Pakal the Great Becomes King of Palenque
K'inich Janaab' Pakal came to the throne of Palenque at twelve in 615 and reigned for sixty-eight years. The city had been sacked twice by Calakmul in the previous generation and was a secondary power when he inherited it, through his mother, which is why so much of his monumental programme is concerned with establishing that a claim through the female line was legitimate. What he built is why Palenque is the site it is. The Temple of the Inscriptions, the palace with its four-storey tower, and the aqueduct that carried a stream under the plaza in a corbelled vault, all in a limestone that allowed relief carving of unusual delicacy. The inscriptions are among the longest in the Maya world and were central to the decipherment of the script in the 1970s. His tomb was found in 1952 by Alberto Ruz, who noticed a stone slab in the temple floor with filled-in holes, spent four seasons clearing a rubble-packed stairway, and reached a vaulted chamber with a five-tonne carved sarcophagus lid. The lid shows Pakal at the moment of death falling into the underworld with the world tree rising above him — an image that later supplied a great deal of nonsense about ancient astronauts. His skeleton was covered in jade and a mosaic mask. His son Kan Bahlam continued the programme. Palenque was abandoned around 800, like the rest of the southern lowland cities. The skeleton also produced a long argument about age. The inscriptions give him eighty years and the bones were read by the excavators as those of a man of about forty, which was used for decades to discredit the historical reading of the glyphs before better analysis and the decipherment settled it in the texts' favour.
- Year: 615 CE
- Category: Political
