Palenque

Under Pakal’s extraordinary sixty-eight-year reign, Palenque did not merely recover; it experienced a spectacular renaissance that eclipsed its rivals. Backed by his mother, who remained a powerful co-ruler for the first twenty-five years of his reign, Pakal embarked on a massive rebuilding campaign to erase the humiliation of the Calakmul invasions. He expanded the great central Palace, a labyrinthine complex of rooms, courtyards, and a unique four-story square tower that served as both a watchtower and an astronomical observatory. Pakal forged strategic alliances with Tikal and Yaxchilan, turning the tide of war and capturing enemy lords. His court artists abandoned the stiff, formalized styles of the past in favor of a naturalistic, deeply emotional portraiture, capturing the human face with unprecedented sensitivity in stone and stucco.

Upon his death in 683, Pakal was laid to rest inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, a soaring pyramid constructed as his personal funerary monument. In 1952, the archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier made a sensational discovery beneath the temple floor: a hidden, rubble-filled stairway that descended deep into the heart of the pyramid. At the bottom lay Pakal’s burial chamber, untouched for over a millennium. The king’s massive stone sarcophagus held a tall man adorned in the richest collection of jade ever found in a Maya tomb, his face covered by a magnificent jade mosaic mask, his body wrapped in hand-carved jade beads held together by gold wire. From the sarcophagus, a hollow stone tube known as a psychoduct ran up the stairway to the temple sanctuary above—a physical conduit for the "white breath" of the king’s soul to ascend from the underworld to the land of the living, maintaining his connection to his descendants.

The golden age of Pakal was sustained by his successors. His eldest son, Kʼinich Kan Bʼalam II, completed his father’s tomb and constructed the Group of the Crosses, a trio of temples dedicated to the patron deities of the city, known as the Palenque Triad. These temples—the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and the Temple of the Sun—were adorned with intricate tablets depicting rituals of kingship, ancestral devotion, and cosmic balance. His brother and successor, Kʼinich Kʼan Joy Chitam II, continued this architectural fever, remodeling the Palace and refining the city's artistic legacy. For over a century, Palenque stood as a beacon of intellectual and artistic brilliance, its buildings washed in vibrant reds and blues, standing out against the deep green of the surrounding hills.

Yet, the fragile equilibrium of Maya geopolitics was easily shattered. In 711, the rival kingdom of Toniná launched a devastating raid on Palenque, capturing Kʼinich Kʼan Joy Chitam II. The king was taken away, likely executed in Toniná, and Palenque was plunged into a decade-long interregnum. Though a new ruler, Kʼinich Ahkal Moʼ Naabʼ III, eventually seized the throne in 722 through complex political maneuvering, the city never fully recovered its former security. The eighth century was marked by ongoing, exhausting warfare with Toniná and the systemic stresses that were beginning to destabilize the entire Classic Maya world.

Sometime shortly after 800, the building stopped. The elite class, the priests, and the artists vanished from the ceremonial core. For a few generations, a remnant agricultural population lived among the decaying palaces, planting crops in the plazas and using the grand stone chambers for shelter. Eventually, they too departed, leaving the city entirely to the forest. When Spanish explorers arrived in the region in the 1520s, the site was virtually uninhabited, its true name forgotten, known only to history through the ruins of its silent, vine-choked towers and the whisper of the Otolum river flowing past its abandoned temples.