Has the Maya Kingdom of Sak Tz'i' Been Found?
Thursday, September 15, 2022
Mexico Maya Altar(© Proyecto Arqueológico Busiljá – Chocoljá)
CHIAPAS, MEXICO—According to a report in The New York Times, a fortified Maya settlement thought to be the capital of the Sak Tz’i’ dynasty is being investigated on private land in southern Mexico by a team of researchers including Charles Golden of Brandeis University. The site is thought to have been occupied as early as 750 B.C. until the end of the Classic period, around A.D. 900. Golden said that the ruins cover about 100 acres and include an acropolis dominated by a 45-foot-tall pyramid, temples, plazas, reception halls, a palace, ceremonial centers, and a ball court measuring about 350 feet long by 16 feet wide. Inscriptions from other sites had linked the kingdom of Sak Tz’i’ to the Maya cities of Piedras Negras, Bonampak, Palenque, Tonina, and Yaxchilan. A two-foot by four-foot wall panel recovered at the site, dated to A.D. 775, records the names of rulers, battles, rituals, and a creation account of a flood and a water serpent that may relate to the construction of the city. “The stories touch on the community’s relationship to the surrounding natural environment,” said team member Andrew Scherer of Brown University. “The area is thick with streams and waterfalls and frequently floods.” For more on the site's initial discovery, go to "Around the World: Mexico."
https://www.archaeology.org/news/10830-220915-mexico-maya-kingdom
Corpus ID: 163090630
Sak Tz'i' in the Classic Period Hieroglyphic Inscriptions
P. Biró
Published 2005
History
The Sak Tz'i' toponym was discovered by Linda Schele and Nikolai Grube, who first analyzed the inscriptions mentioning this archaeologically unidentified site (1994). Recently, the Sak Tz'i' polity has been discussed by various epigraphers (Guenter and Zender 1999; Martin and Grube 2000; Anaya Hernández 2001; Anaya Hernández, Guenter and Zender 2003; Biró 2004). While I will offer suggestions about the possible political extent or sphere of influence of Sak Tz'i', as previously analyzed by Armando Anaya Hernández (2001), it is ultimately a matter of archaeological investigation to unravel the exact location of the site. In this paper, I enumerate the monuments referring to Sak Tz'i' and analyze the relevant passages of the texts, with final comments about the political history of the site as far as it is known through the limited set of data.1 As a supplement to the above-mentioned works, this is directed to interested specialists and non-specialists alike, in hopes that a critical edition of the texts with additional comments will be of some help to future epigraphers and historians. Our understanding of the information recorded in Classic Maya inscriptions is not complete, and even more limited in the case of unprovenienced monuments. Hopefully, some archaeologist will find the remains of the site that once was called Sak Tz'i', and the picture presented here will be supplemented by inscriptional and archaeological data, as we gain a better reconstruction of the past of another Classic Period center. The order of the texts presented here follows a time frame from the earliest dedicated inscription to the latest. It should be noted that this is a hypothetical order, as most of the inscriptions are fragments, the last dates of which are not plausible as dedication dates. I will add, where possible, the drawing or drawings available to me; however, it will be helpful if other researchers complete my data in the future. 2005 Mesoweb: .
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sak-Tz'i'-in-the-Classic-Period-Hieroglyphic-Bir%C3%B3/e3567141d9ed0c6d7e3bac150f120639cc0894cb
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