The Manikin Sceptre: Emblem of lineage

Abstract

In official Maya portraiture the manikin scepter was one of the most important insignia of the male rulers. As a central icon it carried great! symbolic weight, and expressed a cluster of closely interrelated cultural concepts. In this paper it is suggested these concepts may be revealed in several punning or loosely homophonous words that probably also include Mayan names for the scepter. Recent work in the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic writing has been particularly successful in identifying the ancient uses of phoneticism in Mayan epigraphy (Justeson and Campbell, editors, 1984). This approach includes recognition of the inherent polysemy of Mayan languages, which may have many meanings for a single word, and that in the hierogrlyphic writing system "signs may have more than one canonical value" (Fox and Justeson, 1984, p. 17). This polyvalence of Mayan epigraphy is assumed here to be equally inherent in the iconography, or visual symbols, of Maya imagery. Although several closely related languages were spoken during the millennium and in the places where the symbols considered here were employed, a conceptual continuity is apparent in their use; in the following interpretation of an important aspect of Maya ideology only the language of the latest examples of the iconographic cluster, Yucatecan, has been consulted,' and hypotheses about the use of "wordplay" to convey a cluster of inter-related meanings are made without regard to the distinction between plain and glottalized consonants.