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TRANSLATIONS
This is the 6th period, the first one in the 'season' of the after noon. No longer is the sun growing, Pa5-51 has no hand of fire making him grow. On the contrary, Pa5-52 gives us information that now things are turned around, i.e. the sun will diminish in power. Pa5-53 and Pa5-54 continue, however, with the message that the beams of the sun are strong. In Pa5-51 we can see the familiar shape of the sun with his 6 flames that the rongorongo system of writing demands, each flame representing 60 days. These 6 flames give us 360 days, the year of the sun. We can compare with e.g. ancient Egypt: "Nut, whom the Greeks sometimes identified with Rhea, was goddess of the sky, but it was debatable if in historical times she was the object of a genuine cult. She was Geb's twin sister and, it was said, married him secretly and against the will of Ra. Angered, Ra had the couple brutally separated by Shu and afterwards decreed that Nut could not bear a child in any given month of any year. Thoth, Plutarch tells us, happily had pity on her. Playing draughts with the Moon, he won in the course of several games a seventy-second part of the Moon's light with which he composed five new days. As these five intercalated days did not belong to the official Egyptian calendar of three hundred and sixty days, Nut was thus able to give birth successively to five children: Osiris, Haroeris (Horus), Set, Isis and Nepthys." (Larousse) When the three fingers of light no longer are there, and the sun is starving, that is illustrated in Pa5-52 with an arm ending in a hand where the fingers are closed. The arm is curved to show that things are now turned around. We can compare with the Inuit who regard sun as female and moon as male, sister and brother: "The moon, being without food, wanes slowly away from starvation until it is quite lost from sight; the the sun reaches out and feeds it from the dish in which the girl has placed her breast. After the moon is fed and gradually brought to the full, it is then permitted to starve again, so producing the waxing and waning every month." (Arctic Sky) The arm with clenched fingers and the curve is a combination of these two more fundamental glyph types:
Pa5-53 and Pa5-54 do not require any special comments. Let us therefore take the opportunity to continue with a few more observations regarding the arm with clenched fingers and the branch bent like the letter U: If we compare Pa5-52 and Pa5-40
we can see that in Pa5-40 the branch is bent so sharply that it must be broken, while that not is the case in Pa5-52. The fundamental glyph type is smoothly bent illustrating the idea of a turn, not a break. By making a small adjustment of the fundamental glyph type the creator of the text on tablet P has changed the meaning. A break is qualitatively different from the fundamental meaning which seems to be a turn, bend, or reversal. As regards the other fundamental glyph type, its fundamental meaning seems to be a powerful straight arm held vertically in order to support. It is an arm for supporting the sky. In ancient Egypt arms of gods held up the sky:
"Among the multitude of gods worshipped by these people [the Maya] were four whom they called by the name Bacab. These were, they say, four brothers placed by God when he created the world at its four corners to sustain the heavens lest they fall." (Diego De Landa according to Hancock) Number four is in the Chinese script intimately connected with this concept too:
The original meaning breath (that which emerges from the mouth) is similar to the ancient Egyptian god Shu, the god of air. Between the sky and the earth there is air and that depends on the four pillars upholding the sky. |
