Glyph D10 vision serpent (part of bloodletting)   --  Schele, 1988

Photo: Mark Van Stone   zoom Drawing: Merle Greene Robertson

Robert Wald (1999) has read this glyph as ka-kan / chan / "snake". Ordinarily, the ka phonetic complement before the snake head signals that it is to be pronounced kan and not chan, as would otherwise be expected. Thus, finding ka prefixed to his name tells us that the son of Pakal the Great was Kan Balam and not Chan Balam. Similarly, the ka phonetic complement that invariably appears before the snake head in the emblem glyph of Calakmul indicates that the polity was known as Kan rather than Chan.