Tz’ihb

Notes on the colors and lines of this site, and where they come from.

The word

Tz’ihb is a Classic Maya word for writing and painting. The epigrapher David Stuart read it in the 1980s. In glyphs it is spelled tz’i-bi or tz’i-ba. The same word forms the title aj tz’ihb, for scribes and painters, and it opens the signatures of artists, “it is the painting of” (Stuart, 2017).

One sign for the word shows a hand holding a brush. It appears on a painted bowl from the Tikal area, known as K772. For years the reading of that sign was a sound guess with no proof. A text at La Corona settled it, where the brush sign takes the place of the spelled word (Stuart, 2017).

The brush glyph will go here.

Scholars now read tz’ihb as wider than writing and painting. It comes close to the work of a drawn line (Herring, 2005, pp. 7 to 8, as cited in Ancient Mesoamerica, 2025). So a page about the colors and lines of this site carries that name.

Popular sources often write the word tz’ib. Epigraphers write tz’ihb. Modern Yucatec writes ts’íib, for writing and to write.

The ground

Maya painters laid their colors on lime plaster. Masons burned limestone, slaked it with water, and mixed in sap from tree bark, which made the plaster tougher (Rodriguez-Navarro et al., 2023). The background of this site is named sak, the Maya word for white, as in sakbe. Its shade is my estimate of a plaster wall, not a measured color.

The five colors of the logo

Each letter of SAKBE carries one color. The names come from Maya paint and from one Maya stone.

S. Hematite red

Hematite is an iron oxide, ground to a red earth. Tests on mural fragments from Bonampak found it in both the red and the pink (Gettens, 1955). At San Bartolo, the paints are mostly iron compounds, hematite and goethite, with carbon black (Hurst and O’Grady, as cited in Meanwell et al., 2018).

A. Maya blue

Maya blue is indigo bound to a clay mineral called palygorskite. Chemists in four countries worked out this mix in the late 1960s (Arnold, 2005). The blue at Bonampak is Maya blue (Gettens, 1955). The painters at Xultun used it too (Saturno et al., as cited in Meanwell et al., 2018).

K. Ochre

The dull yellow at Bonampak is limonite, a yellow iron earth (Gettens, 1955). Not every Maya yellow is an earth. A study of yellows from murals in Yucatán found many made of indigo compounds on palygorskite, a “Maya yellow,” along with ochre (Doménech et al., 2011).

B. Jade green

Jade is a stone, not a paint. I named this letter for the stone. Green paint on Maya walls came from more than one source. Some greens are made with Maya blue, and some are a clay-based “Maya green.” Copper greens, malachite and chrysocolla, are known at some sites (Meanwell et al., 2018). The green at Bonampak was never tested (Gettens, 1955).

E. Indigo

Indigo is a dye from the leaves of a plant. It is the color inside Maya blue. Doménech and his team propose that Maya makers drew indigo, Maya yellow, and Maya blue from one batch of leaves soaked in lime water, at different steps (Doménech et al., 2011). That is a proposal, not a settled fact.

Still to check

The page of each claim from Gettens, Arnold, Doménech, and Meanwell. The author of the 2025 article in Ancient Mesoamerica. Herring’s book, read in the original. The Maya meaning of sak, from a scholarly source.

Sources

  1. Arnold, D. E. (2005). Maya blue and palygorskite. A second possible pre-Columbian source. Ancient Mesoamerica. Volume, pages, and coauthors to verify.
  2. Doménech, A., et al. (2011). From Maya blue to “Maya yellow.” A connection between ancient nanostructured materials from the voltammetry of microparticles. Angewandte Chemie International Edition. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201100921
  3. Gettens, R. J. (1955). Identification of pigments on fragments of mural paintings from Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. In K. Ruppert, J. E. S. Thompson, & T. Proskouriakoff, Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico (p. 67). Carnegie Institution of Washington. Year and page to verify.
  4. Herring, A. (2005). Art and writing in the Maya cities, A.D. 600–800. A poetics of line. Cambridge University Press. To verify.
  5. Meanwell, J. L., et al. (2018). Pigments at Mayapán. In XXXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala. mesoweb.com. Title to verify.
  6. Reading all about it. Rethinking orality in Classic Maya scribal imagery. (2025). Ancient Mesoamerica. cambridge.org. Author to verify.
  7. Rodriguez-Navarro, C., Monasterio-Guillot, L., Burgos-Ruiz, M., Ruiz-Agudo, E., & Elert, K. (2023). Unveiling the secret of ancient Maya masons. Biomimetic lime plasters with plant extracts. Science Advances, 9(16), Article eadf6138. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adf6138
  8. Stuart, D. (2017, May 1). A note on the sign for TZ’IHB, “writing, painting.” Maya Decipherment. mayadecipherment.com