Palenque: Art and Court of Pakal

Of all the great cities of the ancient Maya, Palenque is the one that has most captured the modern imagination. The site perches on a series of artificial terraces above the Grijalva River in the foothills of the Chiapas highlands, in the eastern part of the Mexican state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border. Its setting — a cool, cloud-forested ridge of mossy stone at the foot of the Lacandón Jungle — gives it a softer, greener, more intimate feel than the open savanna sites of the Petén, and the art produced under its Late Classic dynasty has long been recognized as the most refined of any in the Maya world. The reason is, above all, the reign of one king: K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I, who came to the throne in 683 CE and ruled for 68 years, presiding over a generation of art and architecture whose influence is felt across the western lowlands.

For a survey of the wider context, see the overview on major Maya cities and archaeological sites, and the detailed account of the greatest single find at the site in the most important find at Palenque. For the river cities of the same period, see Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta.

Setting and early history

The Palenque region sits at the interface between the limestone Petén lowlands to the north and the volcanic highlands of Chiapas to the south. The Grijalva River and its tributary the Otulum provided year-round water, and the surrounding hills supported a dense tropical forest. The earliest ceramic occupation of the valley is dated to the Middle Preclassic (c. 1000–600 BCE), but the civic history of the site begins in the Late Preclassic with the establishment of a small ritual center on the natural ridge above the Otulum River. The first substantial buildings, including the Olvidado (“Forgotten”) temple, date to the Late Preclassic and were decorated with stucco modeled in the style of the central Mexican Olmec tradition.

The dynastic history of Palenque begins in the 5th century CE. The empirical founder of the dynasty was K’uk’ B’ahlam I (r. 431–435 CE), whose accession is recorded on the oval Palace Tablet. The dynasty traced its lineage back into the mythological past, claiming descent from a three-stone hearth of creation. The early dynasty was not particularly powerful: Palenque was repeatedly attacked by neighbors, including the Snake dynasty of Calakmul, and in 599 and 611 CE major buildings were burned in wars associated with the Kaan king K’an I and his successors. The political and military background is discussed in why Calakmul was such a powerful rival to Tikal.

The reign of Pakal

The political fortunes of Palenque were transformed on 29 July 683 CE, when K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I — Pakal the Great — came to the throne at the age of 12. Pakal was a member of a junior branch of the dynasty whose legitimacy was at first contested, but he went on to rule for 68 years, the longest reign in the documented history of the ancient Maya. His accession is recorded on a long hieroglyphic text that runs the full length of the central staircase of the Palace, and his death in 683 CE — already 80 years old — is recorded on the side panels of the Sarcophagus Lid in his tomb.

The cultural program that Pakal sponsored is the densest concentration of Late Classic Maya art in any single city. In addition to the Temple of the Inscriptions described below, Pakal commissioned the great Palace, the oval Palace Tablet with its 617 hieroglyphs recounting dynastic history, the elaborate stucco reliefs of the Palace Tower, and an entire iconographic program that includes the Stucco Frieze of the Palace, with its three-dimensional portraits of captive lords.

The Temple of the Inscriptions

The Temple of the Inscriptions is the great stepped pyramid that rises above the southern end of Palenque’s central plaza. It was built during the reign of Pakal and was dedicated as his funerary monument, with the king’s tomb concealed deep inside the pyramid and reached by a hidden staircase.

The building takes its name from the three large hieroglyphic panels carved into the upper façade of the temple, with 617 glyphs that record the dynastic history of Palenque from the 1st century BCE to the dedication of the temple in 692 CE. The temple was discovered in 1746 by the Spanish friar Antonio de Solís, who described the inscription in a letter, and the building was professionally excavated in 1952 by the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, whose team found the stairway leading to the inner tomb.

The full significance of the find, and a detailed reading of the sarcophagus lid and its iconography, is the subject of the most important find at Palenque.

The Palace

The Palace of Palenque is a complex of connected buildings arranged around four interior courtyards, built and rebuilt by several generations of the dynasty. The earliest version dates to the reign of Pakal’s father, K’an Mo’ Hix (r. 572–583 CE), and major additions were made under Pakal himself and his sons. The most famous single feature is the four-story square tower — the only known tower in Classic Maya architecture — whose function is still debated, with proposals ranging from an astronomical observatory to a watchtower to a symbolic representation of the world tree. Recent scholarship, including the work of the Proyecto Arqueológico Palenque led by Arnoldo González Cruz and (since 2003) of the INAH Chiapas project, has begun to map the hidden sub-structures of the Palace, including a long sequence of buried floors and tombs, with the aid of LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar.

The Palace Tablet, set in the back wall of House E of the eastern court, was carved in 799 CE under K’inich Kan B’ahlam II, the grandson of Pakal. It is a single oval panel of limestone carved with 617 glyphs recounting dynastic history from the creation of the world to the time of the carving.

The Cross Group

North of the Palace, on a raised terrace of its own, stands the Cross Group — three temple pyramids named for the cross-shaped emblems carved into their inner sanctuaries, plus a larger non-radial platform that supports them. The temples were built by K’inich Kan B’ahlam II and dedicated in 692 CE as a symbolic program representing the mythological three-stone hearth of Maya creation.

The Temple of the Cross is the central temple of the group, with a great interior relief carved into the back wall of the inner sanctuary depicting the ruler and his consort in a vision of the world tree, with the K’awiil lightning deity emerging from a serpent.
The Temple of the Sun is the southern temple, with a depiction of a jaguar sun and a long glyphic text.
The Temple of the Foliated Cross is the northern temple, with an image of a cross-shaped maize tree and a glyphic text naming the children of the world tree.

The Cross Group is read in the modern literature as a coherent mythological and political program; the long inscriptions are among the most thoroughly translated passages of Maya writing.

The art of the western lowlands

The art of Palenque, distinct from that of the Petén capitals, has a number of features that the modern literature has long noted: an emphasis on three-dimensional stucco modeling; a preference for fine detail in costume and personal adornment; a particular use of blue stucco and dark backgrounds that recalls central Mexican practice; and a sophisticated set of portrait sculptures that depict the dynasty’s rulers as individuals, in older age, often with the features of middle age or infirmity. The Stucco Frieze of the Palace, with its three-dimensional portraits of captive lords kneeling on a war mat, is unique in Maya art; the head of Pakal from the tomb, painted in the famous stucco death mask, is one of the most reproduced Maya works in the world. The wider art-historical context is in Maya art, architecture, and monuments, and the techniques of Maya stucco and stonework are in Maya pottery, jade, and material culture.

The post-Pakal dynasty and the abandonment

After the death of Pakal in 683 CE, the dynasty was racked by war and political instability. K’inich Kan B’ahlam II (r. 684–702 CE) was an energetic military ruler, but the late 7th and early 8th centuries were a difficult time. The catastrophic defeat of K’an Joy Chitam II, captured by the rival city of Toniná in 711 CE in a war recorded in the inscriptions of both cities, was the most dramatic single event. Toniná is a major Maya site in its own right and is the subject of the broader treatment of Maya cities and archaeological sites.

The final years of the dynasty, in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, are recorded on a series of late monuments in the Palace, including the great Hieroglyphic Stairway (a modest 35-step inscription compared to Copán’s 62-step stairway) and the Bench of the captives in House E. The last dated monument at the site is dedicated in 799 CE, and within a generation the central precinct had been abandoned. The causes of the broader collapse of the central lowland cities are surveyed in causes of the Classic Maya collapse.

Rediscovery and modern archaeology

Palenque was visited briefly by Antonio de Solís in the 18th century, and again by Guillermo Dupaix in 1807. The first modern scientific expedition was the visit of the American travelers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in 1840; Catherwood’s drawings of the Palace and the Temple of the Inscriptions are still used as historical documents. The first Mexican excavation was led in 1891 by the geographer Dionisio Gutiérrez, and major modern work was begun in 1949 by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) under Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, who discovered the tomb of Pakal in 1952.

The Proyecto Arqueológico Palenque has continued since 1973, and major modern work has been led by Mercedes de la Garza, Linda Schele, David Stuart, Roberta and Mark Romano, and (most recently) Arnoldo González Cruz of INAH Chiapas. The LIAG-UNAM LiDAR project of 2017 mapped 25 square kilometers of the Palenque region, revealing the dense rural settlement that surrounded the city and a complex network of causeways. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (inscribed 1987), and is administered jointly by INAH and the state of Chiapas.

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