Variant: fist

·    Features:

o A left hand with fingers quite tightly curled to form a fist, pointing downwards, viewed from the back of the hand.

o Typically, it’s the left hand, with the viewer looking at the back of the hand (i.e., not at the palm), but the K&H example shows a right hand, with the viewer looking at the palm.

·    Iconographic origin:

o The syllabogram k’o is derived from a (presumed former) logogram for k’oj = “knocking”.

·    Do not confuse this with CHOK, which has the index finger stretched out pointing downwards, with many tiny dots (representing droplets of incense) falling downwards from the hand.

·    TRT Monument 6 J17b has the thumb upwards, and it could be a right fist.

Variant: “kuch” above two kawaks

·    Features – a “vertical” bipartite glyph, with two components, stacked:

o Top – a horizontally rectangular, tripartite element (nicknamed) “KUCH”:

§ Left: three touching or non-touching dots, in a triangular formation, triangle pointing left.

§ Middle: a KAWAK.

§ Right: three touching or non-touching dots, in a triangular formation, triangle pointing right.

o Bottom – a rectangular, “tallish” component, symmetric along the vertical axis:

§ Outline:

·      Pear-shaped, with quite a deep (but narrow) “bay” in the centre of the floor.

·      When extremely narrow, it can become a vertical line reaching upwards from the middle of the bottom towards the centre

·      Narrow or a single line, it always starts a little higher than the floor level, because of the indentation in the floor, in the middle of the pear.

·      The floor (within indentation in the middle) can be plain or bold.

§ Insides:

·      At each side of the pear, on the inside, symmetrically, there’s a “pond” (= a semicircle or arc with a dotted protector on the outside). These may be anywhere from halfway up the walls to right in the left and right corners (as is the case for the “pond” on the right of WITZ’ and KAWAK).

·      On the inside of the pear, at the top, hanging from the ceiling, there’s a “stalactite” / “grapes”.

·      (Optionally, symmetrically placed along the vertical axis) there may be two small x’s.

The MGDV terms “pond”, “grapes/stalactite”, “x’s” merely describe the shape of these components and are unrelated to their iconographic origin. Instead, all three merely reflect the small cracks and fissures, and uneven surfaces (and scintillations?) of (non-polished) rocky / stoney surfaces. That’s the reason that all three elements are found in this glyph, as well as in WITZ’, and KAWAK.

·    Subvariants (2) – as so often the case, there is a full form and a reduced form:

o A. Full form: as given under “Features” above.

o B. Reduced form: just the top.

·    Thompson considered the reduced form to be an independent glyph and gave it the code T174.

o For some period of time, epigraphers considered this to be a logogram with the reading KUCH.

o I can’t find any standard sources giving KUCH as the reading for T174, but there must be some papers which have such a reading.

o The reduced form of k’o (=“KUCH”) is identical to reduced form of t’o (see t’o for further information).

Furthermore, Thompson considered the lower element k’o to be an independent glyph and gave it the code T530.

·    The approach to the reduced form taken by MHD and Bonn are slightly different:

o MHD:

§ Recognizes a full form for both k’o (MHD.ZCF(.1&2)) and t’o (MHD.AAA(.1)).

§ By implication, the reduced forms are k’o (MHD.ZCF(.3) and t’o (MHD.AAA(.2)).

§ MHD can hence distinguish the reduced forms of k’o and t’o from one another (as codes), even if:

·      The full and reduced forms are not distinguished from one another (as codes).

·      The reduced forms cannot be visually distinguished from one another.

o Bonn, in contrast:

§ Recognizes a full form for both k’o (0530bv) and t’o (0174bv) – this is “similar” to MHD.

§ There is also a code for the reduced form of k’o (0530bt), as there is also a code for the reduced form of t’o (0174bt).

·    Stuart-ANVotSk is the paper which first proposed the decipherment / reading of this glyph.

·    The example from Stuart-ANVotSk.p3.fig4b (TRT Monument 8 A22-A23) is an important step in the reading of this glyph as k’o because it is related to another monument (TRT Monument 6 J17), where the same noblewoman’s name – Ix Yan K’oj – is written IX.<ya:na:<k’o.jo>>, where the k’o is written with the common “fist”-variant (and the jo is written with the chronologically later and more common variant). This establishes substitution between the two variants of k’o.

·    Verifying this was made much more difficult due to three factors:

o A typo in the label of Stuart-ANVotSk.p3.fig4, where the glyph-block of fig4a – TRT Monument 6 – is labelled as being from TRT Monument 8 while the two glyph-blocks of fig4b – TRT Monument 6 – is labelled as being from TRT Monument 8 (i.e., the numbers of the two monuments were swapped).

o The glyphic text of TRT Monument 6 is written in a T-shaped area, where the left side of the horizontal bar of the T is completely eroded, leaving only the vertical bar and the right side of the horizontal bar of the T. Many drawings of TRT Monument 6 show only the vertical bar and the right side of the horizontal bar without even hinting that the left side of the horizontal bar exists. There is hence a tendency to start the column labels at A for the top glyph-block of the vertical bar. In fact, columns A-D (four columns) should be assigned to the completely missing/eroded left side of the horizontal bar. The vertical bar (of the “T” shape) is then columns E-L (eight columns) and the right side of the horizontal bar is columns M-P (another four columns). This is the labelling used by MHD, which I have adopted. Such a labelling is (apparently) done on the assumption that the T-shaped region of glyphic text is symmetrical along the vertical axis, with four columns each for the left and right side of the horizontal bar of the T. It is only with this labelling that the glyph-block with the full syllabogram-spelling ya-na-k’o-jo of the noblewoman’s name is J17.

o The glyphic text of TRT Monument 8 is around the edge of the top surface of the sarcophagus (i.e., lying “flat” on the surface) and around the actual edge of the lid of the sarcophagus (i.e., standing “vertically”, with respect to the ground). In one drawing, the former are assigned glyph-block numbers 1-84 and the latter are assigned glyph-block numbers 85-108. However, MHD (and perhaps Gronemeyer-MA also) label the former A1-A24 and latter B1-B81. It is only with this labelling that the glyph-blocks with the full syllabogram-spelling ya-na-k’o-jo (with the rarer k’o variant) of the noblewoman’s name is A22-A23.

·    Warning: do not confuse (on the one hand) MHD.ZCF, 0530bv (k’o), and T530 with (on the other hand) TOK.p21.r5.c2, MHD.HT9, 0643st, and T643 (ch’u).

o The former cluster have a stalactite / grapes in the middle of the ceiling of the pear-outline component while the latter have a partitive disk, LEM, or “nothing”. That “nothing” in the centre of the ceiling of the “pear-outline” could be equivalent to “something” is shown by the fact that MHD has both forms as examples of HT9.

o Also, the former cluster tend to have the “pond” on the walls or in the extreme left and right corners, while the latter tend to have them in the middle of the two bottom halves of the “pear-outline”.

o MHD give a tentative reading of chu? to MHD.HT9