·    Do not confuse this with the phonetically similar tz’un – tzuk is a much more common (and better understood) word for “part”, “partition”, “province”.

·    Both tz’un and tzuk can have numbers preceding them – used to describe regions having that many tz’un or tzuk. This is then further used in titles of rulers of such regions, or in indicating people from those regions with the “AJ <place>” phrase .

·    Grube&Schele-TitCMI provides some early and basic information, including references to many occurrences of tzuk.

·    Beliaev-WTaOT – the whole paper is devoted to the word tzuk, both in titles and in names of regions, with many examples.

·    With tzuk, the most common numbers preceding it are “7” or “13”.

·    Features:

o An anthropomorphic head (often looking a bit scowling or glum).

o A “tree trunk” growing vertically through the middle of the head (with “roots” at the base).

o A “shiner” or single dot in the forehead.

·    There is the possibility to read this glyph as a logogram TZUK, with an optional infixed syllabogram ku as an end phonetic complement. This is probably even the iconographic origin of tzu.

o Such an interpretation is superior in cases where it’s known from context that the word tzuk is intended, but where there is no ku written. This is because -k is not one of the sounds which is routinely underspelled. Far from it – it’s almost never underspelled, and in the few situations where that’s proposed it’s not totally clear that it’s a case of underspelling – perhaps a completely different word is intended (see pek = “to summon”).

o However, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to treat it as just tzu, but the other possibility should always be borne in mind.

o Reading it as tzu[ku] è tzuk makes this word a syllabogram-only spelling.

·    MHD takes the opposite point of view and sees this glyph as fundamentally a logogram – a search in MHD on “blcodes contains SM5” yields 33 hits:

o 26 as TZUK.

o 5 as tzu, to write some form of the verb tzutz.

Unfortunately, I didn’t record the date of running the query which gave the results above. Running it on 2024-03-01 now produces 33 hits, and all of them are transliterated as tzu. It looks like MHD might have had the same doubts, but eventually decided on viewing it as a syllabogram.

·    The head / animal head in NAR Stela 8 & Stela 13, and K2730 comes from the head / animal head variant of ku – the tzu is just the single “tree trunk” in the middle and some roots at the bottom.