Zender 2009 the Naming

7/27/2019 Zender 2009 the Naming

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Zender Colas Festschrift 1

The Naming Insight:Hieroglyphic Names & Social Identity in the Pre-Columbian Americas1

Marc Zender, Peabody Museum, Harvard [email protected]

I therefore propose a dynamic model of name acquisition.Name acquisition was a means to enhance and legitimizepower throughout a kings life. It was an ongoing andgradual process. The accession was one such decisivemoment, but others were equally important.

Pierre Robert Colas (2001:9)

As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelledonto the other the word water... and somehow the mysteryof language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-rmeant the wonderful cool something that was flowing overmy hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave itlight, hope, joy, set it free! ... Everything had a name...

Helen Keller (1903:28)

Introduction

In several seminal papers (2001, 2003, 2006, 2007), and in the publication of hisdissertation (2004), Pierre Robert Colas developed a dynamic model of ClassicMayan onomastics that remains both foundational and insightful, with much stillto contribute to our understanding of the structure, acquisition, and significanceof the personal names and titles of Classic Mayan elites.

Colas (2001) initial insight that Classic Maya dynasts did not so much changetheir names throughout their careers as acquire novel nominal elements andepithets in accordance with their evolving sociopolitical roles (e.g., accession,death) served to harmonize previous observations by epigraphers that Mayanrulers took new names upon their accessions (Eberl and Graa-Behrens 2000,2004) with the classic anthropological concept ofrites de passage (Gluckman 1962,Turner 1967, Van Gennep 1909), which several scholars had already shown wassignificant to the interpretation of accession rituals and iconography (Bonavides

1This is a preliminary paper prepared for the conference Maya Culture: Identity, Language and

History A Celebration of the Life and Work of Pierre Robert Colas held at Vanderbilt

University, Nashville, Tennessee, September 26-27, 2009. As this is still very much a work in

progress, please do not cite without written permission of the author.


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1992, Le Fort 2000). This convergence further allowed Colas to identify a crucialseparation in the names of Classic Maya rulers between personal names servingas rigid designators (i.e., invariable, unambiguous referents to a kings self, seeKripke 1972:270) and more ambiguous names, titles and epithets whichdesignated a kings socially-definedperson (Colas 2001, 2003). Colas model hasbeen of immense utility in teasing apart concepts of individual and socially-constituted identity, as well as for the investigation of Classic Mayan concepts ofdivine authority (cf. Houston and Stuart 1995, Zender 2004).

It may perhaps come as something of a surprise that Pierres model, initiallyconceived in his early twenties, should have proven so robust and productive,but there are several reasons why this should be so. For one, his work alwaystook full advantage of the fruits of Mayan decipherment, to which he was anactive contributor. For another, his knowledge of hieroglyphs was balanced byhis familiarity with modern Mayan languages (particularly Yucatec) and theirsemantic, morphological, and syntactic possibilities. But perhaps mostimportantly, Pierre was always careful to position his theories thoughtfully

within broader anthropological and philosophical discourses, and he took cross-cultural comparisons very seriously, finding much of interest in more than acentury of onomastic and philological studies of the elite inscriptions of Egyptand Mesopotamia.

In Pierres most recent papers, and in a book in preparation at the time of hisdeath, he continued to refine his dynamic model, becoming increasinglyconcerned with regional and temporal variations in Mayan naming practices.His identification of an ethnic boundary running roughly along the Usumacintariver drainage, proposed largely on the basis of the geographic distribution oftwo distinct types of names in the region (Colas 2006), is well borne out by recentwork on language variation in the Classic Maya lowlands. In another paper

(Colas 2007), he revisited the topic of name acquisition once again, showing thatthis perspective still had much to contribute with his demonstration that ClassicMaya kings acquired yet further names upon their deaths, surely the mostpoignant of all rites of passage. It is a tragedy of the first order that Pierre neverhad the opportunity to continue his onomastic research in all of the promisingdirections that were constantly being suggested to him.

This paper touches upon many of the aspects of naming and identity that were ofgreat interest to Pierre, but it treads lightly in evaluating and extending thoseconcepts, its purpose being rather the consideration of Pierres model in lightnaming traditions elsewhere in the New World. Following a review of the key

anthropological, philosophical, and literary concepts of naming, I suggestsome tentative first steps towards an integrated view of the pictorial and glyphicrepresentation of names among the Classic Maya (ca. AD 600-900), the LatePostclassic Aztecs (ca. AD 1300-1521), and in the Plains Pictographic tradition ofthe late 18th and early 19th centuries. If this perspective is valid, then theremarkable similarities between these traditions may suggest new possibilitiesfor cross-cultural comparisons in the domain of names and social identity in thepre-Columbian Americas.


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Whats in a Name?

The potential for the confusion ofname with named is an ever-present peril, andthe question of identity is a correspondingly rich one in literature. As theimmortal Bard himself famously asks:

What's in a name? that which we call a RoseBy any other word would smell as sweete;

Romeo and Juliet, II, 1, First Folio (1623: 59)

Shakespeare's argument, which no doubt many of us share, is that while a thingand its name stand in a powerful and important relationship, the name isnonetheless not the thing itself. But that he even presents this idea forcontemplation suggests that Shakespeare understood the complicated,interdependent relationship of name and named. At the very least, heunderstood that it was a problematic one for much of his audience.

Jorge Luis Borges, for his part, presents an even stronger view of the relationshipbetween name and thing, though he could only bring himself to do so in theconditional:

Si (como el griego afirma en el Cratilo)El nombre es arquetipo de la cosa,En las letras de rosa est la rosaY todo el Nilo en la palabra Nilo.

Jorge Luis Borges, El Golem (1964)

(If, as Plato affirms in Cratylus, the name is the archetype of a thing, then in theletters R-O-S-E one can find the rose, and all of the Nile in the word Nile.) We

may disagree with Plato, but the sentiment is familiar, and significant enoughthat Shakespeare and Borges discuss it. The question is: are names naturali.e., inevitable? Do words in fact have an intrinsic relationship to the things theysignify? Or is language, as linguists tell us, just a system of arbitrary sound-meaning pairings?

Today, the strong form of the name-entity relationship isn't pursued by manyscholars. While the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1905)argued that most or even all English names described (or at least indirectlyreferred) to named entities, most scholars would now follow the causal theoristSaul Kripke (1972, 1980), who argued that names are best seen as rigid

designators: terms referring to entities independently of any properties held bythem. To the extent that names and entities do frequently seem to be natural orconventional i.e., if the word valley sounds appropriate for a low-lying areabetween mountains, or vine sounds like something that ought to wind its wayaround trees Kripke would have explained this as the result of a long-termcausal connection with the named object as mediated through communities ofspeakers. In other words, we all conspire to habituate words and their referents.So much so, in fact, that very few English speakers are aware that both valleyand vine are words that English borrowed from French. Indeed, every English


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word that begins with a v- was ultimately borrowed from French (or Latin). Butsuch is the power of the consensual use of vocabulary that hundreds of thesewords now sound as English as any others.

The active creation of meaning, in which human agents and cultural memoriesboth play major roles, is nowhere more visible than in the domain of personalnames and titles, the subject of this paper. Cross-culturally, as mentioned above,names are frequently bequeathed in ceremonies associated with rites de passage(Van Gennep 1909). One such context is baptism. Such ceremonies are not byany means restricted to newborns or young children; the key feature is thereceipt of a new name corresponding to a new social identity. Marriage isanother significant event of this kind. In English-speaking countries, and inmany other parts of the Western world, it has until recently been traditional for awoman to take the surname of her husband at their wedding. Again, the newsocial identity compels the change of name. Going one step further, we mightreasonably ask whether the name of the present Roman Catholic pope is moreappropriately Joseph Alois Ratzinger or Benedict XVI. Cross-culturally and

diachronically, many high or sacred offices require the adoption of new names tomark the successful transition to a new social status. In the ancient world, manyrulers are known to have marked changes of identity, role, and responsibility bythe acquisition of a new name (Beckerath 1984; Colas 2001, 2003; Eberl andGraa-Behrens 2000, 2004; Quirke 1990).

Hieroglyphic Names in Ancient Mesoamerica

Let us now turn to Mesoamerica and examine some of the artistic, epigraphicand material correlates of these principles of naming in the rich material cultureof this region. I hope to show that many of the features of what we have so farrather uncritically called names their use as rigid designators, their

cultural continuity, and their adoption to mark a transition to new socialidentities are in fact present in all of the cultures in this region, beginning atleast 3,000 years ago, and quite possibly significantly earlier. Secondly, in myopinion, rather too much has been made of distinctions between writing and art(or pictography) with respect to the recording of names. Although it isobviously significant to know whether a graphic communication system hadrecourse to phonetic signs or not, I would like to show that all of the writingsystems of Mesoamerica had recourse to the pictographic principle and regularlyused it alongside and occasionally even in lieu of phonetic writing. As we willsee, these observations have interesting implications for the study of Plainspictography, suggesting that a widely-shared repertoire of pictographic signs is

at least a valid possibility, albeit one that will need to be carefully demonstratedin such documents as we have. These considerations are taken up again towardsthe end of the paper.

Name glyphs appear as integral parts of some of the oldest known portraits ofthe Americas. Although still more than a little enigmatic, the colossal sculptedheads of the Olmec are agreed by most scholars to represent the individualizedportraits of powerful individuals, most likely rulers. To take just one example,Colossal Head 2 from the site of San Lorenzo (Figure 1), three evident macaw


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heads are lined up in the headdress of this stately if battered portrait of an earlypotentate. Are we justified in regarding this as his name, or could it just havebeen a decoration on his headband? As David Kelley (1982) noted some yearsago in an important paper published in Visual Language, all later Mesoamericancultures visually associated name glyphs with the head or face. As the seat of anindividual's most distinctive physical characteristics, the head is a very logicallocale for these all-important linguistic badges of identity. Moreover, theprinciple may well be a universal one, appearing as it does in Egyptian sculpture,Etruscan painting, and even the Plains Pictographic tradition. No visual cultureknown to me regularly wrote the names of depicted individuals beside their feet.Whether one is willing to follow specialists in identifying Olmec Colossal Headsas the named portraits of historical individuals or not, still clearer examples ofthe principle appear about 2,000 years ago in the Highlands of Guatemala. OnKaminaljuyu Monument 65 (Figure 2), three cross-legged personages wearingjade necklaces and seated on small benches each wear distinctive headdressescontaining glyphs known from later contexts in the Lowlands. The topmost isnamed, in part, Sky, the middle is Sun, and the lowest is Snake's Tooth.If later

Classic Period namesakes are any indication, his name may have beenpronounced *Ukohkan Kaan, though the divide in time and possibly evenlanguage makes any such attempt hazardous in the absence of phoneticevidence. What seems certain is that Snake's Tooth or a successor had an interestin recording his military successes against at least two named contemporaries.Each of the depicted lords receives two kneeling, nearly naked prisoners withhands lashed together in front of them. The prisoners, too, wear their names asdistinctive headdresses and hairstyles.

A much more detailed arrangement appears on Piedras Negras Panel 2 (Figure3), commissioned in the late 7th-century. Here, king Turtle Tooth I receives theallegiance of six young lords from the nearby city-states of Yaxchilan, Bonampak

and Lacanja. The entire scene is dated by a framing hieroglyphic text toNovember 11th, AD 510 (Martin and Grube 2008: 144). Above the kneelingfigures are their personal names, titles, and cities of origin. The central figure'sdecorative headdress sends a spray of feathers through the main text preciselywhere his name is to be found. This kind of text-image interplay, welldocumented in Maya monuments of the period (Wald 1997), leaves us with nodoubt as to when and where the exploits of this king took place.

Like the Piedras Negras ruler, the account of the Aztec Emperor Axayacatl'sconquest of Tlatelolco in AD 1473 is a model of detailed reporting (Figure 4).Produced in the early 16th-century, the Codex Cozcatzin combines indigenous

hieroglyphs and narrative pictography with a Nahuatl text written in the Romanalphabet. The two accounts are parallel, with significantly more detail providedin the alphabetic text, yet all of the key historical facts are presented in theindigenous system: the year of event (top left), the place from which Axayacatlcame (Tenochtitlan), his name glyphs attached to his head, the day on which hearrived at Tlatelolco, the name of his adversary (Moquihix), and the name of thetemple at Tlatelolco upon which he slew his rival. Clearly there is a disparitybetween the amount of detail provided at early Kaminaljuyu and that among thelater Maya and Aztecs, yet there is also a conservative thread: names and their


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privileged associations with the heads and faces of their owners. This is whereidentification begins and ends; that is, it would appear to be the minimalnecessary identifier, both in contemporary and later traditions.

I would like to turn now to a brief consideration of the aptly-named PalaceTablet of Palenque, originally situated in the long northern structure of the site'sroyal residence (Figure 5). Commissioned by K'inich K'an Joy Chitam II in AD720, its motive was to explain his assumption of power at the rather advancedage of 57. Such lengthy texts are usually responses to some real or perceivedirregularity in dynastic descent (Martin and Grube 2008). More than twohundred hieroglyphs recount the king's birth, coming-of-age, and the accessionsof a long-lived father and elder brother, striving to set forth his own claim to thethrone with the maximum amount of possible detail. For our purposes, the mostimportant portions of the panel are those which reflect the king's changes ofname. At birth he is called Uhx Ak'iin(?) Mat, and he carries this name for 57years. Then, at his accession, we are told that he takes the royal name K'inichK'an Joy Chitam II (Eberl and Graa-Behrens 2000, 2004). There are several

parallels here with Pope Benedict XVI. Not only did this ruler assume a new andsacred identity very late in his life, but he also took a new name to mark it.Further, he isn't the first to have held that particular royal name; such nameswere often passed down within descent lines, sometimes for hundreds of years.

Names were both descriptive and predictive in Ancient Mesoamerica. In onescene from Bernardino de Sahagn's Florentine Codex (Figure 6), an Aztec divinerreads the fortune of a child born on the dayMahtlactli Tochtli (10 Rabbit). Amongthe Aztecs, children were named after the day on which they were born, andsince each day had an associated significance, so too did children have ready-made personalities, behaviors and social roles ascribed to them.2

The Structure of Classic Mayan Hieroglyphic Names

Now that we have explored the functions of some of these names we can pass toa consideration of their structure. In Figure 7, I have collected three differentversions of the name of K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Chahk, or Thunder burns the skywith Fire, a Late Classic ruler of Naranjo (Martin and Grube 2008: 74-77). Thefirst is a painted example from the famous Buenavista del Cayo vessel (K4464),the second is a drawing of his name as carved on Naranjo Stela 23, and the thirddepicts the king seated on a throne conjuring wind and lightning, his nameliterally incorporated into his elaborate headdress, as carved on the face ofNaranjo Stela 22. What's fascinating about all of these variants is that the signs

involved in this name have rather heterogeneous origins.For example, the first sign in all three spellings is KAHK fire. It is an evidentpictograph: a pictorial sign used to communicate the word for the object itdepicts. Flames are depicted, and flames are meant. This sign is followed in the

2Unfortunately for the poor mother, 10 Rabbit is a day associated with drunkenness. Resolute in

the face of adversity, she's doubtless thinking great, just like his father.


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first two examples by the pictograph of a tapir, an endangered relative of thehorse native to Central and South America. The word for tapir in ClassicCh'olti'an was TIL, but the sign doesn't mean tapir here. Rather it stands forthe homophonous verb til to burn. This is what we call a rebus, which is apictorial sign used for its sound value instead of its meaning. Rebus is a handyprinciple to have, since many words and concepts are not easily depicted. Andcertainly any sign for burning would be apt to be confused with one for fireproper. In the third example, if we decipher the signs in the king's headdress wedon't find a picture of the tapir, but we do find two purely phonetic signs ti andli, which together spell til to burn. That a verb is indeed intended rather thanthe word tapir is indicated by the wi phonetic sign which appears in all threeexamples; this provides us with a verbal suffix that could not appear on the nountapir. The remaining signs are also pictographs: CHAN sky is somewhatstylized, but essentially represents a bright surface; CHAHK thunder is itself aportrait of the Maya Storm God, Chahk, whose name literally means Thunder.(As does the name of the Norse God Thor.)

Perhaps a word is in order here about the translation of this rulers name asThunder Burns the Sky with Fire. As Nikolai Grube (2002:348) has pointedout, royal names of this formi.e., complex predicates involving aspects of oneor more named deitieswere exceedingly common during the Classic Period(see also Houston and Stuart 1995; Grube 2001; Martin and Grube 2008). Suchnames are remarkably different from the kinds of names we find in the 7th-9thcentury Southern Lowland inscriptions and those documented for the much laterColonial period (e.g., Roys 1940, Carrasco 1964, Feldman 1983). For one thing,calendar names, common in the Colonial era (Baroco 1970) are very rare in thehieroglyphs. For another, patronyms and matronyms, also well-known fromlater sources, seem not to have existed in Classic times (cf. Bricker 2003 andGrube 2003: 344-348). Clearly there have been substantial changes in naming

patterns in the seven centuries separating the Classic period from our firstdocumentation of Mayan names in the Roman alphabet by early 16th-centuryfriars.3

Having dissected a typical royal name of the Eastern Classic Maya Lowlands, itis now time to revisit a little of the unfortunate history of the terminology ofwriting. Ignace Gelb (1952) is largely to blame for a now thoroughly discreditedview of the evolution of writing from pictures and pictographs to rebus and,eventually, fully phonetic systems such as syllabaries and alphabets. Theproblems for such a view are many, but the two most devastating are, first, thatscholars have yet to find evidence that any one system passed through any of

these stages. Communicative systems are conservative entities, and while scripts3To be clear, it is important to note two limiting factors on this conclusion: first, only the names

of apical elites are available to us from Classic times, leaving open the possibility that

commoners names may have shown more continuity; second, there is pronounced regional

variation in these naming patterns, such that most royal names west of the Usumacinta do not

show the predicate structure involving deity names (Colas 2006). Nonetheless, it cannot be

gainsaid that all of these names are still of a different kind than those documented in our

Colonial-era sources. More work is needed to explore the reasons for this divide.


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frequently change character and composition when borrowed from one group tothe next no known writing system ever passed from logographic to syllabic toalphabetic stages. Second, as we have just seen in the name of K'ahk' Tiliw ChanChahk, pictographic, rebus and purely syllabic signs comfortably cohabit inMayan writing, as indeed elsewhere.

For these reasons, I much prefer a view of pictography, rebus and phoneticwriting as contemporary and largely independent communicative tactics. Tobe sure, they certainly interact, and some individual signs in Egyptian, AkkadianCuneiform and Mayan do indeed move from pictography to rebus, or from rebusto the purely phonetic. But movement in the opposite direction is also known,and such cases are better seen as sporadic, historical changes affecting individualsigns, not as developmental stages undergone by entire systems. To argueotherwise would be tantamount to a claim that the use of the English letter X inXmas (Christmas) means that the English alphabet as a whole is becominglogographic.

Hieroglyphic Names of the Aztec Emperors

Let us turn now to the Aztecs, and to some specific examples of the use of nameglyphs that I believe will prove most instructive when we pass on to a briefcomparative look at Plains Pictography. First of all: how were Aztec glyphsdeciphered? Here we are indebted to early Franciscan missionaries like Sahagnwho provided us with a Rosetta Stone in the form of lists of hieroglyphicnames and contemporary translations and interpretations. Yet this has alsoproved something of a two-edged sword in that the translations were sothorough that scholars neglected until recently to study the internal systematicsof Aztec writing itself. This is only being done now, in work led by the Spanishscholar Alfonso Lacadena (2008), but at last we can begin to offer an internal

critique of early Spanish interpretations using the Aztecs' own writing system asour basis (see also Zender 2008).

As we know from both written and oral histories, the name of the 8th AztecTlahtoani of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was Ahuitzotzin, literally Revered Otter. Yethis name was almost always written with but the single pictograph AWITZO, adepiction of the river otter. The element meaning revered or sacred wasprovided by the reverential suffix -tzin, but while often written in toponyms andthe occasional personal name it is never (to my knowledge) included inAhuitzotzin's name glyph. Rather, as can be seen in a compilation of severalexamples (Figure 8a-d), his name is usually indicated only by the stylized

portrait of a river otter, often either attached to the king's portrait by a thin lineor hovering just above his head. The water cascading down the creature's backserves as a useful diagnostic, separating the sign for otter from that for dog.Indeed, so distinctive was this name glyph that it could appear entirely divorcedfrom iconography as a name-stone associated with the Tepozteco temple inMorelos (Figure 8-d). Here there is still no -tzin suffix to be seen, and theabbreviation would therefore appear to be standard. Only the unlikelihood thatthe temple carvings would be referring to an actual otter (as opposed to acommissioning ruler named otter) stands in the way of potential ambiguity.


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Abbreviation is even more rampant in the name of Motecuhzoma II, literally HeFrowns like a Lord or He is Angry like a Lord (Figure 9). In all instancesknown to me the only element written is TEKW, in origin a complex pictographrepresenting the turquoise headband and nose-plug of royalty, but usedmetonymically for the Nahuatl word tekw-tli, lord (David Stuart, personalcommunication 2006). It is important to point out that Aztec writing had thecapability to write the initial m- (a pronoun) as well as the final verb-root smato frown, be angry, and did so in numerous other script contexts whereambiguity may have been more of a factor. Whatever the reason for its lack here,it was apparently considered sufficient to write the head noun tekw as a clue tothe full name Motecuhzoma. I have always found such abbreviations fascinatingin their own right, but in the space left to me I would like to explore theirimplications for Plains pictography.

Plains Indian Pictography

The recent rediscovery of the Houghton Ledger provides a welcome opportunityto tests models and interpretations of Plains pictography first advanced morethan 120 years ago.4 According to the analysis of Castle McLaughlin (2009), folio56 of the ledger (Figure 10), one of 77 painted by some five different artists,depicts a Lakota Warrior probably named Thunder Hawk in battle with a rivalIndian. Thunder Hawk is astride a horse, and fires his rifle at his adversary. Aspray of smoke and gunpowder issues from the weapon, and a line traces thepath of the bullet. Thunder Hawk's name is given above his head, to which it isattached by a thin line. Two signs seem to be involved, so this glyph is alreadytwice as complex as those employed for the names of most Aztec Emperors. Thefirst is a raptorial bird, so indicated by its spread wings, as a hawk coastingthermal winds. The second sign is a jagged line indicative of sacred noise.Taken together, Thunder Hawk (Lakota Cetan Wakiyan) seems a veryreasonable interpretation. As I will show below, however, Medicine Hawk orSacred Hawk are additional possibilities which might be considered.

The study of Plains pictography began with the remarkable pioneering work ofColonel Garrick Mallery. A well-known lawyer in mid-19th centuryPhiladelphia, Colonel Mallery received his commission during the Civil War,and eventually served as President of the Philosophical Society of Washington.But his true passion was Plains gestural and pictographic communication.Working closely with Sioux speakers, Indian agents, and missionaries, Mallerypublished several influential studies during the late 19th century. His modestly-

4TheHoughton Ledger was acquired by James Howard during the 1870s, who retitled it The

Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Uncpapa Sioux Chiefand bound it in along with an

introduction before selling it to a New York book dealer, after which the volume came to

Harvard's Houghton Library as part of a bequest in 1930. This layered document reflects a history

of violent interactions between Lakota Sioux and Anglo-Americans as they fought for control of

the Great Plains during the 1860s and 1870s (McLaughlin 2009). Now Houghton MS. Am

2337, this manuscript is the focus of ongoing research by the Houghton Library, the Peabody

Museum, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.


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titled Pictographs of the North American Indians, a Preliminary Paper, published bythe Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology in 1887, ran to 256 pages and includedover 300 figures. But his magnum opus was Picture-Writing of the AmericanIndians, first published in 1894, and containing 807 quarto pages and over 1,000figures and plates. This is literally an embarras de richesses,but instead ofprompting continued work on the system, Mallery's detailed catalog insteadseems to have misled his contemporaries and followers into the mistaken beliefthat the depths of Plains pictography had been plumbed, and furthersystematization has hardly been attempted by modern students. The parallelstory of Aztec decipherment could hardly be closer (Zender 2008). Yet the dataare there, and there are many powerful models available from studies of writingsytems south of the border. Let us hope that the rediscovery of the HoughtonLedger may provoke some of this necessary work of systematization, preferablyby those already familiar with Lakota and other relevant Siouan languages.

As but one example of the richness of Mallery's work, let us look at a page fromPictographs of the North American Indians (Figure 11). As indicated, this is a copy

of a drawing made by Lean Wolf of the Hidatsa, a Siouan people who todayprefer the name Minitari. Mallery's description is a model of succincticonographic interpretation: The horns on the head-dress show that he is a chief.The eagle feathers on his war-bonnet ... show high distinction as a warrior. Hisauthority as ... leader of a war party is represented by the elevated pipe. Hisname is ... added with the usual line drawn from the head (Mallery 1894:168).In addition, Mallery cites Lean Wolf as explaining that the outline character ofthe wolf, having a white body with mouth unfinished was drawn this way toshow that it was hollow ... i.e., lean (ibid. 168). Finally, he points out thediagnostic tail, a feature distinguishing wolf from coyote, and reminiscent of thedisambiguating water scrolls of the Aztec otter.

Among the brightest jewels scattered through Mallery's works is the publicationof the pictorial roster of 84 families in the band of Chief Big Road of the OglalaSioux. Submitted to Major McLaughlin, the Agent at Standing Rock in theDakota Territory, it seems to have been drawn shortly before 1883. It then cameinto the possession of one Rev. Hinman, who informs us that the portraits werenumbered and the names translated by the agency interpreter and although notas complete as might be, are, on the whole, satisfactory (Mallery 1887:174). Theroster is now in the National Anthropological Archives of the SmithsonianInstitution, Washington. Just as the translations of early Franciscan missionariesprovided scholars with the key to Aztec hieroglyphic writing, Malleryrecognized that here in the unnamed agency interpreter's reading of Chief Big

Road's roster was a potential Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of Plainspictographs.

Of the 84 named individuals in the roster, Figure 12 shows a detail of 35 of themalong with the names provided by the interpreter. At the front of each line is achief marked as such by distinctive red-and-blue face paint, and a decorated pipeand pouch. Certain high-ranking warriors are indicated by their face-paint andwarclubs. Many intriguing patterns emerge from examination of these nameglyphs, and here are just a few of them:


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(1) The color BLUE clearly equates with Iron in the translations. Thus, IronHawk (46), Iron WhiteMan (76), and Iron Boy (81). But sometimes BLUE justmeans blue, as we can see with Blue Cloud (62) and Blue Hawk (79). InLakota, Blue Cloud is Arapaho, though here the context suggests a personalname rather than the well-known ethnonym.

(2) Note the generally consistent visual differences between CROW (51, 59, 78),HAWK (47, 53, 73, 79), OWL (67) and EAGLE (53, 69). As raptors, the signs forhawk and eagle share certain conventions, but the diagnostic for the former isspread, pointed wings, whereas the latter always involves a white feather withblack tip. This is perhaps clearest in the name Eagle Hawk (53), where thefeatures of both birds merge. There are some inconsistencies, however, and werethe signs entirely canonical, we would expect the name BlueHawk (79) to be infact *Blue Crow. The unlikely color combination may be a factor. In any case, afair degree of consistency emerges, and I think it clear that the bird in theHoughton Ledger is indeed a hawk as McLaughlin (2009) has proposed.

(3) Another fascinating element is the jagged lines sign twice translated asSacred. Thus, in the name ofSacred Teeth (64), a thin line joins a field ofjagged lines to the figure's mouth or teeth. In the name ofSacred Crow (78), thecharacteristically perching bird emits three jagged lines from the top of his head.Elsewhere, as we will see in a moment, these same jagged lines are translated asMystic, Medicine and Thunder, raising the possibility that the name of theHoughton Ledger figure may in fact have been Sacred Hawk or MedicineHawk, though Thunder Hawk nonetheless remains an equally strongcandidate.

In Figure 13, I have compiled several examples of the jagged lines element fromthree different sources. The five examples on the upper line come from another

interpreted roster commissioned in 1884 by Red Cloud, Chief of the Pine RidgeLakota, and reproduced here from Mallery (1887). I have also included the twoexamples from Chief Big Road's roster, and three iterations of the ThunderHawk name from the Houghton Ledger. Note that Thunder, Medicine andSacred all emerge as equally valid interpretations. It's quite probable thatthere is a semantic linkage between these concepts, as Mallery himself allows.Indeed, in explaining the name Medicine Bird in Red Cloud's Census, heobserves that The word medicine is in the Indian sense ... and would be morecorrectly expressed by the word sacred, or mystic, as is also indicated by thewaving lines issuing from the mouth (Mallery 1887: Fig.289).

I strongly suspect that working from the original Lakota terms would be veryhelpful in searching out further relationships, since it is only in this domain thatpotential rebus usages might be recognized. Others will be better equipped thanmyself to be able to say whether Medicine Hawk or Sacred Hawk was adocumented warrior's name in the era of the Houghton Ledger, but I mention theidea to see whether it generates some possibilities, and in the hopes that itmotivates further work on the range of expressions possible in PlainsPictography.


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Concluding Comments

This paper has explored several aspects of onomastics and the hieroglyphicrepresentation of names that were of great interest to Pierre Robert Colas duringhis tragically short but nonetheless highly productive career. While Pierreswork focused on the social and political significance of names among the ClassicMaya nobilityincreasingly from a broad geographical and diachronicperspectivehe nonetheless found much of value in the consideration ofunrelated Old World traditions in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Such comparisonswere, however, always grounded in a realistic assessment of the hieroglyphicdata on Classic Maya names, and the linguistic evidence for permissiblesemantic, morphological and syntactic combinations: fields which Pierrecontrolled admirably.

This paper has been offered in the spirit of complementing Pierre's detailed lookat Maya onomastics (supplemented with comparable material from othertraditions) with a global look at pre-Columbian representation of names from

traditions widely separated in time and space (supplemented with in-depthexplorations of representative examples from each tradition). Once one discardsearlier biases against the Aztec and Plains Indian traditions, surprisingly similarpatterns of the pictorial representation of names can be found between to haveobtained in the pre-Columbian Americas for some three millennia, from at leastthe Olmec horizon until the late 19th-century AD. Further, as Pierre noted in hisown studies of name acquisition among the Classic Maya, examples from evenfurther afield can also prove instructive and enlightening. There is something sobasically human about the naming insightthe discovery that all things havenames, and that there is an intimate and interdependent relationship betweenname and named (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1998)that it cross-cuts many distincttraditions, uniting phenomena as superficially diverse as Shakespeare's plays,

the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, Egyptian royal art, Mayan stelae, Aztec codicesand Plains Indian ledgers.


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Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Lesley Gill, Sergio Romero, Norbert Ross and MiriamShakow for the kind invitation to contribute to this celebration of Robbys lifeand work. I would also like to thank Norma Antillon for her kindness andindustry in arranging my travel and accommodations, and for her patience as Istruggled to finish this (still very preliminary) paper in time for the symposium.Previous versions of these ideas were presented in a Workshop at DumbartonOaks organized by Joanne Pillsbury, Diana Sorensen and Jan Ziolkowski (March6-7, 2009) and also at the Peabody Museum Weekend of the Americas (April 3-4,2009) organized by Castle McLaughlin. I would like to thank the organizers ofthose events, as well as my fellow presenters and the conference participants, formany stimulating suggestions which have improved my thinking immeasurably.This paper is dedicated to Pierre Robert Colas, inwitzin.


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Documents

Zender 2009 the Naming