K'inich Janaab Pakal
K'inich Janaab' Pakal ruled the Maya city of Palenque for sixty-eight years, one of the longest reigns recorded anywhere in the ancient world. Born in AD 603, he came to the throne at twelve in 615, and his mother Sak K'uk' governed for the first years and remained influential — the dynastic inscriptions take unusual care to establish his legitimacy through her, which suggests it was questioned. Palenque had been sacked twice by Calakmul in the decades before his accession, and much of his reign was spent rebuilding. He constructed the palace complex with its distinctive four-storey tower, and a series of temples whose inscriptions are among the longest continuous Maya texts known — the Temple of the Inscriptions carries some 617 glyphs recording the dynasty's history and projecting it forward to a date in the year 4772. His son completed the Cross Group, which set out his descent and his identification with the gods. He was buried in a vaulted chamber deep inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, reached by a stairway that had been deliberately filled with rubble. Alberto Ruz Lhuillier spent four seasons clearing it and opened the tomb in 1952 — the first substantial royal burial found in a Mesoamerican pyramid, which overturned the assumption that they were platforms rather than tombs. The sarcophagus lid shows him at the moment of death falling into the underworld with the world tree rising above him, and has been misread by some as an astronaut in a capsule. He died in 683. His skeleton showed a man who had never done physical labour.
- Lived: 603 CE – 683 CE
- Nationality: Maya
- Roles: ruler
