Palenque is the ruin of a Classic Maya city-state in the northern foothills of Chiapas, southern Mexico, about 150 m (490 ft) above sea level near the Usumacinta River, and it is best known as the city of Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal, who ruled it from 615 to 683. His funerary pyramid, the Temple of the Inscriptions, hid an intact royal tomb that the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier reached in 1952. The ruins date from roughly 226 BC to about AD 799; the excavated core covers around 2.5 km², which archaeologists think is less than a tenth of the ancient city. UNESCO inscribed the site, together with the surrounding national park, as a World Heritage Site in 1987.
Lakamha, the city of big water in the Chiapas hills
The Maya called the place Lakamha, usually translated as “big water”, and the name fits. The city sits on a shelf of steep limestone hills where springs break out of the karst and streams run down to the lowland plain to the north. Rainfall averages around 2,160 mm a year and the mean temperature is a humid 26 °C, so the forest grows fast. After elite building stopped sometime after 800 and the last farmers left, cedar, mahogany and sapodilla trees covered it so thoroughly that when the Spanish arrived in the 1520s the district was almost empty.
Palenque was never as big as Tikal, Chichén Itzá or Copán. What sets it apart is the quality of its buildings and carving: mansard-like roofs, tall roof combs, stucco reliefs and long hieroglyphic texts. Those texts let epigraphers such as Heinrich Berlin, Linda Schele and Peter Mathews draw up the first dynastic list for any Maya city. The kingdom itself was called Bʼaakal, and its earliest known king, Kʼuk Balam, took power in 431.
Pakal’s 68-year reign, 615–683
Pakal came to the throne at a low point. The rival superpower Calakmul had sacked Palenque in 599 and again in 611, the second time with the Calakmul king present in person. An inscription from the period laments that the yearly rites were not performed in 613: “Lost is the divine lady, lost is the king.” Pakal, born in March 603, was crowned in July 615 at the age of twelve, after his mother Lady Sak Kʼukʼ had held power for about three years. She remained an influential figure for roughly the first 25 years of his rule.
He ruled until his death in August 683, a reign of 68 years. That is the fifth-longest verified reign of any sovereign monarch in history and the second-longest of any monarch in the Americas. In the 620s he married Lady Tzʼakbu Ajaw, and they had at least two sons, Kan Bahlam (born 635) and Kʼan Joy Chitam (born 644), and probably a third. Under Pakal Palenque allied with Tikal and Yaxchilan, and most of the palaces and temples visible today were built or rebuilt. The chart below puts his reign beside other Palenque rulers whose dates are known from the inscriptions.
Inside the Temple of the Inscriptions
Pakal began his own funerary monument in the last decade of his life, perhaps as early as 675, and his son Kʼinich Kan Bahlam II finished it shortly after 683. The Maya name was Bʼolon Yej Teʼ Naah, “House of the Nine Sharpened Spears”. It is the largest stepped pyramid at Palenque: eight stepped tiers carry a summit temple, giving nine levels in all. The pyramid measures 60 m wide, 42.5 m deep and 27.2 m high, the temple on top adds 11.4 m, and the whole mass amounts to about 32,500 cubic metres. The largest stones, near the top, weigh 12 to 15 tonnes.
The English name comes from three carved tablets inside the temple, which hold the second-longest hieroglyphic text known from the Maya world after the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copán. They cover around 180 years of the city’s history and centre on Pakal’s period-ending rituals for the three patron gods that scholars call the Palenque Triad. Five doorways open on the front, framed by six stucco-covered piers. Four of them show standing figures holding an infant version of the god Kʼawiil (God K), one of whose legs is a serpent and whose foot has six toes, probably a nod to Kan Bahlam II, who is shown elsewhere with six fingers and six toes.
Alberto Ruz and the 1952 tomb
Palenque had been visited and drawn for two centuries before anyone found the tomb. Antonio del Río’s soldiers smashed through walls in the Palace in the 1780s, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck lived in one temple in the 1830s, an account by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood came out in 1841, Désiré Charnay took the first photographs in 1858, and Alfred Maudslay made moulds of the inscriptions in 1890–1891. None of them noticed the plugged floor slab that hid the stairway.
Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, born in Paris and later a Mexican citizen, took charge of the work of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) at Palenque in the 1940s. Lifting a floor slab at the back of the temple, he found a stairway that the Maya had deliberately packed with rubble before the city was abandoned. It took four seasons of digging to clear it. In 1952 his team reached the crypt, deep inside the pyramid, and Ruz became the first person in over a thousand years to see Pakal’s burial.
The discovery proved, for the first time, that a Maya pyramid could be a tomb as well as a temple. The carved stone sarcophagus had been made for an unusually tall man, and Pakal lay in a suit of jade pieces strung with gold wire, with a jade mosaic mask over his face. The lid shows him as an aspect of the maize god rising from the jaws of the underworld, an image that later became a favourite of pseudo-archaeological speculation. A narrow stone tube, nicknamed the psychoduct, runs from the tomb up the stairway to the temple floor, apparently a path for the king’s soul. When Ruz opened it, the burial was the richest scientifically excavated tomb then known in the Americas. Ruz died in 1979, and his remains rest at Palenque, in front of the tomb he uncovered.
The Palace and its four-storey tower
Facing the Temple of the Inscriptions across a plaza is the Palace, a cluster of linked buildings and courtyards on a broad artificial terrace. At 97 by 73 m at its base, it is the largest building complex at Palenque, and it grew over about four centuries. Pakal remodelled it in 654, 661 and 668, and his younger son Kʼinich Kʼan Joy Chitam II rebuilt the northern side. The rooms were used for court business, receptions and ritual, and they had baths and sweat baths fed by piped water.
The square tower in the middle, usually called the Observation Tower, has four storeys and a mansard-like roof. Its purpose is not settled; the name reflects an old guess that it was used for watching the sky or the surrounding plain. Throughout the Palace the Maya used the corbel vault, an arch built by stepping stones inward until they meet. It needs very thick walls and only spans narrow rooms, which explains the tall, slim galleries. The Palace also yielded the Palace Tablet, the back of a throne found by Ruz’s team.
The Cross Group of Kʼinich Kan Bahlam II
After Pakal died in 683, his elder son Kʼinich Kan Bahlam II, then about 48, became king and launched his own programme in the south-eastern corner of the site. The Cross Group consists of three temples on stepped pyramids around a small plaza: the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Foliated Cross. Each inner shrine holds a carved panel in which two figures present offerings to a central icon. Earlier writers took the two figures as Pakal and his son; scholars now read both as Kan Bahlam, once as a six-year-old during a rite of passage and once at his accession.
The name is a misreading by early explorers. The cross-shaped motif on two of the panels is not Christian at all; it shows the world tree that stood at the centre of creation in Maya myth. The temples were in effect a statement of the new king’s right to rule, tying him to the gods of the Palenque Triad just as his father’s tomb had done. The Temple of the Foliated Cross text names Kʼukʼ Bahlam I, the supposed founder of the dynasty. Kan Bahlam ruled until 702, and his brother followed him until 711, when the kingdom of Toniná sacked Palenque and carried him off as a prisoner.
Water under the plaza: the Otulum aqueduct
The Otulum, a stream that runs through the ancient city, was channelled under the main plaza through a stone aqueduct more than 100 m long with a corbel vault about 3 m high. It carried the stream beneath the Palace terrace, kept the core from flooding in the rainy season and protected the slopes from erosion. A stone bridge crosses the same stream some way downhill.
Smaller channels, holding tanks and drains handled run-off from the ridges to the south. In 2010 researchers from Pennsylvania State University, Christopher Duffy and Kirk French, identified the spring-fed Piedras Bolas conduit as a pressurised system: its narrowed outlet would have forced water out to a height of about 6 m. It is the earliest known example in the New World, though nobody knows what it was for.
UNESCO 1987 and the city still under the forest
UNESCO listed the “Pre-Hispanic City and National Park of Palenque” in 1987, covering 1,772 hectares of ruins and rainforest. Excavation since Ruz has kept turning up finds. In 1994 Temple XIII, next to the Temple of the Inscriptions, yielded the tomb of the so-called Red Queen, a noblewoman covered in red cinnabar powder and possibly Pakal’s wife. In 2022 INAH announced a stucco head of a young maize god found in a pond. Archaeologists still estimate that only about 10% of the city has been uncovered, leaving more than a thousand structures under the trees.
The site recorded 920,470 visitors in 2017, most of them staying in the adjacent modern town of Palenque. Comparing Palenque with other Maya capitals shows how differently the Maya built. The temple pyramids of Tikal in Guatemala, which allied with Pakal, rise far higher above the lowland forest, and Chichén Itzá in Yucatán flourished after Palenque had fallen silent. For the wider picture of how the Maya world spread across the highlands and lowlands of Mexico and Central America, see this guide to the geography of the Maya civilization.