Calakmul

A city without monuments

formationDrafted from Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008)

The kings later inscriptions call the Snake dynasty, kaan or kaanul, were already a power in the lowlands generations before any of them raised a monument at the city archaeologists now call Calakmul. The earliest known Snake rulers, men like Yuknoom Ch'een I and Sky Witness, are attested chiefly at other sites - a carved stairway of bound captives at Dzibanche names Yuknoom Ch'een I directly, and Sky Witness's own conquests, including the very defeat that broke Tikal in 562, survive only in inscriptions raised by other kings recording what he had done to them. Not a single monument from any of these early Snake kings stands at Calakmul itself.

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · HJPD · CC BY 3.0

The dynasty's arrival at Calakmul

The pattern held through the reigns of Scroll Serpent, whose armies reached as far as Palenque in 599 and 611, and his successors Yuknoom Ti' Chan and Tajoom Uk'ab K'ahk'. Only with Stelae 28 and 29, raised in 623, do dated Snake-era monuments finally appear at Calakmul itself - though even these do not preserve a legible royal name. Whether this marks the dynasty's actual relocation to the city or simply the point at which its kings began commemorating themselves there, the effect was the same: Calakmul, not Dzibanche, became the seat from which the Snake kings would build the network of allied and subject kingdoms that made them Tikal's great rival for the rest of the Classic period.

King of kings

peakDrafted from Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008)

Yuknoom Ch'een II, remembered today as Yuknoom the Great, took the throne in 636 and ruled for fifty years, presiding over the dynasty's golden age. Calakmul's output of carved stelae, and much of the monumental palace architecture that still dominates the city's core, dates substantially to his reign; as many as eighteen stelae were his own commissions.

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · Arian Zwegers · CC BY 2.0

The star war of 657

His long tenure turned on a running struggle with Tikal. In 650 he campaigned into the Petexbatun region, backing the founder of a rival Tikal dynasty at Dos Pilas against the reigning king, Nuun Ujol Chaak. He followed this in 657 by attacking Tikal directly in a "star war," bringing Nuun Ujol Chaak under his supervision, at least for a time. Calakmul intervened again in 677 to inflict a second defeat on the same king, and a combined Calakmul-Dos Pilas force is likely to have delivered the decisive blow that finally broke him in 679.

Overking of the Petén

Beyond Tikal, Yuknoom the Great's authority as an "overking" reached across a wide network of client courts. He oversaw the installation of a ruler at El Perú, sealed by marriage to a Calakmul princess; he kept the small centre of La Corona so firmly under his control that its own heir resided at Calakmul; he installed kings at Cancuen across three generations, and travelled personally to Oxwitz in 662 to help a local ruler mark a calendar anniversary, coordinating the visit with a campaign by an allied city against one of its neighbours the same year. He died an octogenarian early in 686, Calakmul still the dominant power of the central lowlands - though, as later events would show, his one lasting failure was that Tikal itself had never been fully subdued.

A single day in 909

endDrafted from Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008)

Yuknoom the Great's son Yich'aak K'ahk' inherited a kingdom whose authority still ran from El Perú and Dos Pilas to a five-year-old client king installed at Naranjo, but in August 695 he led Calakmul's forces against Tikal's Jasaw Chan K'awiil I and was decisively beaten, losing the effigy of a Calakmul patron deity in the fighting. The defeat did not destroy Calakmul's power outright, but the diplomatic relationships that had sustained the golden age fell away sharply afterward; only one or two statements of overlordship can be identified in the reigns that followed.

National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City · Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · Gary Todd · CC0

Decline into silence

The decline that set in after 695 continued for generations. A lone monument was raised at Calakmul in 790, two more in 800, three in 810 - none naming its own patron - and, as at Tikal, the key calendar-ending of 830 passed without commemoration at all. By 849 a foreign inscription at Seibal offered what may be the last outside reference to the Snake kingdom, and archaeologists have questioned whether a state worth the name still existed there in any real sense.

The last stone

One final rally left its mark. Stela 61, its portrait almost entirely gone, preserves the name of a king called Aj Took', "He of Flint" - and, in place of a fuller text, a single ceremonial date most likely placing it at the calendar-ending of 909. A few even later stones survive, but by then Maya writing at the city had degraded into sequences that only resembled dates, or, in the case of one particularly crude stela, seemed almost to parody the great monuments still standing around it from centuries before.