Pakal the Great of Palenque: The Maya King and His Tomb

K’inich Janaab Pakal I, known as Pakal the Great, was a Maya king who ruled the city of Palenque in southern Mexico for 68 years, from 615 to 683. He rebuilt his kingdom after crushing defeats and turned Palenque into one of the most beautiful cities of the Classic Maya world. His tomb deep inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, discovered in 1952, is one of the most celebrated finds in the history of archaeology in the Americas.

Palenque before Pakal

Palenque lies on a forested shelf at the edge of the Chiapas highlands, overlooking the plains towards the Gulf of Mexico. Its ancient name was Lakamha’, “Big Water”, after the many streams that run through the site, and its kingdom was called B’aakal, “Bone”.

In the decades before Pakal’s reign, Palenque suffered heavily. The powerful Snake kingdom, which later ruled from Calakmul, attacked the city in 599 and again in 611. Inscriptions describe the second attack as a disaster in which sacred objects were lost and ritual order was broken.

During this crisis the royal line passed through women. Pakal’s mother, Ix Sak K’uk’, appears to have held royal authority from 612 to 615, and his father, K’an Mo’ Hix, does not seem to have ruled.

Accession of a boy king

Pakal was born in March 603, according to dates carved at Palenque. He became king on 29 July 615 at the age of 12. His name combines K’inich, a royal title linked to the sun god, with Janaab, of uncertain meaning, and Pakal, meaning “shield”.

The Oval Palace Tablet, set in a wall of the royal palace, shows the young Pakal seated on a jaguar throne and receiving a headdress from his mother. The image stresses that his right to rule came through her. His mother lived until 640 and his father until 643, and both probably played important roles in his early reign.

In 626 Pakal married Ix Tz’akbu Ajaw, a noblewoman probably from a nearby town. Their sons included K’inich Kan Bahlam II and K’inich K’an Joy Chitam II, both of whom later ruled Palenque.

Building a great city

Pakal’s long reign was a time of recovery and building. He enlarged the Palace, a complex of courtyards, galleries and towers on a broad platform. One of its buildings, House E, was dedicated in 654 and became the setting for royal accessions, painted white and decorated with stucco.

Palenque’s architects developed lighter, more open buildings with wide doorways, mansard-shaped roofs and roof combs. Stucco reliefs, painted in bright colours, covered walls and pillars. Inscriptions record that Palenque took captives in wars during Pakal’s reign, and a courtyard of the Palace displays carved figures of defeated enemies, probably from campaigns in the 650s and 660s.

Palenque’s builders also tamed the streams that crossed the city. The Otolum stream was channelled through a vaulted stone aqueduct running beneath a plaza, a rare feat of Maya engineering. The Palace’s distinctive four-storey tower, unique in Maya architecture, was added later, after Pakal’s time.

Pakal also restored the kingdom’s religious life. Palenque’s inscriptions present him as the ruler who renewed the worship of the city’s patron gods, known to scholars as the Palenque Triad, after the disasters of 599 and 611.

The Temple of the Inscriptions

Late in life Pakal began his funerary monument, the Temple of the Inscriptions. It is a nine-level stepped pyramid, about 27 m high including the temple, with a temple on top whose walls hold three large carved panels. These panels contain one of the longest known Maya inscriptions, with more than 600 glyphs. They record Pakal’s ancestors, his rituals and dates stretching deep into the mythical past and into the future.

Pakal died on 28 August 683, at about 80 years of age, having ruled for 68 years. His son K’inich Kan Bahlam II completed the temple and took the throne in 684. Kan Bahlam went on to build the Cross Group, three temples celebrating his own accession and the city’s gods.

Discovery of the tomb

In 1948 the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier noticed that one of the floor slabs in the temple had a double row of holes with stone plugs. When he lifted it, he found a vaulted stairway packed with rubble, leading down into the pyramid.

It took four field seasons to clear the stairway. On 15 June 1952 Ruz reached a triangular stone door at the bottom, near ground level. In front of it lay the remains of five or six people, probably sacrificed. Behind the door was a vaulted chamber about 9 m long and 7 m high, its walls decorated with stucco reliefs of nine standing figures, probably ancestors or underworld lords.

The chamber held a massive stone sarcophagus covered by a carved lid about 3.8 m long and 2.2 m wide, weighing several tonnes. When the lid was raised in November 1952, Ruz found the skeleton of a tall man covered in jade: a mosaic mask of jade pieces with shell and obsidian eyes, necklaces, ear spools, bracelets and rings, with a jade bead in his mouth. A narrow stone tube, often called a “psychoduct”, ran from the sarcophagus up the stairway to the temple floor, probably to link the dead king with the world of the living.

The carving on the lid is one of the masterpieces of Maya art. It shows Pakal in a reclining pose, falling into, or emerging from, the open jaws of the underworld. Above him rises the World Tree, a cross-shaped tree linking the underworld, earth and sky, topped by a supernatural bird. Around the edges are symbols of the sky and portraits of his ancestors.

The sides of the sarcophagus show Pakal’s ancestors emerging from the earth as fruit trees. The whole tomb thus presented the king as part of a cosmic cycle of death and rebirth, and as the link between his dynasty and the gods.

Debates, myths and facts

Early studies of the skeleton suggested that the man was 40–50 years old, not 80, leading some to doubt the inscriptions or the identification of the body. Later studies using other methods supported an older age at death, and most scholars accept that the skeleton is Pakal’s and that he lived to about 80.

In 1994 a second rich tomb was found in the neighbouring Temple XIII. It held a woman covered in red cinnabar, nicknamed the “Red Queen”, with a malachite mask. She is widely, but not certainly, thought to be Pakal’s wife, Ix Tz’akbu Ajaw.

In his book Chariots of the Gods? (first published in German in 1968), Erich von Däniken claimed that the sarcophagus lid shows an astronaut at the controls of a spacecraft. Maya specialists reject this: every element of the scene, from the World Tree to the underworld jaws, appears in other Maya art with well-understood religious meaning.

Another misconception is that pyramids in the Maya world were always tombs, as in ancient Egypt. Pakal’s tomb was the first found inside a Maya pyramid, and while other royal burials have since been found in temples, many Maya pyramids were platforms for temples rather than burial monuments.

Later history and legacy

Palenque continued to flourish under Pakal’s sons and grandsons, but its last known inscription dates from 799, and the city was abandoned during the Classic Maya collapse. The ruins were reported by Spanish officials in the 1770s and 1780s and later drawn by travellers such as Frederick Catherwood.

Palenque was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. The jade mask and other tomb objects are displayed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which was robbed on Christmas Eve 1985; the mask and other pieces were recovered in 1989. Replicas of the tomb are shown at the site museum.

Palenque also played a key role in the decipherment of Maya writing. At the first Palenque Round Table conference in 1973, Linda Schele, Peter Mathews and Floyd Lounsbury worked out the sequence of Palenque’s kings, including Pakal, directly from the inscriptions. Their work helped show that Maya texts recorded real political history, not only astronomy and religion.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 599 and 611: The Snake (Kaanul) kingdom attacks Palenque.
• 603, March: Birth of Pakal.
• 615, 29 July: Pakal becomes king at the age of 12.
• 626: Pakal marries Ix Tz’akbu Ajaw.
• 654: House E of the Palace is dedicated.
• 683, 28 August: Pakal dies after a 68-year reign.
• 684: K’inich Kan Bahlam II becomes king and completes the Temple of the Inscriptions.
• 1948: Alberto Ruz Lhuillier finds the hidden stairway.
• 1952, June: Ruz reaches Pakal’s tomb.
• 1987: Palenque becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Pakal’s reign shows how a Maya king could rebuild a defeated kingdom through religion, art and architecture. His tomb, with its inscriptions and imagery, opened a window on Maya beliefs about death and kingship, and helped scholars read the history of the Maya in their own words, as recorded in their Long Count calendar and hieroglyphic texts.