Pakal: The Most Famous Maya Ruler Ever

Ever heard the name Pakal? Well, he's the most famous of ancient Maya kings. He ruled the city of Palenque in the 7th century CE. He lived for 80 years and ruled for 68. He took the throne at 12, and he took a city that was near collapse to one of the greatest of all classic Maya cities. Why is he so famous? Well, it's really because we know so much about him. Hieroglyphs and art panels tell us all sorts of things about him. In this video, I want to talk about Pakal not as an anthropological specimen, but as a person, as a human being. I'm going to tell you about his life. Our setting is Palenque, the jewel of the ancient Maya world. It sits in a mountainside on a plateau 100 meters above the plains below that are full of cornfields. It's called the Military Crest of the Hill. It's kind of a natural fortress. There are six rivers and tons of waterfalls, fruiting tree groves, and some of those groves were cacao, chocolate. It was a natural resource paradise. The city's first king was crowned in 431 CE, and his name was Kuk Balang. The city was advancing and expanding nicely, and it became an ally of the great city of Tikal to the east of it. But then, Tikal and Calakmul started a huge war, and it affected Palenque. In 562, Calakmul defeated Tikal and dominated them for 80 years. In 584, Palenque gets its first queen, Lady Yol Ik Nal, and she takes the throne in 584, and really that's not a good sign. Mostly the Maya want male kings, and when we see a queen take the throne, it means that there wasn't a viable heir, perhaps because of all this warfare. In 599, Calakmul actually attacks Palenque itself, and Palenque records it. They say that there was an axing of Lakamha, which is their city center, by the Khan kingdom, the snake kingdom, which is the name of Calakmul. The texts go on to say that the three Palenque triad gods, the kind of mythological founders of the city, were thrown down. That probably means there was some kind of temple desecration involved. Then in 604, Lady Yol Ik Nal dies, and her son Ahen Yol Mat replaces her. But in 611, Calakmul attacks again, and this time they're led by their king, Skrull Serpent himself. Ahen Yol Mat and his wife were captured and then later killed. The texts read, lost was the lord, lost was the lady, the rituals were not performed. That's the world that Pakal was born into in the year 603. He was nine years old when he and his mother walked into Palenque in the year 612. It was a city in ruins, with no royal family. Those two were probably bloodline related, but they're from somewhere else, a place called Osh Teku, a city or a little village or something, or maybe part of Palenque. But that name translates three gods, so they came from someplace called three gods, probably talking about the Palenque Triad. His mother takes the throne at first. Her name is Lady Sak Kuk, which means White Quetzal. I love that name, it's such a beautiful image of a normally green bird being white. Pakal takes the throne at twelve years old. The oval tablet shows his mom giving him the royal headdress. The oval tablet itself wasn't created until Pakal was fifty years old. Sheely calls this headdress that he's being handed the Drum Major Headdress, and you can really see it does look like that. But the strange thing about this oval tablet image is that Pakal is shown as an adult, not a twelve year old boy. Why did they do that? Well, I think it was because the king's image had become iconic. A lot like modern monarchs, when they put themselves on the money or in portraits, it had to be the same person every time. And as a ruler gets older, sometimes they update their image. Like that time when Queen Elizabeth was changed from a younger Queen Elizabeth to an older Queen Elizabeth on all of the British pounds. I think the oval tablet had to show him as people understood him and look like that iconic image of the king, or the tablet would be misunderstood. His mom, by the way, looked pretty young still. He was crowned Kanich Hanab Pakal, Sun-Faced Flower Shield in 615 CE. Pakal's big problem was that he was not of the direct bloodline, and he was pretty quiet for the first decade of his life. He was probably still a young boy learning from his mom and from the people of the royal court. In 626, when he's 22 years old, he marries a woman named Lady Sakbu. And the texts say that she's from a place called Tochtan. And we understand Tochtan as either someplace outside of Palenque or a part of Palenque where its first three kings were crowned. So it's a very fundamental, bloodline-rooted place. And so, marrying her put his kids into that bloodline. They had three sons, and two of them would go on to be kings of Palenque. Their firstborn son was Khan Balam, Snake Jaguar, and he was born in 635. Their second son was named Khan Hoy Chitom, and he was born in 644. They had a third son that we've actually just recently understood, and he was born in 648. His name was Tiwol Mat. And that third son sadly dies in his 30s. That's probably why we didn't hear much about him. It's a sad story. You don't put it in hieroglyphs. But his son will also eventually become a king of Palenque after Khan Hoy Chitom. His name was Akal Monab, which is a weird name. It means basically Turtle Macaw of the Watery Place. Interesting, strange name. Khan Balam was crowned as the heir apparent at the age of six. So, Pakal had his first big success. The bloodline is secured and tied to Palenque's ancient bloodline. In his 40s, he starts building temples. And interestingly, the first one he builds is called the Olvidado, and he builds it in 647. And it's remarkable for various reasons. The first reason is its architecture. It's unique and new in terms of engineering and architecture for Maya temples in general. It has a double vault mass, which means it has a room on the outside, and then you go through a door, and there's a room in the backside too. This was tricky with Maya construction techniques because it required a corbelled arch in the front and a corbelled arch in the back, which meant that the middle that we call the double vault mass would be very, very heavy. But Pakal and probably his team of architectures and engineers pulled it off, and the Olvidado is the very first double chamber building of its kind in the Maya world. The second interesting thing is its location. It's not in the city center where the palace and Pakal's tomb is. Instead, it's located one kilometer to the west of the center, still in Palenque. I think it's that area of Tochtan where his wife was from. Third is the parentage statements on the building. Now the building's all destroyed, but when they first found it, there were stucco panels on the outsides, on the columns. One side had his father and the other side had his mother, and his dad was named Khan Mohish. We don't know a lot about him, but there he was in the parentage statement of the Olvidado. I think that this was an act of kind of political propaganda by Pakal, where he was placing his parents physically in the part of Palenque that is Tochtan and its very ancestral roots. Pakal also spent some time during this period regaining power over Palenque's kingdom. That kingdom was called Bac Nal, the Bone Place. And that might sound to our western ears as very brutal, something, you know, people being killed, but probably in the Maya mentality, a bone place, was more connected to being rooted to your ancestors and their tombs, rather than killing people in battle. But make no mistake, Pakal was a warrior, and he led the recapture of many local subsidiary cities. We see him crowing about that in the hieroglyphs of the palace he built. In 659, he has a battle with Pomona, a big city to the northeast of them. In 662, we read that he defeats the city of Santa Elena, and both of those are brought to heel and back into the Bac Nal kingdom. His portrait in the palace names him as a warrior. There's this great gallery, a long hallway in part of the palace called House A, and as you walk along it, on the wall are these kind of medallions. They look like picture frames, and they once held portraits of the royal family of Palenque. Nowadays, they're all broken up and cracked off, but they were beautiful in their time. They were different than western portraits because a western portrait has a picture frame and a nice painted picture of someone. But remember, the Maya felt very in touch with their ancestors, that they could actually physically come back to our corporeal world. So, all of these portraits of kings had the frame, but then it was actually a 3D stucco statue, a bust of their heads that came out of the portrait itself and looked down onto the gallery. So, as you walked through the gallery, all of these kings were actually coming from the other world into the gallery to look at you. As I say, all of them are destroyed now, but luckily we know which one is Pakal's. Each one of them had stucco heads, and there were two stucco heads found under Pakal's tomb, and those got brought to the bodega. But then one day, my professor Linda Sheely had the smart idea to bring the one that was obviously Pakal's head out to House A's gallery, and she looked around. Which one of these medallions would it fit into? And she found one on the far left of them that clicked. His head fit perfectly in there. It was definitely Pakal's medallion. And on the outside of that medallion, there were descriptor hieroglyphs. One of them is an owl sitting over the symbol of Venus. An owl in Maya is Kui, and that's also the same name for warrior. And Venus is very connected to warfare. So, on the very portrait of Pakal in the palace, it names him as a Venus warrior. In 654, he starts building his palace. The first building he builds is House E with that oval tablet inside. He had a big job to do because there was an original palace already there, but it was only one story. What he did was cap that and build a second story on top. And on top of that second story, he built five buildings. Buildings A, B, C, D, and E in our archaeology nomenclature. The famous tower that you see in the pictures of the palace, well, that was built after Pakal. So, we don't give that to him, but all the other beautiful buildings were his. And he transformed the lower level into a kind of symbolic underworld. So, he kept that going too. There are three different staircases that go from the underside of the palace up into the upper parts. Very, very complex and a major renovation of Palenque's palace. House C's courtyard is full of images of captives and subservient lords. Pakal probably held his court right there amongst all these scenes. The steps that he stood above actually tell the story of Calakmul. Those hieroglyphs tell us that Calakmul did destroy the city, but then they end with Pakal's triumphant return and the resurgence of the city. He also builds the North Group and the Temple of the Count. So, a lot of construction. And every one of those new buildings had that double vault gallery construction. And one of the things that he did to make that happen is he and his court, assumably, invented this kind of amazing cement and stucco. It's stronger than anything else we saw in the Maya world. Sadly, it ends with Pakal and his son Khan Balam. After that, nobody does it. And we still don't know exactly how they made this cement. But because they did, all of Pakal and Khan Balam's buildings stood the test of time. I mapped over a thousand buildings in Palenque and most of them are rubble. But anything that Pakal or Khan Balam made is still standing and it's still beautiful. Not only is the architecture standing, but the stucco is still there. Whatever that binder was in their cement and stucco, it was amazing. I suspect it was some kind of tree resin, but that's for a chemist to figure out, not me. Hopefully someday someone will. 663 was an important year in Palenque because that was the moment that the Tikal King himself arrived to Pakal's court. The hieroglyphs tell us all about it. His name was Nuhn-Hol-Chak. And he arrives before he really starts fighting with both Calakmul but a rival city called Dos Pilas. It's straight out of some kind of soap opera. He's probably in Palenque looking and gathering support. Who will help me fight Calakmul? And of course, Palenque has a bone to pick with Now here's what happened to this King, Nuhn-Hol-Chak. He was a subjugated king in Tikal. Calakmul didn't take them over. They just made sure that they were working for Calakmul. But during that time period, Nuhn-Hol-Chak had a brother, Balai Chan-Kawil. And Balai Chan-Kawil was somehow or another coerced to working more in conjunction with Calakmul. Through Calakmul's authority and force, he establishes the city of Dos Pilas. And interestingly, their emblem glyph is exactly the same as Tikal's because he's also part of that royal family and connected to their ancestors. Nuhn-Hol-Chak can't stand that. Even though there have been decades of Tikal doing nothing to fight back, when this happens, he can't take it. He attacks his brother Balai in 672, and he's successful. He ends up exiling his brother for five years from that new city, Dos Pilas. But Balai gets the last laugh. He ends up getting Calakmul's support to attack back, and in 679, he kills his brother Nuhn-Hol-Chak. All of this is going on just a maelstrom of activities while Tikal's trying to pull Palenque back up to its prominence. But Tikal's getting old. By the time Nuhn-Hol-Chak dies, he's 76 years old. Tikal died on August 28, 683. But before he did, his son and he build his tomb. We call it the Temple of the Inscriptions. Khan Balaam, crowned prince in his late forties, finishes building the tomb. Khan Balaam was probably trained by the best minds and warriors his whole life, and he was probably very ready to be king. But he did his father right by completing his tomb and honoring it. Tikal's tomb is buried at the base of that building, and it's accessed through interior staircase. The temple had to be built around that tomb. Because it's a big building, and inside in the center is a 20-ton sarcophagus lid. 15 tons the base that holds the body, and then another 5 tons of stone on the top, all beautifully carved. So, the image shows Tikal falling down the World Tree, the Axis Mundi, into the Underworld, but we know that he will eventually be reformed and he will go up into the sky to take his place among the gods and the ancestors. Around the sides of the sarcophagus are all sorts of images and hieroglyphs explaining his long lineage. It talks about his father and his mother, and goes all the way back to the starting kings of Palenque. There are inscriptions on the very top of the temple in its first interior room, and that's why we call it the Temple of the Inscriptions. It goes across three panels, and there are 617 glyphs. It tells his story, but it does more than that. It says that when he was born, he was more than just a Palenque king, that he was actually the avatar of God One of the Palenque Triad. They were the mythological first kings of Palenque, and we've given them boring names like God One, God Two, God Three. But he does more than just connect him, he makes an argument that he was connected because Venus was in the exact same place in the sky when he was born as G1 was born. So he does a kind of political, mythological, religious propaganda that say that, yes, I acknowledge that I am not part of the bloodline directly, but I'm better than that. The reincarnation of God One. Near the end of the text, it also tells us that Pakal will be here in spirit until the first Piktun. That is a big increment of time within the Maya calendar. It's an 8,000 year period. Baktuns are what we normally talk about. They're 400 year periods. And this text is very important, at least to geeks like me, because when you do the math and it says arrive to the first Piktun, you don't get to 2012 like we used to think the calendar reset at 2012. When you do the math, it's 4,772 CE, and it totals 20, not 13 Baktuns. So in this panel of Pakal's life, they, on the side, prove at least to me that we were wrong about this 13 Baktun setup that Palenque, which were great mathematicians, believe that time continues and that the calendar won't reset to the Piktun period for thousands of years from now. And there he sat for 1,268 years. Then in June of 1952, Alberto Ruz opened his tomb, and we found all of these amazing things inside. We found the hieroglyphs. We found the images of him. But this was 1952. We hadn't cracked the code of Maya hieroglyphics yet. We were pretty good at the calendar, and we could tell when birth dates were being named. So Ruz called him Lord 8 Ahau, which is his birthday. We've come a long way in our understanding. Pakal's story humanizes the ancient Maya. We have this challenge that the Maya are still not really taking their rightful place in ancient world history as one of our great human civilizations. What we need is a face to the civilization. And Pakal could be that. He could be like an Imhotep, or a Confucius, or an Alexander the Great. We humans need a human story to connect ourselves, to relate ourselves to these great civilizations. The Maya need a front man to represent them in the story of humanity. And I think Pakal is the guy for the job. He, or maybe his son Khan Balam. Would you like me to make a video about him next?