Palenque Mayan Ruins

Vast, mysterious and enchanting, the ruined city of Palenque is considered to be the most beautifully conceived of all the Mayan cities. Nestled amidst steep and thickly forested hills, its temples and pyramids are frequently shrouded in lacy mists. During its period of cultural florescence, the 7th through 10th centuries, Palenque was even more beautiful, for then its limestone buildings were coated with white plaster and painted in a rainbow of pastel hues. Mysteriously, the great city was later abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle. Even the Mayan name of the city was lost, and the ruins received their current name from the nearby village of Santo Domingo de Palenque. Unknown until 18the century, this jewel of Mayan architecture was introduced to the world through the evocative writings and splendid drawings of the explorers Stephens and Catherwood in 1841. While the ruins have received some of the most extensive reconstruction efforts of any Mayan site, only 34 structures have been excavated of an estimated 500 that are scattered around the area.
The Temple of the Inscriptions, erected in 692 AD, was a temple, a burial tomb and a pilgrimage site. Beneath the floor of an inner room a hidden stairway leads to a funerary crypt 80 feet below. The crypt contained a coffin and a skeleton covered with jade ornaments and other precious jewels. Inscriptions reveal the burial to have been of the priest-king Pacal Votan who ruled the city from 615 to 683 AD. The thirteen corbelled vaults leading to the burial crypt replicated the thirteen levels of heaven in Maya cosmology and the nine stages of the pyramid symbolized the nine levels of the underworld. The ruins of Palenque, like so many other Maya sites, were part of a vast regional sacred geography, itself a mirror of the night skies as viewed and understood by the Mayan astronomers.