Variant: abstract

·    MHD statistics:

o This is not a very common glyph, but not that rare either – a search in MHD on “blcodes contains ZZA” (2025-04-08) yields 15 hits. They mostly spell tz’onoom = “shooter” or jatz’oom = “striker”, though in both cases, the -om is usually underspelled. The latter is best known in the two names:

§ Jatz’oom Kuy, nicknamed “Spearthrower Owl” – the father of the first ruler of TIK after the massive political upheaval called the “Entrada”, where power brokers from Teotihuacan caused a thorough change in the political landscape of Classic Maya civilization. Some epigraphers are wary of the reading Kuy/“Owl” for this name. Furthermore, Jatz’oom is more (literally) “Striker” than “Spearthrower”, but the nickname is very well established in the literature.

§ Jatz’oom Jol, nicknamed “Moon Skull” because the ja syllabogram is a “moon glyph”, found in close association with the skull-glyph JOL (not intrinsically, just for writing this name). A more literal rendition would be “Striker Head”. He was a ruler of YAX in the 5th century AD.

o It appears on both ceramics and monuments, though only 3 of the 15 hits are on ceramic inscriptions.

o It’s on inscriptions from CNB (Chuncanob, a.k.a. Chactun), NAR, PAL, TIK, TNA, UXM, YAX, ZAP (El Zapote), so largely in the core Classic Maya area of the Central Maya Lowlands.

Variant: rabbit head

·    Lopes-ANLatNPotSL.p2 (2005): There is some evidence that the rabbit head (T759) at [13] may be a syllable with a value /tz’o/ (Stuart 1999:173-174). The transitive CVC root kotz’ has the meaning of “to roll, wind, wrap” in some Maya languages such as Ch’olti’ (Moran 1935) and Colonial Yucatec (Vásquez 2001:339). A syllabic value of /pe/ has also been proposed for this glyph which is productive in some contexts. Curiously, both roots kotz’ (Vásquez 2001: 339) and kop (Vásquez 2001: 336) have similar meanings in Colonial Yucatec [= to roll, wind, wrap].

·    Gronemeyer&MacLeod-WCHi2021 (2010) provides a detailed argument for a possible alternative (i.e., additional) reading of the rabbit head glyph as tz’o (possibly arising from the merger of two formerly distinct glyphs) – Gronemeyer&MacLeod-WCHi2021.p54.fn57: We prefer the reading /tz’o/ for the sign AP7 first proposed by David Stuart (Stuart, Houston & Robertson 1999: II-52) for the "Snake Lady" conjuring scene on K5164; he reads the whole as Ix Tzak Kotz'-om Chan: ‘she who conjures/grasps the rolled-up snake’. This kotz'-o:m ‘winder snake’ (the term we prefer) is likely to be the same being owned by Ihk' Mu:y Muwa:n in his parentage statement, as will be explained. The /tz'o/ reading for this animal head does not seem to work in all instances, as in the Codex Dresden pp. 4a-10a, where the productive reading /pe-ka-ja/ for pehkaj (t-u chich) ‘it is spoken (in his prophecy)’ appears (Schele and Grube 1997: 96, who offer a translation ‘he reads’). Beliaev (2004: 122, fn. 1) has proposed /ko-pe-ma/ for the snake in this Snake Lady scene, yielding a nearly identical meaning kop-em ‘rolled up’. But we observe that the Ch’olan perfect participle -em is all but absent from the script, while the agentive -o:m abounds. Additionally, a participle *u-kop-em with no modified noun following (as we have at K2) seems unlikely, whereas a possessed agentive u-kotz’-o:m works well here. We speculate that two distinct signs merged creating a default bivalence for AP7.

·    The rabbit-head is listed as pe but not as tz’o in any of the (post-2010) syllabogram tables of the “printed” reference / pedagogical works (up to K&H in 2020). Bonn also does not list the rabbit-head with a reading of tz’o. So the Stuart 1999 proposal hasn’t perhaps met with much support.

·    Sim: it would appear that MHD is in favour of pe (for K5164).