Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  For nearly two hundred years, foreigners had been arriving at Palenque—an international who’s who of artists, explorers, and archaeologists including Antonio del Río, John Lloyd Stephens, Frederick Catherwood, Désiré Charnay, Alfred Maudslay, and Frans Blom. Drawing, photographing, mapping, making plaster casts, they had transformed the city into the most studied of all Maya ruins.

  You could say this latest arrival was a foreigner, too. Alberto Ruz Lhuillier had been born in Paris, in 1906, to a French mother and a Cuban father. (Alberto’s first cousin on his father’s side was a young man about to become famous in his own right, Fidel Castro Ruz.) Graduating from the University of Havana, Ruz had studied at Mexico City’s prestigious Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he’d been drawn into archaeology by the great Alfonso Caso, Matthew Stirling’s ally in the argument over the age of Olmec civilization. After earning his master’s degree, Ruz had gone to work at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and become a Mexican citizen. In 1949, at the age of forty-three, he’d been placed in charge of the work at Palenque.

  Tall, with dark good looks and gentle blue eyes, Ruz was known to his friends as a joker and an addict of that Maya delicacy, chocolate. He was also known for his affable chats with his workers and his outrage over the discrimination suffered by the present-day Maya. And Ruz shared the inveterate optimism of the archaeologist. Though Palenque had been studied for nearly two hundred years, only a tiny percentage of the ruins had been unearthed, so he was confident he could still find something of value amid the rubble. Ruz knew that Maya pyramids were often constructed one atop another, perhaps as a way of concentrating supernatural energy in a sacred place. The Temple of the Inscription’s carvings, size, and location all bespoke the building’s importance. Yet it had never been excavated. He began to wonder whether another pyramid might lie beneath.

  The floor of the pyramid’s crowning temple was unlike any other at Palenque, constructed not of stucco but of carefully fitted flagstones. Now, as Ruz prowled the building’s central chamber, he noticed a paving stone drilled with a row of perforations. Crouching for a closer look, he noted a detail that all the others had missed: The temple’s walls, instead of ending at the floor, seemed to extend beneath. The next day, May 20, 1949, he had his men lift the perforated slab, and after some probing they uncovered a flat, narrow stone, the kind the Maya had used to close a vaulted ceiling. A few days later, they found one step, then another—a stairway.

  The steps had been filled with stones and clay. So the crew began to dig, hauling out the debris in buckets fixed to ropes and pulleys. Troweling downward, they found a strange, square stone tube running along one of the stairway’s walls. Then, at the bottom of the forty-fifth step, the floor became wider, and they discovered an offering of two jade ear ornaments. But it wasn’t the end of the stairway, only a landing where the steps made a U-turn.

  Ruz worked as weather and funding allowed. After another twenty-one steps, the stairs dead-ended at a wall, more than seventy feet below the temple floor and about level with the plaza outside. Fixed to the barrier was a masonry box with another offering—three pieces of pottery, seven jade beads, another pair of circular jade ear ornaments, two shells filled with cinnabar, and a tear-shaped pearl more than half an inch long. Ruz sensed they were getting close.

  Breaking through the thick stone-and-lime wall, they discovered a triangular slab nearly seven feet high, apparently sealing another entrance. At its foot, in a rough stone box, lay a mass of human bones. Ruz believed they were six sacrificed youths, though the skeletons were so mixed and in such bad condition that he couldn’t be sure of the count. At least one of the victims was female, and all were nobles, judging from their flattened skulls and their jade-encrusted teeth. Ruz knew that something important must lie beyond.

  Finally, on Sunday, June 15, 1952—three years after they’d begun—the crew heaved the triangular slab aside and Ruz slipped through, the first person in centuries to step into the heart of the pyramid. Consumed with emotion, he struggled to recoup his scientific detachment. He was standing in a large crypt nearly thirty feet long by thirteen feet wide, the vaulted ceiling soaring nearly twenty-three feet above the floor. But as he trained his flashlight through the ancient gloom, its rays seemed not to illuminate earth or stone, but ice. Stalactites hung from the vault like slender icicles, and the walls reflected a frosty sheen, both the result of centuries of water seepage.

  The high vault was supported by black stone beams, and the stone walls and ceiling had been fitted with such care that not one piece had shifted during a millennium. Standing sentinel on the walls were nine larger-than-life stucco figures, each with a headdress of quetzal feathers; a feathered cape; and jade plaques, ear ornaments, necklace, chest plate, bracelets, scepter, and a round shield in the image of the sun god. Ruz took them to be the lords of darkness, guardians of the nine levels of the Maya underworld.

  On the floor rested two exquisite stucco heads, one of a youth, the other of a gaunt-cheeked old man; both had been stripped from larger statues and left in the tomb as a kind of bloodless sacrifice. The finest of their kind ever found at Palenque, the heads were exceptionally realistic, obviously portraits of actual persons. Fixing his flashlight on them, Ruz felt moved by the “austerity, inner power, and spirit of the priestly cast.”

  At the threshold of the chamber, the square stone tube that they had followed down the stairway morphed into a stucco serpent, apparently forming a spiritual conduit to the pyramid’s summit and the world of the living. Tracing the serpent with his beam of light, Ruz saw that it rose from an enormous limestone monument in the center of the crypt. Some thirteen feet long and seven feet wide, the monument had a stone base and sides, all worked with intricate images of richly attired figures, along with thirteen bar-and-dot dates from the early seventh century.

  On the base rested a huge stone slab carved with bas-reliefs on all four sides and top, which even in the dimness, Ruz recognized as a masterpiece of Maya art. The slab’s central image was a phantasmagorical figure surrounded by astronomical signs, representing, Ruz mused, “heaven—the spatial limit of man’s earth, and the home of the gods, in which the unchanging course of the stars marks the implacable rhythm of time.” A decade later, Swiss author Erich von Däniken would take the heavenly theme a precarious step further, suggesting that the carving depicted an extraterrestrial astronaut come to Earth to sow civilization among humankind. But there was no misconstruing what lay on top of the slab—a belt studded with jade ornaments, a jade mosaic scepter depicting the rain god, and a jade mosaic shield in the form of the sun deity. Ruz thought the monument might be an altar for subterranean rituals. Then another idea took shape: Could the huge base be a sarcophagus?

  But the rainy season had already begun, and Ruz’s funds were exhausted. It would be November, an excruciating five months later, before he was able to test his theory.

  By then he had a plan. When they finally reopened the chamber, Ruz instructed his men to drill a hole in the monument’s base, in an area without carving. The bore met with nothing but solid stone. A second attempt found a hollow core, however, and when an exploratory wire was inserted, it emerged with traces of red pigment—the color often found in Maya royal graves, signifying the east, resurrection, immortality. Now Ruz was certain: He’d discovered the largest Maya sarcophagus ever found, and a tomb of consummate importance. The realization affected him almost as powerfully as the discovery of the crypt itself.

  Ruz had a delicate decision to make. Should he risk damaging the fantastically carved lid, one of the artistic glories of Maya civilization, in order to see what lay inside? He didn’t hesitate for long. Since the tomb was too cramped for heavy equipment, he ordered a tree felled and its trunk cut into lengths of various sizes. The logs were then trucked to the pyramid, hauled up the seven stories to the temple, lowered with cables down the sixty-six steps of the interior sta
ircase, and finally maneuvered into the tomb. After two days of feverish tension, the men placed at each corner of the sarcophagus an upright log with a hydraulic truck jack set on top.

  On November 27, at dusk, they began to raise the jacks millimeter by millimeter. As the lid edged upward, they slipped stone slabs underneath, in case the jacks should lose their purchase. And when the devices had reached their limit, other logs were balanced on the originals and the process continued. For twenty-four “soul-shaking” hours, Ruz didn’t permit himself to leave the chamber.

  Gradually, a hollow came into view beneath the lid—long, vaguely fish-shaped, and sealed by another highly polished, perfectly fitted stone. This second slab had been drilled with four holes, now filled with stone plugs, which had apparently been used to lower it into place. As soon as space allowed, Ruz slipped under the five-ton lid and worked out two of the plugs. Setting his flashlight against one of the openings, he peered through the other. Inside the sarcophagus, just inches from his eye, was a human skull covered with jade.

  Climbing beneath the five-ton lid of Pakal’s sarcophagus, Alberto Ruz peered inside and discovered a human skull covered with jade.

  The men slipped cords through the four holes and raised the interior slab. What followed was one of the great moments in archaeology. As the sarcophagus was opened, the cinnabar-dusted interior came into view. In the center of the fish-shaped hollow lay a skeleton. Badly deteriorated, he was resting on his back, his arms at his sides, his legs extended. And everywhere, glimmering against the reddish background, were bright green jades. In his mouth, a jade bead. On his forehead, a band of jade disks. On his ears, fantastic jade ornaments like the flowers of the sacred ceiba tree. His hair had been dressed with diminutive tubes of jade, and around his neck were draped jade necklaces of different shapes—spheres, cylinders, flowers, pumpkins, melons, even the head of a snake. Over his chest lay nine enormous strands, each with twenty-nine tubular jade beads. Both wrists were wrapped in a bracelet of two hundred jade beads, and all ten fingers wore a thick jade ring, some square, others round. His right hand grasped a jade cube, his left a jade sphere. Next to each foot lay another large jade bead and a figurine of the sun god. Over his loins lay a brilliant green figure with an oversized head and a tiny body, perhaps representing the corn god. And placed on his face was the fabulous mosaic mask of more than two hundred perfectly fitted pieces of jade and other stone. Apparently the mask had shifted during burial, and over the centuries its plaster backing had disintegrated, spilling fragments down the left side of the head.

  Ruz’s discovery caused an international sensation. For one thing, it was the first Mesoamerican temple pyramid found to conceal a sepulcher, calling to mind the fabulous tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs. Then there was the great artistry of the grave’s contents—the lifelike stucco heads and reliefs and the enormous, finely worked sarcophagus. And not least, there were all those carved jades, one of the most spectacular caches of the stone ever found. To Ruz it was “the most extraordinary tomb so far discovered in this continent of America”; to scholars Linda Schele and Peter Mathews, the temple and tomb were “one of the greatest historical legacies of the Americas.” But whose body did it shelter? No one could say, because no one knew how to read the carvings on Ruz’s sarcophagus.

  Beginning in the late 1800s, working from Diego de Landa’s “alphabet,” experts had begun to decipher some of the Mayan characters found in codices and on monuments, including words for colors and the cardinal compass points and the names of various gods. But Landa’s translations seemed so rife with inconsistencies and duplications that by Ruz’s time, most experts had decided that Maya writing, like Chinese characters, didn’t record individual sounds but words or parts of words. And judging from the relatively few symbols used—about eight hundred, compared to twelve thousand in Chinese—they concluded that the Maya works must deal with only the limited subjects of astronomy and the calendar.

  Then in the late 1950s, a few years after Ruz’s discovery at Palenque, German archaeologist Heinrich Berlin noticed that certain symbols tended to appear only at given cities, leading him to suppose that they recorded either the names of the places or perhaps those of patron deities or ruling dynasties there. And so came the first tantalizing clue that the Maya’s words might relate not to the movements of the heavens but to events here on earth. Later that decade, working with texts from Piedras Negras, the Peabody’s Russian-born, American-educated Tatiana Proskouriakoff had a brilliant insight. Though she still couldn’t translate them, she saw that the inscriptions on certain monuments combined words and dates in patterns that seemed to commemorate the anniversaries of rulers’ births and accessions.

  Meanwhile, the young Russian linguist Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov had made another startling claim: Since the individual Mayan characters were too numerous to be letters of an alphabet and too few to be Chinese-style characters, they must be hieroglyphs, which, like those of ancient Egypt, could stand for either a sound or a word. Though the idea was embraced by some scholars (including the young Michael Coe), it was generally met with scorn, particularly from the preeminent J. Eric Thompson, who as late as 1972, flatly stated, “Maya writing is not syllabic or alphabetic in part or in whole.”

  But in 1973, a team of scholars including Linda Schele and Peter Mathews met at Palenque, put Knorozov’s principles to work—and over the course of a single astonishing evening managed to translate the engravings on the side of Ruz’s sarcophagus. Finally, it was revealed whose remains were inside. Because his name included the glyphs for “sun” and “shield,” Schele and Mathews called him Lord Sun Shield and later Pakal, the Mayan word for “shield.” Rather than the visitation of an extraterrestrial astronaut, as Erich von Däniken had suggested, we now know that his sarcophagus lid depicts the apotheosis of the jewel-bedecked Pakal, triumphantly emerging from the underworld and taking his place with other deities, including the sun, the moon, and the planet Venus. The exquisite stucco heads we recognize as portraits of Pakal himself, one as a youth, the other in old age—giving us not one but two glimpses of a genuine Maya king.

  Schele, Mathews, and their collaborators went much further, accomplishing something that had never been done for any Maya city: They traced four centuries of Palenque’s royal dynasty back to A.D. 397, including the rulers’ names and the dates of their birth, accession, and death. And as engravings from the Temple of the Inscriptions and other monuments yielded to translation, more pieces of Palenque’s history fell into place. In 615, when twelve-year-old Pakal assumed the throne, the city found itself at its nadir following a pair of military defeats by superpower Calakmul and its allies. After some initial setbacks, including another loss to rival Piedras Negras, Pakal transformed Palenque into a major power and remade his capital with some of the most elegant buildings in the Maya world. After his death in 683, he was succeeded by his sons, first Kan Balam II then Kan Joy Chitam II, who perpetuated the golden age inaugurated by their father. Then in 711, the city’s fortunes turned again, when it was defeated by nearby Tonina, and by the end of the century, it was languishing. The final date recorded there was 799, incised not on a great stela but on a sherd of pottery marking the accession of Janaab’ Pakal III, the last king of Palenque. Not long after, the once-great capital was abandoned, eventually returning to jungle.

  The same fate would befall the mightiest Maya cities over the following century. Though it’s often viewed as a sudden, mystifying “collapse,” it was really a gradual decay, taking place during a hundred years or longer and involving factors such as deforestation, drought, overpopulation, warfare, and ultimately, a loss of faith in the royal dynasties that were supposed to ward off these catastrophes. Through the ninth century, as people drifted out of the cities and returned to subsistence farming, construction halted and the carving of jade all but disappeared. By 909, the Maya Classic had run its course, its final gasp recorded in the last Long Count date ev
er discovered, on a monument at Palenque’s nemesis Tonina.

  But even this “collapse” didn’t spell the end of Maya culture, just its shift to safer havens, where other, so-called Postclassic cities were built—in the northern Yucatan, the highlands of Guatemala, and along the Pacific Coast. And so, in places such as Coba, Uxmal, Mayapan, and Chichen Itza, branches of the Maya family tree would flourish again, with an even greater emphasis on trade and a continued reliance on military solutions to their many differences. In these new locations, as the price for keeping their thrones, rulers now shared authority with their nobles, who organized themselves into influential councils. The days of the all-powerful, divine monarch were done. And one of the prerogatives claimed by the ascendant nobility was the right to own and display jade, the erstwhile stone of kings.

  Ruz continued his work at Palenque until 1958. By then, friends were calling him “el Hitchcock de la arqueología,” for the way he teased out the suspense when recounting his exploits, especially the discovery of the tomb of Pakal the Great. In 1970, Ruz founded El Centro de Estudios Mayas, and two years later, he became director of Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, where Pakal’s bones and death mask are displayed along with a reproduction of his tomb. Though Ruz was known as a joker and bon vivant in his earlier years, in later life, he showed a more somber and embittered aspect, especially toward Americans. This resentment may have stemmed partly from his leftist political leanings and partly from a feeling that foreigners had overrun his beloved Palenque and usurped his work there. In particular, Ruz despised the epigraphers, including Schele and Mathews, who, by going directly to the source, the words of the ancient Maya themselves, had overturned many of his own, more speculative theories. And so, branding the newcomers “fantasists,” he persisted in his own misguided reading of the sarcophagus lid—claiming, for instance, that the king whose grave he’d discovered had died at age fifty, not at eighty as the glyphs had shown, and that his name wasn’t Pakal at all.