Identifying Individual Hands in the Monuments of K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Naab of Palenque

Temple XIX Stuccos

Click on image to enlarge

Click on image to enlarge

The discovery and reassembly ¹   of Temple XIX’s well-preserved stucco relief (Figures 8, 9, and 10) offers an opportunity to compare styles. Temple XIX is next door to Temple XVIII, it was built under the same ruler at roughly the same era, and its artisans were presumably drawn from the same pool of talent.

Partly because of its brevity (only 12 glyphs), it offers few points of comparison with the 100-glyph Temple XVIII text. The content and discourse of the texts have little in common. The numerals in Temple XVIII are usually head-variants, while no head-variant numerals appear on the Temple XIX relief. The Temple XIX text never mentions Akal Mo’ Nab, nor his family, focusing on a different set of characters than that of Temple XVIII. Finally, the Temple XIX text repeats thrice a striking glyph heretofore completely unknown: a heron or osprey holding a fish in its mouth, apparently a kind of title.

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David Stuart (private communication, October 2000) pointed out that these three examples each seem to be by a different hand. The second example, at D1, exhibits the same strength of line and form that we see in the glyphs of the ’Clarity Master’ in Temple XVIII. The other two differ from each other in their treatment of eyes, fins, u-syllables, and le-syllables. The ’Clarity Master’s bird head and fish tail are strikingly simple and smooth in outline, his sculptural quality of eye of both bird and fish are crisp and effective. The other two examples are more realistic, but more diffuse. The finely-detailed head of the third fish reminds me of the ’Laughing Eyes Master,’ though I hesitate to commit fully to such a claim.

Click on image to enlarge

Click on image to enlarge

There are, however, many strongly-flavored glyph elements in this inscription which are difficult to parallel in Temple XVIII. For instance, the beautiful chum-tun-ni at C1 (Figure 12), displays an anthropomorphic "stone" and elegant ni-suffix without peer on Temple XVIII. The two ch’ok collocations at D4 and D5 (by two distinct hands, of which D4 might be our ’Clarity Master,’ Figure 13) are clearly by different artists than the ch’ok examples surviving from Temple XVIII (Schele, Linda, and Mathews, Peter, The Bodega of Palenque, Chiapas, México, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1979, #541, 542, 543, & 545, Figure 13). The three daysigns (all ahaw, Figure 14) spring from two different hands, one of whom may be our ’Clarity Master’.

The second and third examples (B2, C2) are similar enough that they may spring from the same hand, though the differing details of the cartouche give me pause. This artist (or artist and slavish follower) favors crescent-shaped eyes and mouths, and the inline border of the cartouche is a distinct organic crease, while the artist of A1 prefers round eyes and a shallow-groove inline. The well-formed, single stroke mouth of A1 and the crisp grooves in the adjacent ni-suffix suggests that we have here another glyph by the ’Clarity Master.’ Contrasting these with a pair of calendric glyphs from Temple XVIII, we see a third hand at work in the ajaw daysign, and a well-formed 5-K’ayab whose strength and simplicity recall the ’Clarity Master.’

Footnote:

¹In spite of the fine state of preservation of its parts, this huge relief (some eleven feet high and three wide) had largely fallen from its stone support and lay in a thousand pieces on the floor. Thanks to an emergency grant from FAMSI, a team of six trained Mexican conservators labored eight months to reconstruct it. With rare foresight, setting a standard for this type of archaeological excavation, Project Director Alfonso Morales insisted on the laborious collection and preservation of every scrap and chip of stucco. Many of these were the consistency of toothpaste, requiring extreme care and skill to preserve and dry out without further damaging them. Preserving the undecorated and interstitial fragments of the stucco bed allowed the team eventually to reconstruct the entire text in order, unlike the Temple XVIII texts.

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