[Aztlan] left hand

[Diane Winters]

Hi Martha,

While this doesn't relate to mythology, I thought I'd pass it along for 
whatever it might be worth, either to you or to anyone interested in the 
issue of right or left handedness.

Years ago I was working on the Maya glyph T714, also called the 
"fish-in-hand" glyph because it depicts a hand grasping a fish (paper 
published in the 6th Mesa Redonda / Palenque Round Table papers volume). 
One of the things I noted then was that it is always a left hand doing the 
grasping.  This might be assumed to merely be a graphic convention were it 
not for the fact that the fish-in-hand happens to appear in one of the few 
Maya texts that for some reason was carved in mirror-image form - the text 
as well as individual glyphs themselves being reversed left to right.  Even 
the ruler's name glyph is reversed so that it appears as Jaguar Shield 
instead of Shield Jaguar.  But the fish-in-hand is not reversed.  If it had 
been it would appear to be a right hand.  Now, I don't know if this is why 
it was not reversed, or what significance it may have had in relation to the 
meaning of the glyph, but it has always intrigued me.

Diane Winters