The Architecture of the Temple of the Inscriptions and the Glyphic Corpus of the Central Tablet: A Hypothesis of Structural Correspondence

In a series of four preceding works, the glyphic corpus of the Central Tablet of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque was treated as a discrete structure, and a set of indicative coincidences was recorded between its mathematical properties and the architecture of the monument: the parameters of the corpus stratifications coincided with the façade and profile projections of the pyramid, a marker coordinate with the position of the entrance to the internal stairway, and the induced structural capacities with the capacities of other corpora of the complex. In the present work I return to the series as a whole. Its disparate results reveal a pervasive regularity — the recurrence of the number three and of step 3 across different layers of the material: in triads of objects, in arithmetic progressions, in the positional notation of the marker set. The cumulative capacities of the pyramidal stratifications prove to be a sequence of quadrupled tetrahedral numbers — a diagonal of Pascal's triangle; the vector of structural capacities {16, 140, 480} is its slice at the positions of the marker set. I formulate the connectedness of the series as a hypothesis: the discovered structure exhibits a systematicity incompatible with an explanation by chance coincidence; the question of its nature — whether a property of the material, a property of the process of its creation, or a consequence of as-yet-unidentified structural regularities — is left open for further discussion. The nearest test is the corpora of the lid of Pakal's sarcophagus and of the East and West Tablets of the Temple of the Inscriptions, linked to the Central Tablet through the same vector; these are also the first check of the applicability of the framework beyond the material on which it was calibrated.