Palenque

Sacked twice in twelve years

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

Palenque's Classic dynasty, according to retrospective texts compiled at the end of the seventh century, began with K'uk' Bahlam I, "Quetzal Jaguar," whose reign started in 431. For nearly two centuries afterward the kingdom - known to its own people as Baakal, "Bone" - governed itself from Lakamha', its capital in the foothills above the Usumacinta basin, largely outside the reach of the great rivalries convulsing the central Petén to the east.

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · Candiderm · Public domain

The Snake kingdom reaches across the Usumacinta

That isolation ended abruptly. On 21 April 599 Palenque was "axed" - sacked - by forces from Calakmul's Snake kingdom, an assault launched from a great distance and requiring a crossing of the Usumacinta River, evidence of just how far the Snake kings' ambition now reached. Queen Yohl Ik'nal, who had ruled through the attack, died in 604 and was succeeded by Ajen Yohl Mat, whose eight-year reign brought a second, still worse catastrophe: on 4 April 611, Lakamha' was sacked again, this time by Scroll Serpent, the Snake king, in person. Neither Ajen Yohl Mat nor his own successor-in-waiting, Janaab Pakal, lived out the following year, both dying within weeks of each other in 612.

Three years without a king

What followed was recorded in language unlike anything else in the Palenque corpus - "lost is the divine lady, lost is the lord" - and a new ruler is named only as Muwaan Mat, the ancestral deity and progenitor of Palenque's patron gods, rather than as any ordinary mortal king. Whether this represents an actual interregnum under a deity's name, a stand-in for an unnamed foreign administrator imposed by Palenque's conquerors, or something else again, no surviving text makes fully clear. The strange period lasted three years, and ended only with the accession of a twelve-year-old boy.

A crown from his mother

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

K'inich Janaab Pakal - "Radiant Shield" - came to the throne in 615 at the age of twelve, the son of Lady Sak K'uk', "Resplendent Quetzal." His inauguration is shown on the Oval Palace Tablet, where his mother herself presents him with the royal "drum major" crown, an image without real precedent in Palenque's earlier monuments. Sak K'uk' lived another twenty-five years, dying in 640, and she and her consort K'an Mo' Hix almost certainly held much of the kingdom's practical power while the young king grew into his own authority.

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · tato grasso · CC BY-SA 2.5

Clawing back Santa Elena

Once he came into his majority, Pakal set about reversing the losses of the previous generation. A stairway inscription in Palenque's West Court describes fighting six days after the death of a rival lord in 662, and credits the king with bringing the strategically important site of Santa Elena "back under Palenque's control" - an achievement that echoed one his own predecessor had claimed decades earlier. The triumph proved short-lived: Santa Elena fell to Piedras Negras only two years later, and the Snake kingdom, still commanding events from Calakmul, installed a boy-king of its own at nearby Moral-Reforma soon after. Most of what Pakal had recovered was quickly lost again, but the kingdom he had inherited as an orphaned child was, by any measure, no longer the broken state Scroll Serpent had left behind in 611.

The king's rebirth

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

K'inich Janaab Pakal ruled for sixty-eight years, dying in 683 as an old man who had spent much of his reign, in his final years, building his own memorial: the Temple of the Inscriptions, a stepped pyramid raised over a vaulted burial chamber at its base. He did not live to see it finished; the final texts and embellishments were completed under his son and successor, K'inich Kan Bahlam II.

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

A discovery in 1952

The temple kept its secret for over twelve centuries. In 1949 the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, restoring the pyramid's inner sanctuary, noticed a floor slab pierced with a ring of stone-plugged holes - designed, it turned out, to lift the slab itself. Beneath lay a rubble-packed stairway descending eighty feet into the heart of the pyramid. Four excavation seasons later, on 13 June 1952, an intrusive flashlight beam finally reached a sealed triangular doorway at the bottom and revealed a sight with no equal anywhere in the Maya world.

The sarcophagus

Behind the door was a vaulted chamber dominated by a huge stone sarcophagus, its lid carved with what is today the single most famous image in Maya art: the king shown reborn from the jaws of the underworld, rising along the trunk of a world tree toward the heavens, framed by a sky band studded with the symbols of sun, moon and stars. The chamber's walls name the nobles - the sajal and aj k'uhuun of Pakal's own administration - who had overseen the temple's design, its labour, or perhaps its payment. It stood, and stands still, as the clearest surviving expression of everything Pakal's reign had rebuilt after the ruin his mother had crowned him amid as a boy of twelve.

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

A king who waited

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

K'inich Kan Bahlam II was already forty-eight years old when he inherited the throne from his father in 684 - a long wait for a man whose portraits, whether carved in relief or modeled in stucco, are among the most distinctive of any Maya king, marked by a strikingly realistic imperial nose and full lower lip. He spent the eighteen years of his reign building at a pace that, in places, outdid even his illustrious father's own achievements.

Three temples for three gods

His masterwork was the Group of the Cross: the Temples of the Cross, the Sun and the Foliated Cross, dedicated together in 692 as a single coordinated program blending myth and history across an immense range of carved panels and inscriptions. Each temple gave a spiritual home to one of the three gods of the Palenque Triad, and each housed a wall tablet showing Kan Bahlam twice over - once as the mature king dedicating the building, once as a child venerating the same god - a visual argument binding his own reign to the mythic founding of the kingdom itself. A rare conjunction of Jupiter, Mars, Saturn and the moon in July 690 was marked by the ceremonial burning of one temple and, the following day, the dedication of another; the same date was carved onto a jade portrait of the king that eventually made its way, by means no inscription explains, into the great sacred well at distant Chichen Itza.

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · Unknown draughtsman · Public domain

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · Bernard Dupont · CC BY-SA 2.0

Wars to the south

The Cross Group's esoteric themes have long dominated how Kan Bahlam is remembered, but his reign rested on real military success as much as ceremony. To the south he fought the highland kingdom of Tonina, Palenque's major rival, and both the Temple of the Sun and Temple of the Cross describe a successful campaign against it in September 692. Three years into his reign he also moved against Pipa', a former Calakmul vassal, installing its king under Palenque's own patronage and extending his influence along the southern bank of the Usumacinta as far as the lords of Yaxchilan and Anaite. That influence did not go unanswered - by as early as 692 Kan Bahlam had already suffered a defeat that cost him the same region to his highland rivals. He died on 16 February 702, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried the same day; excavators clearing the pyramid beneath the Temple of the Cross in 1993 found a dedicatory cache of more than a hundred ceramic incense-burners arranged around its base.

Crouched and twisted in stone

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

Kan Bahlam's younger brother, K'an Joy Chitam II, succeeded him and inherited a rivalry with Tonina that had never been settled. The highland kingdom's own nobles had spent decades absorbing repeated defeats at Palenque's hands, and on 26 August 711 they finally delivered a reversal severe enough to be remembered on their own monuments for generations after: a "star war" attack that penetrated the Palenque capital itself and seized its king.

A captive carved in triumph

A sandstone panel recovered at Tonina records the moment in vivid detail, showing K'an Joy Chitam crouched and twisted, his arms bound and strips of paper drawn through his earlobes in a gesture of ritual humiliation, his own name and title carved beside him so that no one who saw the stone could mistake who had been brought so low. It was commissioned not by a king in his own right but by the lieutenants of Tonina's own child-ruler - a boy who had been crowned at Tonina three years earlier, in November 708, still too young to govern, while the nobles who administered his kingdom on his behalf proved vigorous enough agents to bring down the ruler of Palenque itself.

A capital left to lesser hands

No inscription says what became of K'an Joy Chitam II afterward, whether he died in captivity or was eventually released; his own name disappears from Palenque's record at this point. The kingdom he had ruled did not vanish with him - its later architecture, including substantial work on the royal Palace complex, is credited to a king called K'uk' Bahlam II, attested in the 760s and 780s - but the capture of 711 marked the last time a Palenque king's own defeat was important enough for a rival capital to carve it in stone.

No one came for him

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

The last ruler of Palenque known to any surviving inscription was Wak Kimi Janaab Pakal, "6 Death Shield," also called Janaab Pakal III, who acceded in 799. The record of his reign is modest by the standards of his great predecessor - an incised blackware vessel found in an ordinary residential burial, not a royal monument. One further trace of the Baakal kingdom survives after him: a clay brick made around 814 at Comalcalco, a peripheral site far to the west at the very edge of the Maya world, evidence that some memory of Palenque's kingship persisted there even as the dynasty's own history went silent at its capital.

Depopulation and squatters

What followed at Lakamha' itself was the same story unfolding across the Classic Maya world in the early ninth century: the sudden end of dynastic history, a rapid fall in population, and a long afterlife as a place inhabited only by squatters and itinerant travellers rather than by any court. Most of the great halls of Pakal's own Palace complex remained standing, sheltering that thin, scattered occupation for close to a thousand years. When one such visitor was killed by the sudden collapse of a gallery roof sometime in that long afterward, archaeologists found his remains centuries later exactly where he had died - no companion or relation ever having returned to carry the body away.

Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (2008) · Frederick Catherwood · Public domain