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The inscription states that the accession of the Santa Elena ruler was supervised by the king whose name and emblem glyph appear above. The glyphs of the center photograph are the easiest to read. On the right is a clear ma superfix over a clear ta syllable, yielding mat. This was the smoking gun for Nikolai Grube, who immediately recognized the left collocation as OHL and the emblem glyph in the photograph on the right above as the skull allograph of the Palenque emblem glyph (note the K'UH(UL) droplets).
The only part of the photograph on the left that can be read with any certainty is the "tail" sign at the bottom, for ne. But the remains of the collocation on the left are entirely consistent with the AJ that begins this ruler's name. (For the effaced central sign and two more photographs, see the earlier discussion. More photographs will appear in the Mesoweb PARI Photo Database.) There is no date on Santa Elena Monument 1, so it is impossible to say whether the event overseen by Aj Ne' Yohl Mat took place before or after the Kan attack on Palenque. But clearly the Palenque ruler had been playing power politics in Tabasco, asserting (or perhaps re-asserting) control over a hub of the Río San Pedro, a major trade artery leading toward the central Maya lowlands and the Kan kingdom's rival Tikal. (This was the route that the Teotihuacan warlord Siyaj K'ak' seems to have followed in conquering that kingdom.) We know from another inscription that a Kan king supervised an accession in 662 at Moral-Reforma, not far from Santa Elena on the fertile plains along the banks of the Usumacinta. It would have been in the context of vying for influence in Tabasco, and quite possibly with the provocation of Palenque scoring a coup in that regard by asserting overlordship over Santa Elena, that Kan attacked Aj Ne' Yohl Mat on his home ground on 9.8.17.15.14 4 Ix 7 Wo (April 7, 611). |