The Copán Bench Panel or ''Copan Bench Panel'' is the name of a sculpted platform that was originally located in Temple 11 at the

Maya Maya may refer to: Civilizations * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Maya language, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (Ethiopia), a populat ...

site of

Copán Copán is an archaeological site of the Maya civilization in the Copán Department of western Honduras, not far from the border with Guatemala. This ancient Maya city mirrors the beauty of the physical landscape in which it flourished—a fert ...

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Oce ...

. Discovered by the English archaeologist

Alfred Maudslay Alfred Percival Maudslay FRAI (18 March 1850 – 22 January 1931) was a British diplomat, explorer, and archaeologist. He was one of the first Europeans to study Maya ruins. He also fully translated and annotated the best version of Bernal ...

in the late nineteenth century, it now forms part of the British Museum's extensive collection of ancient artefacts from

Central America Central America ( es, América Central or ) is a subregion of the Americas. Its boundaries are defined as bordering the United States to the north, Colombia to the south, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. ...

.British Museum Collection
/ref> Dated to the late 8th Century AD, the panel is both a work of art and a significant historical record of royal authority.

Description

The stone bench is composed of two long panels that when aligned together are over 5 metres in length. Both panels depict twenty seated individuals, split into two groups of ten facing each other, between which is engraved a central panel with

hieroglyphic Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...

text. The scene portrayed on this enormous sculpture is thought to depict King Yax-Pac's accession to the throne, overseen by his ancestors from previous dynasties. Yax-pac is shown seated to the right of the central text; it is conjectured that the deceased kings' presence helped to justify his claim to the royal throne. The iconography of the bench panel is very similar to the famous

Copán Altar Q Altar Q is the designation given to one of the most notable of the rectangular sculpted stone blocks (dubbed "altars") recovered at the Mesoamerican archaeological site of Copán, present-day Honduras. Copán was a major Maya civilization center d ...

Provenance

Maudslay found this bench panel in pieces above a raised platform inside Temple 11 at Copán in 1881. He shipped it to

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

along with a number of other sculptures from the site and later donated most of his collection to the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

, which in turn transferred Maudslay's original sculptures and extensive range of casts to the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

in 1923.

Bibliography

*M. Coe, Breaking the Maya code (London, Thames & Hudson, 1992) *L. Schele and M.E. Miller, The blood of kings (London, Thames & Hudson, 1986) * M. Coe and J. Kerr, The art of the Maya scribe (London, Thames & Hudson, 1997)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Copan Bench Panel Maya inscriptions Mesoamerican artifacts Ethnographic objects in the British Museum Artefacts from Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the British Museum Copán Regnal lists Mesoamerican stone sculpture 8th-century inscriptions category:Sculptures of the British Museum Honduras–United Kingdom relations

Description

Provenance

See also

Bibliography

References