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To anyone familiar with the pictorial characteristics
of Mayan hieroglyphs it soon becomes quite apparent that a significant amount of their glyphs are based on the
use of half and profiled faces. The Maya developed a pictographic system that incorporates an almost endless array of eloquently characterized faces that are fashioned in the genre of a "severed" man's head. The isolated image of a severed head was seen as a central symbol of royal power and sacrifice among the kings of the Maya. This ritual of decapitation not only played a major role in Mesoamerican religion it also provided a rich lexicon of faces that were assembled into a complex pictographic language (figure1). The first example, on the left, is a frontal view of a Pumpkin head with a Human profile. The second, on the right, is a frontal view of a Parrot with a Human profile. |
