The Maya figured this out Centuries before us

Khan Balam is my favorite Maya king. He was the 13th king of Palenque in the 7th century CE. I love him because he was a scholar. He was a great astronomer, a mathematician, a historian, and a pretty good architect. He was also a warrior, hardened in battle many times. The text, art, and architecture of Palenque bear that out. This is his story, not as some anthropological curiosity, but a historical figure. Khan Balam was a strange looking guy. He had a big nose and a droopy lower lip. Palenque was great at portraiture. We have his image carved into panels and busts and stucco, and they're all very consistent. He might also have had six fingers and toes. My mentor Linda Sheely said that multiple images of him used to show this, but that the last sixth toe was plucked off of his image in the palace in the 1990s. Dang vandals. Khan Balam was born on May 20th, 635. He was the first born son of King Pakal. He was named heir-designate at the age of six. The piers on the Temple of the Inscriptions display that event, showing both his parents both holding him in their arms. Those are cool images too, because they show the young boy with a snake as his left leg. That tied him to Khawil, the god of royal magic. That god, as well, had a left leg that was a snake. He waited most of his life to be king, finally crowned at 48 years old. His name was not Khan Balam until he was king. His princely name was Ah Pitsal. Ball player. Pakal was not in the direct line of kings. He was emergency installed after an attack from Calakmul almost wiped out the Palenque bloodline. So, it was of the utmost importance that his son be prepared to be a great king. Khan Balam's entire life was spent learning from the priests, scribes, and warriors of Palenque's royal court. He was crowned on January 7th, 684 CE, just after his father's death. His full name became K'nich Khan Balam II. Khan Balam I was a previous king of Palenque, and by taking his name, he connected himself to the ancient line of kings and queens. That name, by the way, means snake-jaguar. Now that is a cool name. His first task was to finish his father's tomb, the Temple of the Inscriptions. We know he did that because the inscriptions of the temple end with the death of Pakal and the dates of Khan Balam's ascension to the throne. He also had to take up his father's battles with an enemy city, Tonina. I'll get back to that. Khan Balam's crowning architectural achievement is the cross group. That's where his brilliance really shines. I think he had planned it for decades before he could actually build it. It was three pyramids in a triangular formation – the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun, and the Temple of the Foliated Cross. Each temple had a superstructure with a shrine inside. Those shrines each held carved panels covered in art and hieroglyphs. Even just preparing to build them was an engineering feat. He filled in and leveled a small valley just east of the palace, rerouting its stream underneath the new plaza with sewer lines leading to the Ottolung River. He also capped the Ottolung River for hundreds of meters, creating a walking space from the palace to his new cross group. The buildings themselves were made with an incredibly strong form of mortar and plaster. Pakal's buildings have it too, so I bet they came up with the formula during his lifetime. We don't know how they made it, but any building that Pakal or Khan Balam commissioned is still standing today, while the rest are piles of rubble. Someday a chemist will figure that out. But that mortar is one of Khan Balam's greatest scientific achievements. Astronomy was a big part of the cross group's design. In the inscriptions, Khan Balam showcased the new calendar cycle that he and his court invented, the 819 cycle. It's a repeated count of 819 days, which at first archaeologists didn't know what to make of. But then Yale professor Floyd Lounsbury figured out that it was an ingenious way to incorporate Jupiter and Saturn into the already established Mayan calendar. Lounsbury was also the first to explain the repeated reference to a date in July of 690. All three temples were dedicated together in 692. But the texts keep referencing a date two years earlier. Why? Lounsbury noted that on that date in July 690, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were in a rare conjunction in the night sky. Visible from the front doors of all three temples. And all three planets were in their retrograde motion. That kind of conjunction only occurs every 500 years or so. But it seems that Khan Balam had predicted it. It's possible that he wanted to dedicate all three temples on that date, but his contractors blew the deadline. Heads may have rolled that day. But the implications of the astronomy amaze me. Khan Balam was watching three visible outer-orbit planets close enough to predict their conjunction. Those are the same kind of clues that led Copernicus to the heliocentric view in the 1500s. Khan Balam was figuring that out 800 years earlier. Astronomy was also encoded into the design of the Temple of the Sun. Through tricks of light and shadow, it tracked the stations of the sun throughout the year. The summer solstice sun rises over the Temple of the Cross' west side and sends a knife of light into the temple's back corner. At Zenith Passage, the sun rises directly over the top of the cross and marks the corner of the Temple of the Sun's inner shrine with light. At Equinox, it rises in the gap between the cross and the El Mirador mountain, again casting a knife of light into the innermost corner. I found that alignment myself back in 2001 and I'm proud of that. At winter solstice, the sun, as seen from the doorway of the Temple of the Sun, rises directly over the top of Mirador Mountain. The light beams inside the temple at dawn are a few degrees off of straight in. As it turns out, the morning that the light comes directly in, hence the temple's primary orientation, is on the day of Nadir Passage. Nadir Passage is the opposite of Zenith Passage. It's the day when the sun will pass directly underneath our feet at noon. How the heck did they calculate that? We're still trying to figure it out. But the alignment is true. Just one more thing about the Temple of the Sun. Inside is a panel with a shield in front of two crossed spears. Measuring the angular distance between the two spears, my friend and colleague Alonso Mendez figured out that it's the same angle between the two solstices. The Temple of the Sun was truly about the sun. The Temple of the Crosses texts show off Khan Balam's knowledge of Palenque's history and their mythological origins. It has two long texts bracketing the central image. The left side talks about the mythic ancient origins of Palenque, and the right is a complete list of kings from the dynastic founder Kuk Balam, crowned in 431, to Khan Balam himself. The left side starts with the birth of Muwanmat, the mother of the Palenque Triad, the patron deities of Palenque. She's born in 3121 BCE. That's just before the Maya calendar starts in 3114 BCE. She's born into the third creation, not the fourth one we live in. Then in 2360 BCE, when she's 761 years old, she gives birth to the Palenque Triad, all three of them over a span of 18 days. At the end of the left side text is named a king named U-kit-chan. That means blood letter snake. He was crowned in 966 BCE at the age of 27. But Palenque didn't exist at 966. For that matter, almost no Maya city did. Those are Olmec times. Was U-kit-chan an Olmec ruler? We don't know, but I hope he was. In any event, Khan Balam was a historian, deeply interested in Palenque's past. The panels in the temple shrines are also Khan Balam's Each of the three panels have a central image of two figures facing each other. One is definitely Khan Balam with his big nose and droopy lip. But the other is a little guy. We used to say that that was Pakal in the afterlife. But it was always strange to me that he'd depict his father youthful and smaller than him. Now we've realized that the little guy is Khan Balam as a young prince. His father probably had his heir's portrait all over the city, and Khan Balam needed to update it. So the panels are saying goodbye to his old image and replacing it with his new image as king. Just one more thing about the cross group, and it's my favorite. All three temples are perfect expressions of natural geometry. The proportions that the Hindus called sacred geometry. My friend and colleague Christopher Powell figured this one out. The Temple of the Sun is a combination of 3-4-5 Pythagorean rectangles, in plan, in profile, and side angle. The Temple of the Cross is built in combinations of the golden mean proportion, 1 to 1.618. The Temple of the Foliated Cross uses mainly the square root of 3. All three temples have back rooms of golden mean proportions and front faces using combinations of squares and the square root of 2 rectangles. Not even the Greeks pulled off such elegant combinations of what they called irrational proportions. Now, Khan Balam's life wasn't all roses. He also had to take his father's mantle as war chief. Pakal was crowned in 615 at the age of 12. Just down the road at Tonina, a boy named Balam Chapat was crowned at the age of 8. Those two were lifetime rivals. Balam Chapat means Jaguar Centipede. What a creepy name. They fought for regional supremacy, but Pakal outlived him. A new and even more warlike king took over Tonina in 668 and came at Palenque even harder. Pakal was 65 at the time, so I bet Khan Balam led his army into battle. Just two years into his reign, Khan Balam defeats that king and probably kills him because Tonina gets a new ruler in 687. He's got another creepy name, Baknal Chak, meaning Skull Place Rain God. That guy attacks Palenque in 692, just as Khan Balam is completing the cross group. In his victory texts back at Tonina, he refers to Khan Balam as A Pitsal, his princely name. It's like he's saying, I met that boy in battle. Such disrespect. The Tonina Ball Court shows six captive lords from Palenque at that same time. Khan Balam died on February 16th, 702 at the age of 67. We don't know how, but it could have been for natural causes. He was pretty old. If Baknal Chak took him out, neither Tonina nor Palenque mentioned it. We also have no idea where his tomb is. We've looked for it all over the cross group, but it's not there. I have a theory of where it might be hiding. I think he's inside of one of the only temples in Palenque that remain unexcavated, Temple 11. It was poorly built and no archaeologist will touch it because it would be a restoration nightmare. But it's right in the main plaza and its staircase faces the palace, just like Pakal's burial place. It's also a late construction, after the Temple of the Inscriptions, and it blocks the inscription's once perfect view of the plains below. I believe that Khan Balam's younger brother, Khan Hoi Chi Tam, built Temple 11 in a hurry to honor his brother's unexpected death. It probably looked nice for a while, and then it fell apart. Khan Balam had no children, and poor Khan Hoi Chi Tam had to become king at 58. I'm sure he did his best, but all of his buildings fell apart and he was eventually captured by Tonina. I think he built Temple 11 for Khan Balam and that his tomb is deep inside. Someday we'll find that tomb, and if he's buried in a sarcophagus like his father, the bones will be well preserved. If they are, the body might just have six fingers and toes. Imagine, for the first time in Maya archaeology history, we'd be able to identify a king not just by the hieroglyphs, but by his physical appearance. We will find it someday, and perhaps it will have some texts that will explain the last chapter of Khan Balam's amazing life.