·     No glyphs given in K&H, CMC4.

·     EB.p107.pdfp112.#14: kokaaj – “eagle”, unspecified type.

·     Features:

o Left – a shield and its tassels:

§ Top: the shield itself:

·       Almost always with an AK’AB occupying the full face of the shield.

·       Border is a circle of touching dots.

§ Bottom: tassels hanging off the bottom half of the shield.

·       Sometimes the “shield and tassels” is on top instead of on the left. In such situations, the tassels seem to have the tendency to be on the left.

o Right: the head of a bird of prey, with a large beak (see BMM9.p19.r3.c4 & TOK.p27.r2.c1).

·     In forming the names of rulers (or gods), the word kokaaj was often combined with another word (other animals, e.g. Kokaaj Bahlam or the name of another god, e.g. Itzam Kokaaj):

o In such a situation, the bird of prey head on the right is no longer visible, having become covered by BAHLAM or ITZAM. This meant that only the shield (with tassels) remained visible, along with BAHLAM or ITZAM.

o Because of this, in the early years of Maya epigraphy (when KOKAAJ was still undeciphered), a ruler such as Kokaaj Bahlan was often referred to as “Shield Jaguar” (I, II, III etc), i.e. the “eagle” aspect of it was not really seen. But the shield is only incidental – from the point of view of the semantics of the name, it would have made more sense to refer to such a ruler as “Eagle Jaguar”.

o In the case of Itzam Kokaaj, the itzam covered the bird of prey head on the right in the same way, even though itzam was said before kokaaj. This leads to a slightly counter-intuitive reading order for the name.