, and assigned the correct values in the "drought"
glyph. However, they also proposed that both signs
could have either values, depending on context. This
is not the case, and Maya writing does not accommodate
this sort of polyvalency.  I feel very strongly now,
as do most epigrpahers, that T528 is always read TUUN
and T548 is always HAAB' - phonetically they never
switch roles.  What may confuse people is that T548
could stand for haab' in refering to a "year" of
either 360 or 365 days.  Tuun means "stone" and only
secondarily "year," since ritual stones (monuments)
were used symbolically to as material representations
of the time periods.  But because of the more
metaphoric "year" meaning, tuun "stone" could also
conceivably stand for a 360 or 365-day period. But the
latter 365 usage is very, very rare.


The best recent source for the TUUN reading is my 1996
article "Kings of Stone," published in RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics.  Also very relevant is
John Justeson and Peter Mathews older article "The
Seating of the Tun," published in American Antiquity
in the early 1980s.


Best, David


 
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