276 THE INSCRIPTIONS AT COPAN. 
was apparently a vertical panel rather than a horizontal frieze. Another 
vital objection to Gordon’s view is that these stones were found only on one 
side of Temple 26. It seems certain that if this text had originally gone clear 
around the building, a few fragments at least would have been found on one 
of the other three sides.2. This same objection may be made to the writer’s 
placing glyph-panels in the doorway on the west side of the temple. His 
reason for so doing, however, will appear presently. 
In Temple 11 we have a presentation identical with that suggested here 
for Temple 26. Temple 11 faces to the north and has a corridor passing 
through the middle and emerging at the back (south). Both jambs of 
both of these doorways are inscribed with panels of four columns of glyph- 
blocks each. The panels are 71 cm. wide and at least 81 cm high. They 
were obviously sculptured after the walls were built, as the individual 
elyph-blocks sometimes extend over several different stones without any 
effort apparently having been made to make the horizontal or vertical inter- 
glyph channels coincide with the edges of the stones. This same feature is 
observed in the fragments under discussion, probably from Temple 26, and 
the parallel afforded by Temple 11 is so close that the writer believes it 
explains the original location of these blocks. (See pp. 309-310.) 
The reason for believing that the west doorway was treated in the same 
way as the east one, in spite of the fact that no inscribed blocks of this 
character have been found on the western side, is because Temple 26 faced 
west, and it is almost inconceivable that a back doorway should have had 
this more elaborate treatment than a front doorway and main entrance, 
especially one approached by such a magnificent construction as the Hiero- 
glyphic Stairway. Moreover, the parallel afforded by Temple 11 would tend 
to indicate that both doorways were similarly treated. Probably Temple 
26 fell to pieces long before the Hieroglyphic Stairway collapsed; if so, the 
blocks in the front doorway may have been literally ground to pieces when 
the tremendous amount of stone in the upper four-fifths of the stairway 
crashed to the bottom. At all events, with the limited evidence available, it 
seems not improbable that the blocks in question are fragments of glyph-panels 
which were inscribed on the jambs of the front and back doorwaysof Temple 26. 
Concerning the inscription itself little can be said. The glyphs are all 
of the full-figure variety, and judging from the fragments recovered this 
inscription must have been one of the longest of its kind ever attempted. 
Unfortunately, it is not only too fragmentary, but the signs are too unfa- 
miliar to permit even partial decipherment. 
As already mentioned, although the Peabody Museum has twenty-one 
or twenty-two pieces of this text, the writer was able to fit together only 


1 A hieroglyphic cornice originally ran all the way around Structure 1 at Quirigua, excavated by the writer in 
1912 for the School of American Archeology. (See Hewett, 1912, pp. 168, 169, and Morley, 1912, p. 7, and 1913, 
pp. 347 and 352.) In this case, however, the fragments of the cornice were found on all four sides of the temple, 
and were clearly parts of a horizontal frieze and not a vertical panel. 
2 The Peabody Museum photograph No. 293 shows blocks Nos. 874 and 875 in the Court of the Hiero- 
glyphic Stairway, but as the latter is known to have been found elsewhere (near the summit of Mound 26) the 
former also was probably not found here, but on the east side, as stated in the museum catalogue. 
