Xbalanque as the Ball Court Glyph
Hunahpu is a twin in the Popol Vuh. Xbalanque is his brother.
After their famous battle with the Gods of the Underworld and
their even more famous re-birth, they became the Sun and the Moon
in the heavens so would live forever in the hearts of men.
At this year's Maya Meeting 2004 at the University of Texas
at Austin, an glyph cartouche was included in the artwork presented
at the Forum as Part II.
The glyph at A-2, in this particular cartouche, at the bottom
of page II-32, was read as a spelling for the ballgame, played by
Tajoom Uk'ab' K'ahk' during his war against Tzam. It is
a possiblity that Tajoom Uk'ab' K'ahk's is B-2 without the
hand glyph. Since it was a fast moving Forum, the concept of
Xbalanque did not make itself evident until after I made
a slide presentation.
I found myself looking at the glyph for the ballgame.
It was a male head with the Moon glyph behind it.
The Sun and the Moon were the twins of the ballgame. They
were the two that ran around the ballcourt of heaven, not humans
on earth. Suddenly, I "saw" Xbalanque in his role as
the Moon. Is it possible that this glyph is actually a reading for
Xbalanque? That it does not spell out "ball court"?
It would seem so, in spite of the fact that it has been
used for spellng out "ballcourt," as "pi-tz-ja"
that became a cognate in the Turkish language, as "pisti",
who identified the word only as a "kind of a ballgame." This
indecisive definition is an indication that the word was indeed
introduced into Turkey, not that the Turks introduced the word
in to the the Maya area. On this basis, were the Turks the surveyors
who made the 1414 map of Pirrus de Noha, found in the Vatican Library?
The one that has the east coast of North America inserted into the Persian
coastline as a cordiform projection? Did Piri "Reis" (the Turkish word for "president")
know of former cordiform maps before he created the one considered to be the
east coast of the Americas? Much research still has to be done.