Zapotec Writing - Famsi

since the entire Platform was most likely plastered and painted. 19
The suggested reconstruction of the narrative program commissioned by Lord 13 Night
allowed discovering a standard sequence in the associated texts (Urcid 1992a: 295-308 and 2001:
379-397). Although not all the texts have glyphs that correspond to all the positions in the
standard sequence, all of them begin with an annual date. The presence of 10 annual dates in the
texts provided an excellent opportunity to test the proposed sequence in the Zapotec reckoning of
the Calendar Round. Although there could be alternative interpretations as to the reading order
of these annual dates, the one I previously proposed generates a span of 60 years (Table 2.2) 20 ,
suggesting that the temporal framework of the dated narrative encompasses a human life span,
implying in turn much historicity in its content. Furthermore, the unfolding of the annual dates
shown in Table 2.2 generates spans of four years between two of the year dates, four more that
are multiples (two 8-year spans, and two 12-year spans), and one 2-year span, implicating that
engagements in warfare raids were calendrically prescribed. The ritualized practice of warfare
that was commensurate with the quadripartite structure of the calendar was seemingly a pan-
Mesoamerican phenomenon, as evinced in the story of creation recounted in what remains of a
manuscript now known as ‘Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas’, attributed to Fray
Andrés de Olmos and written in the Basin of Mexico ca. 1533. In the section on the events that
transpired after the creation of the sun and the moon, the story tells us that:
In the fourth year of the fourth [set] of thirteen [years], after the great flood,
there was a loud noise in the sky, and a double-headed dear fell from it, and
Camaxtli ordered it to be picked up and told the men living then in
Cuitlahuac, three leagues from Mexico [Tenochtitlan], that they took the
deer as their god, and so they did, and they fed him during four years with
19 The dismantling of memorials by successors may imply either usurpation in dynastic succession and
the attempt to rewrite history, or acts of termination that ended the power vested on individuals as a
prelude to its transference to the next legitimate heir.
20 Table 2.2 reads from bottom to top. The first column on the right provides the cumulative count of years,
and the second column the number of years between annual dates. The vertical line on the left side links
the position of the three annual dates carved on the most important monolith, that is, SP-1. The lines at
the center of the table indicate the relation between the paired set of annual dates rendered in SP-3 and SP-
5. The vertical line on the right side encompasses the cycle of 52 years being reckoned in the narrative.
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