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: Ethnic groups * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Mayan languages, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (East Africa), a p ...

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. It is one of the most important sites of the Maya civilization, which was not excavated until the ...

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Ocean at the Gulf of Fonseca, ...

. Discovered by the English archaeologist Alfred Maudslay in the late nineteenth century, it now forms part of the British Museum's extensive collection of ancient artefacts from

Central America Central America is a subregion of North America. Its political boundaries are defined as bordering Mexico to the north, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. Central America is usually ...

.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 Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. ...

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.

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 Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

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 (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

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

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

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 sculptures 8th-century inscriptions Sculptures in the British Museum Honduras–United Kingdom relations

Description

Provenance

See also

Bibliography

References