Kʼinich Janaab Pakal rules Palenque

Palenque, called Lakamha’ in antiquity and capital of the kingdom of Baakal in the foothills of Chiapas, had been sacked by the Snake (Kaanul) kingdom, later based at Calakmul, in 599 and again in 611. The deaths in 612 of the king Ajen Yohl Mat and of his heir Janaab Pakal, the boy’s grandfather, brought a succession crisis, and on 9.9.2.4.8 — 24 or 26 July 615 in the Julian calendar, depending on the correlation constant — Pakal, born in March 603, took the throne at the age of twelve; his mother, Lady Sak Kʼukʼ, who had held power in the interval, remained influential until her death in 640. In 626 he married Tzʼakbu Ajaw of Uxteʼkʼuh; their sons Kʼinich Kan Bahlam II and Kʼinich Kʼan Joy Chitam II would both rule after him.

Pakal rebuilt Palenque’s power in the west of the Maya lowlands: inscriptions record captives taken in 659 — among them a lord of Pipa’, probably Pomona — and in 663. He began a great building programme: after the temple now called El Olvidado (647) he enlarged the Palace, adding House E, the Sak Nuk Naah or ‘White House’, Houses B and C (661) and House A (668), decorated with images of captives; the Oval Palace Tablet of 654 shows his accession. In his last decade he began his funerary pyramid, the Temple of the Inscriptions, named after three panels whose 617 glyphs form one of the longest known Maya texts; his son Kan Bahlam completed it soon after Pakal’s death on 9.12.11.5.18 — 26 or 28 August 683 — at the age of eighty, after a reign of 68 years.

In 1952 the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, after clearing a rubble-filled stairway beneath the temple floor, reached the tomb: the king lay in a massive stone sarcophagus whose carved lid shows him at the foot of the world tree, wearing a mask of jade mosaic. Early doubts that the skeleton was old enough to be Pakal’s were resolved by later studies, which found it consistent with the inscriptions; the lid has also become the object of ‘ancient astronaut’ fantasies. After his death Pakal was venerated as one of the patron gods of Palenque.