Reading Pictures and Picturing Readers in Pre-Linguistic Cultures. (04/18/2002)
Serendipitously, I happened to find an article in the NY Times that describes a scene depicted on an Egyptian stone tablet of someone believed to be the Scorpion King who has been made popular in recent movies about mummies returning from the dead to plague modern society. The tablet was discovered several years ago by archeologists Dr. John Coleman Darnell, and his wife, Dr. Deborah Darnell. The tablet has a number of symbols carved on its surface which seem to be early examples of the hieroglyphic sign-system we have come to know as one of the earliest attempts by human beings to transcribe spoken language into written words. This particular stone, if such signs actually exist on its surface, will win the prize for being the oldest example of writing found anywhere in the world. The Darnells associate the depiction with the Scorpion King because two symbols occurring in close proximity to each other in the "text" are identifiable as "falcon," a sign used to signify kingship in later examples of Egyptian writing, and as "scorpion," which they assume is the name of the king represented in the scene carved on the tablet. Coming back to the scene later, I used the word serendipity earlier to characterize this discovery (of the article not the stone) because I happened to watch a story about the founding king of the Maya dynasty at Copan, Honduras, on PBS (Nova, 04/16/2002) the night before I found and read the article in the Times. The Maya also developed and used a kind of picture-writing during the Classic period (200-800 AD), and probably well before that too (1000 BC), that is also referred to as being hieroglyphic. There is no cross-cultural similarity between Egyptian and Maya writing whatsoever. The founder of Copan's dynasty was named Yax-Kuk-Mo' ("Blue-Quetzal-Macaw") and arrived as Copan's ruler around 400 AD.
According to the PBS program, and the Maya scholars who contributed to it, Yax-Kuk-Mo' was not a native resident of Copan prior to his kingship but came there from a distant kingdom in the region, attacked the local power structure with some sort or degree of armed force, and overthrew the "indigenous" rulers of the ceremonial center. There is even some consensus, in the absence of any evidence to support it, that Yax-Kuk-Mo' solidified his victory in the Copan valley by executing any members of the previous ruling family who managed to survive his war of conquest against them. Oddly enough, or not, this same perception of king-making events has been applied to the arrival of the Scorpion King in Egypt. He came from "elsewhere" with an armed force, overthrew the "indigenous" rulers, created a new kingdom, and publicly executed surviving members of the prior ruling family. He is also credited with founding the dynasty that ultimately led to the "Golden Age" of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Since Yax-Kuk-Mo' was followed by sixteen successors at Copan, all of whom claim him as their ancestor, virtually the same thing can be said of him: that he founded Copan's ruling dynasty.
In the NY Times article ("Of Early Writing and a King of Legend," 04/16/2002), John Noble Wilford provides the following explanation and summary of the material that has been read by scholars from the Egyptian stone tablet:
"The falcon-scorpion symbols are followed by a figure carrying a staff. Next is a long-necked bird with a serpent in its beak, probably a symbol of the victory of order over chaos. Then comes a bound captive with long hair, held by a rope connected to a bearded man with close-cropped hair, who is holding a mace. This is thought to be the vanquished ruler being led to public execution. A bull's head on a staff behind the prisoner, also seen on pots at Abydos, could represent the prisoner's name."
While no useful purpose can be served by objecting to the way this scene has been interpreted, and for all I know about Egyptian writing systems anything I might say would have to be taken as meaningless, there is, or might be, a valid question or two that one could ask. For instance, why is it thought that a serpent in the beak of a long-necked bird necessarily represents "the victory of order over chaos"? Perhaps there is ground for that reading of the textual symbol. In Mesoamerican iconography, a similar symbol occurs wherein an eagle with a serpent in his beak was thought to be a sign pointing to the best place for the Aztecs to build their largest city. There cannot be any connection between one thing and the other because of the time differential between Aztec (1400 AD) and Egyptian (3200 BC) depictions. A second striking parallel between the Egyptian scene and even numerous depictions of the same thing in Maya iconography is the existence of the "bound captive" being led by a rope to his "public execution" by the conquering king. A sign, like the "bull's head," which "could represent the prisoner's name," is also a common characteristic of the way in which Maya scholars read texts that depict such scenes, even ones in Copan.
More specifically, and according to Linda Schele and David Freidel, in A Forest of Kings (William Morrow, 1990), an event not completely dissimilar to the one on the Egyptian stone occurred near Copan to end the reign of the thirteenth successor to Yax-Kuk-Mo', a man whose name has been read as "18-Rabbit." In historical accounts, some at Copan and others at a neighboring ceremonial center called Quirigua, the Copanec ruler, at the height of his power, assisted a man named Cauac-Sky in becoming the new ruler of Quirigua. Thirteen years later, during a battle between the two kings, Cauac-Sky captured 18-Rabbit and publicly executed him several days later. Oddly, there is no evidence that Copan retaliated for the murder of its king, even though Copan was vastly more powerful than Quirigua at the time. Also curious is the fact that no mention of 18-Rabbit's death has been discovered on the stone monuments at Copan but occur only at Quirigua.
What seems so striking about the parallel here is that two cultures separated by thousands of miles of ocean-distance, and thousands of years in real time, where there is no possibility at all that one influenced the other, but where both used a form of picture writing that may or may not be strictly linguistic in nature, managed to produce depictions, read from stones, of kingly events that are almost identical in the details subsequently used to characterize power relationships among the "kingdoms" about which they speak. There is a certain logic, of course, in arguing that the source of the parallel in this kind of kingly behavior, where one king conquers and publicly executes his defeated rival, arises from the fact that both cultures that described such occurrences are actually closely equivalent in the level of achievement they have attained when these public events transpired. Early Egyptian and early Classic period Maya, when written text were just emerging in both cultures in hieroglyphic forms, cannot, or should not, be radically differentiated from each other because, while one reached this stage of conceptualization and expression much earlier than the other did, both are only primitive cultures on the grand stage of human evolution. Relatively speaking, as it were, ancient Egyptian behavior parallels the behavior of a much later, and much "younger," culture passing through identical developmental stages on its way to becoming sophisticated and mature. One would only expect the Maya to follow an identical path toward maturity, especially if the model proposed for Egyptian development is expected to stand scrutiny as a valid description of how and why cultures evolve.
The only genuine common ground between Egyptian and Mayan pictographs, and the way in which they are read and interpreted, is contained in the educational background of the people who have "learned" how to read them. In short, one can read pictures or one can picture readers. In this case it seems that the latter option has been the one chosen by scholars who see the same message written in 3200 BC by Egyptians and again in 400 AD by Mayas. Contemporary scholars tell us what ancient Egyptians and Mayas saw when they looked at the stones that were used in pre-linguistic systems of writing to describe the lives they were living. Exactly how scholars manage to bridge the gap between then and now, between there and here, is an issue not addressed even indirectly by experts in the field of reading cultural behavior in the ancient stones of an alien past. When two cultures as diverse in space and time as Egyptian and Mesoamerican are described in virtually identical terms one simply must question the validity of those scholarly perceptions.