Jimm Budd's World

Solving mysteries at Palenque

        Back about the time when Arthur reigned at Camelot, an equally magnificent monarch ruled over Palenque in what is now Chiapas. Camelot has vanished. No one knows if it really existed, but the ruins of Palenque still stand. There are those who claim Palenque was, in the 7th century, the most striking city on earth. The ruins have been designated Patrimonio de la Humanidad.

        Towering above the Chiapas jungle, the oddly pagoda-like tower over the structure called The Palace dominates what is perhaps the most beautiful of the ancient Maya ceremonial centers.

        Palenque is a two-hour drive from the Villahermosa airport. Pleasant, reasonably-priced hotels are located close to the ruins and overnighting at the site allows plenty of time for exploring.

        There is much to see, not only The Palace but the majestic Temple of the Inscriptions, the Hall of the Cross and the stelae, which are pillars carved with history in hieroglyphics, along with the stadium where the Mayas played a game not unlike soccer a thousand years ago. Images in stucco decorate the many buildings providing a fascinating glimpse of a vanished way of life. 

Beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions lie the bones of Pacal, greatest of the Palenque kings. The discovery of his jade-covered remains in a massive stone sarcophagus in 1952 confounded archaeologists. Until then it was believed that the Mayas, unlike the Egyptians, never used pyramids as tombs. Where once it was believed the Mayas huddled 

in warring city-states, now it appears their kingdoms were extensive. Palenque seems to have begun as an outpost of Tikal, the biggest of the Maya cities, which is in what is now Guatemala.

        Under Pacal and perhaps his mother before him, Palenque became a rebel colony, a protégé realm briefly outshining its mentor. From what can be gleaned from the stelae, the gods foretold the glory of Pacal millenniums before his birth.

        His mother, Zac Kuk, a "great lady", perhaps a princess or a queen, arrived from Tikal about 610 A.D.  By then the area had been inhabited for possibly a thousand years, but in Maya terms it was remote, the western edge of the kingdom and the Gateway to Hell (because the sun sets in the west).

        It may have been a place of exile. Zac Kuk ruled here briefly until her son reached puberty. Ceding the regency, she nonetheless hovered in the background, making certain her young monarch survived.

        A lively mystery weekend could be set up trying to guess what led the royal lady to abandon Tikal for the hinterlands. Had she been a queen overthrown by a usurper? Or was it perhaps that the father of her son was not her husband? There are some things the stelae do not tell. Rulers do not erect monuments to court scandals and they don't have their scribes glorify their defeats.

       Chan, son of Pacal, followed his father on the throne and ordered the complex known as the Group of the Cross built to proclaim his glory and his legitimacy. Hok succeeded Chan, glyphs on the stelae arguing that he, too, was the anointed of the gods. You gather there may have been some doubt and that trouble followed. No stelae have been found to tell the end of the tale. Instead, Palenque went into decline and less than a century after the demise of Pacal this Maya Camelot was a ghost city.

        The inference is that there was a palace revolution followed by a civil war. 

When we think about what we know of European history, it seems the logical explanation. Perhaps we had something like the tragedy of Hamlet or Macbeth played out upon these stones.

        Palenque does resemble a stage set after the actors have gone home. John L. Stephens, an American explorer of the 19^th century, saw it that way. "In the midst of desolation and ruin," he wrote, " we looked into the past...fancied every building perfect...and called into life the strange people who gazed at us in sadness from the walls."