Maya News Updates 2010, No. 9: Tonina, Chiapas - Some Photographs of the Stuccoed Wall with Dedicatory Text
On Friday, January 29, 2010, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel posted a short video newsreport on the recent discovery of the tomb and sarcophagus at Tonina, Chiapas, Mexico. I thank Kai Delvendahl for sending me the link. In MNU 2010, No. 8, I posted some screenshots of the tomb and some of the finds. This video also shows the stuccoed wall with dedicatory text. In this update I post some screenshots of the stuccoed wall, again unfortunately not of the highest quality. Part of the stuccoed narrative still retains the original paint and colors. The iconography shows a large Death God, comparable to the one on the well-known stucco facade. The dedicatory text is subject of epigraphic research by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e History. Carlos Pallan Gayol, director of AGIMAYA, recently informed me that this stuccoed wall was excavated earlier than 2009. An epigraphic note (including a drawing made with permission) by Yuriy Polyukhovich, received in February 2007, shows that the stuccoed wall and its dedicatory text were excavated some time in 2006. The multicoloring of some of the collocations (note the red eye of the GOD.N main sign in the dedicatory verb) in this text is extraordinary. As the text is part of ungoing epigraphic research I will refer to only one detail (as this particular detail is an entry in my 2009 updated vocabulary, see its page 98). After the dedicatory verb one can find the spelling 'u-ko-to for u-kot. As Yuriy Polyukhovich suggested in his note, u-kot most probably means "the wall of/his wall" (compare to "Diccionario Maya Cordemex", kot - pared o cerca de piedras seco sin barro):




The first screenshot shows the hieroglyphic text just below the visual narrative on the wall. The second screenshot shows the head of the Death God, part still containing the original color. The last three screenshots show the middle part of the dedicatory text. The original video can be found here.