THE PALENQUE TRIAD

by Heinrich BERLIN.

Sweeping attempts to « read » the Maya inscriptions have failed time and again and there is little chance that they will succeed in the near future. One of the reasons for these failures seems to be that the vast non-calendaric material has not even been properly organized. Few efforts have been made so far to work out how glyphs interact, affect others, and may be related to specific dates. In other words, more studies of patterns are necessary. Such studies will show whether all Maya cities use the same patterns or different ones ; just as with individual glyphs there may be general patterns as well as very local ones. The common patterns, then, most likely will treat the same subject matter, the local ones topics peculiar to the cities where they occur exclusively. Further : though a pattern discovered for one town may not be found to work for other cities, it still may give clues for solving problems at other sites.

In the present study we are going to experiment with three non-calendaric glyphs very prominent in the inscriptions at Palenque. For this study the illustrations should be consulted in the publications cited in the reference list at the end of this paper.

At Palenque even the casual visitor cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the temples of the Cross (TC), Foliated Cross (TFC) and Sun (TS), and to recognize that these three temples, grouped around a plaza, form a very specific unit in the general layout of the city. Thus the visual impression already anticipates the formula : three in one. Studying the temples more closely one could demonstrate how TC and TS show, within the group, the widest differences and that TFC keeps a middle position : now leaning more towards TC, now more towards TS. It is not necessary to elaborate here on the proofs for the foregoing statement, but we may say already that our study will bear it out from a completely new viewpoint.

Besides the famous inner tablets of the sanctuaries each temple originally had a great wealth of additional inscriptions :

the sanctuary door jambs, the sanctuary outer tablets, the stuccoed piers, the balustrade slabs.