What Does the Bonampak Mural Show?

The Bonampak murals are the most complete set of ancient Maya wall paintings ever found. Painted in c. 692 CE in three rooms of a small temple set in the Lacandon rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, the murals show in vivid color a royal court at war, at sacrifice, and at dance. The three rooms, labeled Room 1, Room 2, and Room 3 by the 20th-century Mexican conservators who first cleaned them, form a single narrative program covering all four walls of the building, with subsidiary scenes on the piers and lintels. The painting has preserved the rich mineral and organic pigments of the Late Classic in near-pristine condition, and the figures, costumes, and inscriptions are the most vivid surviving record of Maya courtly life. The murals are now one of the most-visited displays of Maya art, architecture, and monuments in the world.

This page describes the three rooms of the mural program, the iconography, and the historical context. For the broader tradition of Maya wall painting, see Maya murals, painting, and iconography. For the broader context, see Maya art, architecture, and monuments. For the city of Bonampak and the Usumacinta region, see Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta. For the historical war of 692 CE and its consequences, see the Petexbatun wars and the Late Classic period of Maya history.

The site of Bonampak

Bonampak (“painted walls” in Tzeltal Maya) is a small Maya site on the banks of the Lacanjá River, a tributary of the Usumacinta, in the eastern Chiapas rainforest. The site was a minor capital in the Late Classic, vassal or ally of the larger city of Yaxchilán a few kilometers downriver. Bonampak is a small site by the standards of the major Maya capitals — it has only a few major buildings — but the painted temple at its center is one of the great art works of the pre-Columbian world.

The painted temple sits on a low platform at the center of the site. The building is a single three-room structure, with a corbel-vaulted inner room and a flat-roofed outer room on each end. The roof has been partly preserved, and the interior walls are covered with painted lime plaster.

The discovery of the murals

The murals were discovered in 1946 by Carlos Frey and John Bourne, two young American archaeologists working in the Lacandon rainforest. They had been led to the site by Jacinto Pérez, a Lacandon Maya who served as guide. The three men found the building buried under a later addition, and they cleared the entrance, climbed inside, and discovered the painted walls. The discovery was reported in National Geographic magazine, and the Mexican government dispatched a team of conservators led by Agustín Villagra Caleti to clean and consolidate the paintings in 1949.

The site is deep in the rainforest, accessible only by a long walk from the nearest river landing. Despite this, the paintings have been studied by scholars from around the world, and the site is now a small but well-visited museum under the management of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico.

The date and the king

The murals are dated by their own inscriptions to 692 CE, near the end of the reign of Janaab’ Pakal (also called Janaab’ Pakal of Bonampak), a local king of Bonampak, vassal of Itzamnaaj B’alam II of Yaxchilán. The text of the murals is read in association with the Stela 1 of Bonampak and the Stela 2 of Bonampak, both of which name Janaab’ Pakal and his overlord.

The historical context is the war of 692 CE, a major conflict in the Usumacinta region between Yaxchilán (with Bonampak as its vassal) and Piedras Negras, the great rival city upriver. The war was part of the long Petexbatun and Usumacinta politics of the 8th century, and the murals of Bonampak are a direct visual record of one of its major events.

Room 1: the court and the captives

The first room, entered from the south stairway, is the smallest of the three and serves as an introduction. The east, north, and west walls of Room 1 are covered with scenes of court life, with subsidiary scenes on the piers and lintels.

The east wall of Room 1 shows a procession of nobles, each depicted in a vertical band. The figures are arranged in hierarchical order: the king of Bonampak and the king of Yaxchilán are largest, with subordinates below. Each figure wears a different headdress and costume, and each is named by a small hieroglyphic caption. The procession moves from left to right, ascending toward the central figure of the king.

The north wall shows the presentation of a small boy, the heir to the throne, to the assembled court. The boy is held by his mother, and the king watches the presentation. The scene is paired with a glyphic text that names the boy and records his date of birth.

The west wall of Room 1 is the most famous: it shows a long line of captives standing in front of a row of courtiers, with the king seated on a low throne in the center. The captives have been stripped, their hands bound, and they are shown with the blood of beatings still visible. Each captive is named with a glyphic caption that gives his home city, his family, and his rank.

The composition of the west wall uses hierarchical scale: the king and the highest nobles are larger than the captives, who are in turn larger than the smaller figures. The painted captions name Janaab’ Pakal as the king and Itzamnaaj B’alam II as the overlord of Yaxchilán, confirming the date and the political context.

Room 2: the war

The middle room, Room 2, is the largest and contains the most dramatic scenes: the war of 692 CE, shown on all four walls in a continuous program.

The east wall of Room 2 shows the battle itself, with hand-to-hand combat between warriors of Bonampak and warriors of Piedras Negras. The warriors carry shields, spears, and atlatls (spear-throwers), and they are shown in dynamic poses, with blood, bodies, and dismembered limbs scattered across the plaza. The action is centered on a great pyramid temple, the temple of Piedras Negras, which is shown being attacked.

The north wall shows the taking of prisoners, with the victors seizing the surviving warriors of Piedras Negras and leading them away in ropes. The captives are stripped, bloodied, and humiliated, and the scene is paired with a long glyphic text that names the captives and their home cities.

The west wall of Room 2 shows the presentation of the captives to the king. The captives are lined up in a long row, and the king and his nobles examine them, with a small attendant holding a bowl of blood. The scene is the visual climax of the war narrative, and the captions give the names of the major captives and the date of the presentation.

The south wall of Room 2, which is the back wall of the room, is the most famous. It shows a mass of dismembered bodies at the foot of a great pyramid, with the victors standing above and the blood running down the steps of the temple. The image is one of the most powerful in all pre-Columbian art, and it is the visual record of the sacrificial conclusion of the war.

The compositions of Room 2 are dense and dynamic, with hundreds of figures in a single mural program. The colors are bright: red, yellow, blue, white, and black, with the bodies of the dead painted in the same palette. The figures are small (the king’s head is only about 30 cm high), but the detail is meticulous.

Room 3: the dance and the music

The third room, Room 3, is the largest of the three and contains the most joyful scenes: the celebration of the war, the music, and the dance.

The east wall of Room 3 shows a procession of musicians entering the plaza. The musicians carry trumpets of wood and gourd, drums of tortoise shell, rattles of gourd and bone, and flutes of reed and bone. They are led by an old man in white, identified as a crier who announces the arrival of the musicians.

The north wall shows the dance itself, with the king, the queen, and a long line of nobles dancing in a great circle around a central platform. The dancers wear elaborate headdresses of quetzal feathers and macaw plumes, and they carry fans, scepters, and ceremonial bars. The dance is a ritual dance of victory, the visual conclusion of the war narrative.

The west wall of Room 3 shows a long line of lords and ladies of the court, with the king and queen seated on a raised platform at the center. The court wears the most elaborate costumes of the mural program, with jade collars, shell belts, and quetzal headdresses. The composition is symmetrical, with the king and queen as the central axis.

The south wall of Room 3 is dominated by a large musical ensemble, with three musicians playing trumpets, drums, and rattles, and a fourth holding a stingray spine and a bowl of blood. The musicians are the largest figures in the mural program, and they are placed in the position of greatest honor.

The colors of Room 3 are the brightest of the three rooms, with maya blue prominently used in the costumes of the dancers and musicians. The room has been described as a “ballet of color” by the Mexican conservator Villagra, and the figures are the most refined of the mural program.

The piers and lintels

The piers that divide the rooms are painted with subsidiary scenes, including images of the Vision Serpent, Smoke Imix (a serpent-like god with a scroll in his forehead), and the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The lintels of the doorways are painted with figures of kings and gods, and the stucco masks of the exterior are painted in polychrome.

The presence of the Vision Serpent is one of the most important iconographic elements of the program. The Vision Serpent is conjured by royal bloodletting and the smoking of burning copal, and it appears as a flying serpent with a human ancestor or deity emerging from its mouth. The Vision Serpent is the signature image of Late Classic royal iconography in the Usumacinta drainage, and it is also central to the Yaxchilán lintels of Lady K’ab’al Xook.

The hieroglyphic captions

Each scene is paired with a glyphic caption that names the figures, the events, and the dates. The captions are short (often only a few glyphs) and are placed in the upper corners of the scenes. They use the same script as the stelae of Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras, and they tie the visual program to the historical record of the war.

The captions of the south wall of Room 2 include a date in the Long Count that corresponds to 3 February 692 CE, the date of the battle. Other captions record the names of the kings, the names of the captives, the rituals performed, and the final disposition of the prisoners.

The historical record

The Bonampak murals are the most important single body of visual evidence for the political and military history of the 8th-century Usumacinta. The murals show, in vivid detail, the conduct of a major war, the taking of captives, the presentation of prisoners to the king, and the celebration of victory. The scenes confirm and extend what the inscribed stelae of Yaxchilán, Piedras Negras, and Bonampak themselves say, and they provide a visual record of ritual and ceremony that is otherwise lost.

The war recorded in the murals is part of the wider conflict that led, in the 8th century, to the gradual decline of the Usumacinta cities. Bonampak was abandoned within a few years of the war, and Piedras Negras fell into decline soon after. Yaxchilán survived for a few more generations, but the entire Usumacinta drainage was largely abandoned by 900 CE.

The style of the paintings

The Bonampak murals are painted in the orange-slipped polychrome tradition of the Usumacinta, with a wider color range and a more painterly style than the central-Petén codex-style vases of the same period. The pigments are bound in a stucco medium and sealed with a final coat of clear stucco. The principal colors are red hematite, yellow limonite, black charcoal, white lime, and the rare blue maya blue, an unusual pigment made by bonding indigo to a clay mineral.

The figures are small, but the detail is meticulous. The costumes, the headdresses, the weapons, the bloodletting implements, and the glyphic captions are all painted with the same care. The result is a body of painting that is at once a narrative, a ceremonial record, a political statement, and a work of art.

Why the Bonampak murals are so important

The Bonampak murals are central to the study of the ancient Maya for several reasons.

They are a complete narrative program. Unlike the fragmentary murals of San Bartolo, Calakmul, or Cacaxtla, the Bonampak program is preserved in near-pristine condition, with all three rooms and all four walls of the building intact.
They are dated. The Long Count dates of the captions place the program in 692 CE, a fixed point in the political history of the Usumacinta.
They show ritual in action. The bloodletting, the war, the taking of captives, the dance, and the music are all shown in detail, in a way that is not preserved elsewhere in the Maya record.
They are a royal record. The murals were painted under the supervision of the king, and they are a direct statement of royal power, royal ritual, and royal identity.
They are a masterpiece of painting. The murals are among the finest works of pre-Columbian art, with a level of detail and color that is unrivaled in the ancient Americas.

The Bonampak murals are, in short, the Rosetta Stone of Maya painting. They anchor the iconography of the entire Late Classic, and they remain the most vivid surviving record of the ancient Maya at the height of their civilization.

Sources

Miller, M. E. (1999). Maya Art and Architecture. Thames & Hudson. — link
Miller, M. E. (1986). The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton University Press. — link
Schele, L. & Freidel, D. (1990). A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. William Morrow. — link
Houston, S. D., Stuart, D. & Taube, K. A. (2006). The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience in Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press. — link
Taube, K. A. (2010). Maya Deities and the Place of Vision: A Workbook on Maya Iconography. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press. — link