Individuals within the royal courts of the ancient Maya held a variety of titles, including the ajaw title discussed in my previous post. One particularly enigmatic title is the baahkab, translating to “head earth” or “first earth” (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 62–63). Although long recognized as a royal status (Kelley 1962, 306–307), the specific roles associated with this position remain poorly understood. Simon Martin (2020, 94) suggests a diplomatic role for baahkab title-holders, citing an instance in which an individual held this title alongside the diplomatic title lakam. Martin (2020, 85) alternatively proposes that baahkab figures oversaw land resources, pointing to the title’s explicit emphasis on land. The roles of baahkab are further obscured by the term’s semantic shift later in Maya history, when it came to denote wind spirits supporting the corners of the earth (Roys 1933).
Figure 1 shows the widespread distribution of the baahkab title throughout the Maya world. The site of Yaxchilán yields the highest concentration of baahkab references (n=44), followed by nearby Toniná with roughly half that number (n=22). As Martin (2020, 84) observes, the title appears with surprising infrequency at Tikal and Calakmul, the two largest royal courts in the Maya world.
Unlike the ajaw title, the baahkab title is largely restricted to the Late Classic period (600–900 CE). Figure 2 graphs when baahkab titles occurred within the corpus of Maya hieroglyphic writing.
Scribes wrote baahkab in a variety of ways. One way scribes wrote baahkab is using only syllabograms – ba-ka-ba (Martin 2020, 84). Unlike Latin script, Maya hieroglyphic writing allows for multiple signs to carry the same phonetic meaning. Multiple hieroglyphs can therefore represent a single syllable like ba. Data drawn from the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD) indicate that scribes favored two signs in writing baahkab. The most frequently attested spelling (n=130) uses the XE1 syllabogram for ba, whereas the second most common (n=16) employs the logogram AP9a, signifying BAAH, in place of the title’s initial syllable. These labels come from a Maya script cataloguing system used by the MHD (Macri and Looper 2003, 17-21). Figure 3 illustrates these two different spellings of baahkab as ba-ka-ba and as BAAH-ka-ba using the XE1 and AP9a hieroglyphs respectively.
Figure 4 maps the distribution of these two spellings of baahkab. When writing baahkab, the AP9a sign is notably circumscribed in its use, appearing predominantly in the southern Maya area, while XE1 spans a much broader geographic range across the Maya world.
The AP9a sign also appears in the spelling of other words beyond its circumscribed use in the baahkab title. In fact, baahkab is one of several prefixed titles that include the BAAH logogram, which expresses an elevated status within a particular category (Martin 2020, 84). For example, some rulers carry the epithet baahajaw or “head lord,” where the BAAH-sign iterates a leader within a common group (Houston and Stuart 1998, 79; Martin 2020, 70). It is also frequently used in the phrase ubaah, or “their image/body” (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 64).
As Figure 5 illustrates, the Late Classic distribution of AP9a extends well beyond its occurrence in baahkab. For example, while the AP9a sign appears 39 times in the hieroglyphic corpus at Palenque, it is entirely absent from the site’s seven attested baahkab titles — suggesting a deliberate scribal preference for the ba-ka-ba spelling over BAAH-ka-ba.
Reflection:
The maps in their current form are the product of several iterative revisions. Initially designed as proportional symbol maps – where larger dots represented sites with greater instances of baahkab titles or particular glyphs (e.g., AP9a) – this approach was revised when larger dots began occluding underlying data. All sites were subsequently rendered at a uniform scale, with quantity conveyed through a stepped color gradient. This gradient was itself abandoned in later maps, as the focus shifted from quantitative representation to the broader geographic distribution of hieroglyphs. A shaded area demarcating the distribution of particular titles or glyphs was added to address excess white space, though this decision carries interpretive risk, as most sites within these shaded areas contain no hieroglyphic writing.
Mapping hieroglyphic distributions aligns with the founding goals of the MHD, initiated by Martha Macri in the 1980s to document linguistic variation in hieroglyphic texts, and a dedicated mapping tool within the database could be a valuable addition. However, point-distribution maps risk enabling overconfident claims. The geographic distribution of AP9a within baahkab titles, for instance, may reflect sample limitations rather than genuine scribal patterns. Responsible interpretation of such maps requires a strong grounding in Maya epigraphy and linguistics to ensure that the results reflect meaningful trends rather than incidental data points.
References:
Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Kelley, David H. 1976. Deciphering the Maya Script. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Macri, Martha J., and Matthew G. Looper. 2003. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs: The Classic Period Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Martin, Simon. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roys, Ralph L. 1933. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.