Palenque and the Ancient Maya World | Nat Geo Live

you I first went to Palenque when I was a kid of course I think how it's on the same trip that three three years old and it I have to say that today still just walking around that site it's a magical experience there's really no other place like it because when you walk say through the palace pakal's Palace it's still there I mean it's it's it's not even really a ruin the paintings are still on the walls the whole story of Maya archaeology and Mesoamerican archaeology indeed American archeology almost took place there in a lot of senses the explorations started as early as the middle of the 18th century it's just an incredible place to be and it'll always have that aura about it I hope hello there it's good to be back had to think of a title and I came up with this one based on a title of a Star Trek episode in 1967 seemed appropriate as you can see from this wonderful photograph the site itself Palenque sits on a kind of a shelf from the mountains facing the Tabasco coastal plain and so topographically it is a city on the edge in its inscriptions they cover you know many millenniums of time with the master calendar descriptions of the mire so you know noted for so that in a sense with this system that literally tamed eternity they wove mythical and real history into sort of a thing so that I thought this title would just be appropriate the place it's in Chiapas down here in in the Maya area and there's plenty right there you can see the the western location of it within the Maya but Maya area is this huge thing here about oh it's still about half the size of Texas I reckon and all the great sites particularly down in here and up in Yucatan Quintana row in Campeche you can see it here and how sort of isolated it is it's very close to a colonial town Santo Domingo de Palenque was established by the Spanish in the 1570s this is a an area that was on the frontier between the new Spain the Mexican part and the audience eeeh of Guatemala and this was sitting in the woods here nobody knew about it until seventeen 50s or so nobody in the modern times that is in a sense sometimes I get irritated by the term lost city because a lost city that is found is usually something defined as found by a white male European looking around in the woods in the new world or the Americas and but this really was a lost city after it was abandoned and not many people knew about it there you can see the principal buildings you can also know that like most Maya sites that have been well known and partially cleared or even excavated you're looking at about five or six percent of the site it's all through the woods here it's about 16 square kilometres of ruin 37 or hundred or 4,000 structures just an incredible thing it was just mapped only mapped a few years ago and there's buildings in there that are bigger than these that have never been visited by people so there's the so-called palace which probably was it was probably a setting for the royal court particularly during the 7th century David's going to talk about that a lot and but you can see the complicated architecture in the unique tower that's here at Palenque we're here looking out you can see that vast tabasco coastal plain in the background the temple of the inscriptions that we'll hear a lot about tonight one of the largest so-called pyramids I say so-called because a real pyramid just has a pointed top and slash sides and those steps owns the so-called pyramids of Mesoamerica and Palenque are of course really stepped platforms to hold a building on top we know now that if they have nine zones that they are likely to be associated with the underworld and therefore standing as a funerary monument but nobody knew this a long time ago another group the so-called cross group this is a wonderful setting here this is Allen Ginsberg the poet visited here back in the 1940s 50s and call this the broken chapels in the green basement of a Mount and and these are the three temples but it didn't always look like that back in the 1750s a rumor started going around in the frontiers of New Spain that the ricotta's de Piedra out in the woods nobody had seen them except for maybe two or three people who had visited Palenque town and so people started going in there and rumors reached what snog water mollis it E and the the captain-general of Guatemala decided he would find out a little bit more about this so he said the deputy mayor of santo domingo de palenque into the forest to make some drawings it was a trail that went to the what we know now is the palace and they went in there jose calderon one of the folks in Palenque with a little piece of paper bead never drawn anything as his life he was terrible at drawing but he had to send this and he knew this would be sent to the king of Spain so he found this temple and he came upon this great slab we know now unlike most Maya sites that have upright monuments out in isolated clauses and things that that Palenque instead given the great limestone sources they had put big slabs on the walls of the temples and this helped to preserve the inscriptions and the sculptures anyway because they called it on saw this thing in the summer of 1785 it's how long it took people to figure out to go in there and he he drew this I can sympathize with this this is sort of what I did when I first went to you could done Jay Eric Thompson the great my authority had died in the 70s sir Eric looked over my shoulder one at one time and I first got to Yucatan I was making a drawing of a steel as evil childood and he whispered aside to dr. Andrews who was my employer that's the worst drawing of a Mayan monument I've ever seen and that was sort of the source of my education I started then and looking at the drawing now which I still have he was absolutely right anyway this is what Calderon drew he sent it back to a storage area in Guatemala City and that so irritated the captain-general what Amala that he sent another person to palenque this time the royal architect who drew this picture one of the maya pyramids in 1786 with a little lollipop trees all over it and but you can see the the bar reliefs on the appears between the doorways and trees growing up and all sorts of things and he did a pretty good description he even did architectural cross sections some of the buildings show the car vault arch vaults in there in 1787 antonio del rio and artillery captain may v walked into palenque with a group of about 30 people with hatchets they cleared the area and they dug in all the buildings they dug beneath the floors and some and took away a lot of stones and these stones and sculptures bar reliefs all ended up in the museo de america or in a royal cabinet in madrid this is a photograph of the materials taken out in 1787 which is so important because this is the first real museum collection ever made in in the Maya area at least and it's it's still there all catalogued and everything and this is a visit that highlighting Schliemann the the famous excavator of Troy he paid a visit there in 1882 and asked to sit with the Palenque material on the right in the silk hat is one de Dios de la parada del Gado who was head of the museum and that Schliemann there on the left this is this guy here we don't know who these people are but here these are hieroglyphic panels from the under the palace part of a stucco bar early and some other artifacts and things that were found at the site in 1787 little book came out in the London somebody got a hold of some drawings that had been made during that expedition and they decided it was worthwhile to publish so with this ringing title of the description of the ruins of an ancient city discovered in Guatemala and Spanish America because it was then part of Guatemala uh they published a book and in it were drawings some of the by reliefs the people at the time the artists that went in there in the 1780s they didn't feel like drawing hundreds of glyphs so when they see a hieroglyphic panel with maybe 200 hieroglyphs they thought well you know nobody's really going to check us out so they maybe draw six big ones we fill the space that's what it did and this is one of the drawings but this was published and this is the least lifts would drive people crazy no matter that they were poorly copied and it's only about ten out of the sixteen or so in that column we know now but these were published and this was the first thing to ever reach prayer Allah Maya ruined this guy son this is Constantine Samuel rafinesque Smaltz he was born about the time Calderon went to Palenque and he he hadn't he died about 1848 1843 somewhere anyway he was a naturalist Audubon wrote about him a chapter in autobahns ornithological biography says is titled the eccentric naturalist that's this guy this guy was a guest a houseguest of autobahns that time Audubon met him in the 1830s and Audubon woke one night and heard a great noise in the bedroom upstairs where rocky ness was staying and he went up there in Rafi and asked was had no clothes on was running around the room with autobahns favorite violin trying to kill a bat and he killed the bat and he broke the violin to smithereens and Audubon sort of kicked him out never wrote much about him after that but rafinesque was a remarkable character he was eccentric true he read everything he claimed have spoken 50 languages he was born in Constantinople and that in Philadelphia but in in between he wrote books on medical botany and the banking he wrote poems about the lost tribes of Israel and he became interested in in hieroglyphs particularly since champignon was was working with the egyptian hieroglyphs so he began writing a series of letters based on the hieroglyphs of Palenque particularly that column of glyphs that we saw from the temple of the Cross and these were published in Baltimore in 1829 rafinesque collaborated with the Harbormaster up there who was interested in American Indians and they published this thing and Rafi Ness had written a bunch of letters to The Saturday Evening Post with all his conclusions about hieroglyphs and most of were nonsense because you know he had nothing to work with and but he did figure out that the bars were fives and the dots were one so you did figure out that you know the number system the way of writing numbers down so that you know there's a three and there's a ten and there's a six etc anyway things sort of stood there for a long time the guy that did the engravings for that book in 1822 was a madman sort of he was Jean Frederic maximilian de valdek a self-styled count who at the age of 56 got a got a job at the printing house in london did the engravings for that book but he was so enthralled by what he saw that he moved to planky in 1832 and started drawing the ruins he did a wonderful job all of his drawings are most of them at least are in the Newberry Library in Chicago and these are the heard of the piers that Bob reliefs on the areas between the doorway that palanca he did in the 1830s he gets a lot of bad press because people claim that he put elephant trunks and a lot of his glyphs but that was really in the published works and that was the work of the engraver not him he did a fair job at drawing this thing that collar on it seemed pretty nice and he drew all the glyphs which was really remarkable and he also he messed around a lot he he moved in with a polite local Palenque woman who had a house built at the foot of the temple of the cross and to illustrate his books there his inscriptions of the subterraneous and the aqueduct at linky and everything he would do these drawings of his friends in Palenque all this got so much publicity to other people reading about it and that was John Lloyd Stephens it was a New York lawyer and his friend Frederick Catherwood who was an architect and they kept tweeting about this stuff they read the 1822 report and they read the accounts of to pay their Humboldt all these things and it was not talking about these rulings of Otto loom or Palenque so they had to go down there and so they went they get appointed by President Van Buren as a diplomatic team and they were chosen to go down and find the government of Central America because it was in revolution and they went and then they says they got there they took off their epaulets and everything and got down to the real work they had come to do which was drawing all the ruins and they journeyed all over the place published an incredible amount of drawings and texts wonderful reads every year I read Stevens and Catherwood did the drawings this is his version of Palenque clearly done from memory because he was really ill during the trip but he stuck it out and and really did a good job and heartburn rather sold eleven editions of this stuff in 1841 and again in 1843 so these were bestsellers they went all over the world they were translated into German and French etc and they got picked up in installments in magazines like this one in London and the Saturday magazine there's the palace again at Palenque none of this escaped the attention of PT Barnum who ran a big show up in New York in Albany and he decided he would take advantage of this sudden interest in Palenque and so he heard two Salvadorian children maxima and Bartolo and he proclaimed them to be Aztec Lilliputians from the lost Maya city of ischemia and these children were taken literally around the European Circuit they met Queen Victoria this was the pamphlet that came out showing the Temple of the Sun panel their Palenque at the top and but Barnum you know made a lot of money off this and this really just increased the public knowledge of Palenque in a whole series of visitors the most important which was Alfred Percival Maudsley it came through the area in the 1880s and 90s and took photographs had all the sights cleared and made incredible drawings and photographs his artist Annie Hunter in London made incredibly accurate drawings of the inscriptions and things that blinky so we finally get the stuff done right Catherine would came close archeology came to Planck in 1934 I guess really the first time anybody went on there with serious-minded was 85 years ago December the 14th 1922 when Franz Baum was hired by the Mexican government or at least the archaeological establishment to go see what he could suggest about doing about these ruins so he sort of walked around cleared it and mapped it and did some things and suggested a program of excavation in 1934 when Mexico formed its National Institute of anthropology in history they sent a Miguel on hillford and I'm des they're to start digging the palace and he did mm-hmm they looked around and they found in this little courtyard they found palenque's bathrooms system of bathrooms and drainage and sewage and everything the palace it's the only example we have from the entire Maya area yet anyway uh they notice these rooms and they found this hallway with an oval tablet on it which was pretty incredible and then they found a slab of stone in here there's the oval tablet that had been drawn in 1787 throne was gone this is the throne leg that was sent to Madrid and this is in fragments now in the warehouse at Palenque but it's not in the original building let me finish the palace they started looking over the temple of the inscriptions this is how it was in 1942 in 1948 when Alberto reus was hired to start and he walked in the temple up there and he noticed something that Stevens hadn't seen or Catherine would or anybody and that is that the floor of the temple was made out of big stone slabs with holes in them Del Rio in 1787 it sort of cracked a couple of them so Berto had the workers pull up the stone and underneath the stone there was two steps leading down well you know how budgets are in archaeology he didn't know whether it went down four more feet and stopped or whether there were three steps so he decided to go for it this was in 1948 at the end of the summer of 48 he'd gone down 23 steps 1949 he went down about 23 steps again 1950 51 52 finally in June of 1952 he walked into this empty room at the bottom and there was nothing there but he had a group of Maya with him stonemasons from Auschwitz Cobb Yucatan and a loop of local Palin condos and one chablais who was one of the Masons the head Mason sit down Alberto there's a funny-looking little triangular stone over there against the wall if we could move that I'll into something behind it and Alberto said can't lives let's try we've done this we've gone down the steps and we're skeletons and rubble and pottery and caches and everything and so there must be something down here so they move the triangular stone aside but then they open the slab and there was a room a room with a stone in it and he thought hmm he was with says our science another archeologist and Alberto told me later that you know he thought it was a Walter a table he didn't know what it was nobody ever found anything like that and then he came back in one chat Lake the Mason said hey Don Alberto why don't you drill a hole in the side of this thing and see if it's hollow he did and it was we went into town and got fifteen automobile jacks and pull the thing up and there was a body inside and so what I'm going to do is let David take the story here for a while and talk about the man in the tomb okay we're going to shift gears a little bit and and look at a lot of detail at what turned out to be I guess the American equivalent if there is one to King Tut's tomb I mean it's it's the most famous royal ancient royal burial in in all of the Americas arguably the man inside of course the identity of this person ruse wasn't aware of in 1952 in fact his name wasn't really fully deciphered until about 15 years ago but a bit before that people knew part of his name and he's usually simply just called POC Col and puck Hall is right over there on the other side of the stage looking out I was thinking if there was an empty seat he might like to maybe a look on at the screen but we'll see an image of that head in a little bit his full name was in each hub Pacala and he was the greatest king of Palenque one of the greatest of all Maya Kings now you've seen an image of this oval tablet this is the carving that is set into the back wall of one of the structures and the palace and the image of on the back wall was we think the earliest portrait of Paco so here he is on the the throne seated and his mother is presenting him with the this royal headdress the the military headdress a symbol of his kind of duty as king to wage war now pock Hall was born in the year 603 AD we know from the inscriptions he he came to power in 615 it was 12 years old when he became King what's interesting about Pacal however is that the first records we have of him probably including also this this panel are much later and probably date to the 646 50s ad so he was actually raining for quite a long time before he really left his mark or began to leave his mark in the palace most of the palace was except for the tower and a few other structures was actually built by him in the mid-7th century including the the building where that held the throne his mother was very important her name was a lady suc kook or lady white Quetzal and she passed away not long actually before he goes on this this really ambitious program of building and and carving inscriptions and so forth you know when you come to power when you're 12 years old I think your mother probably is wielding a lot of the power behind the throne and I think you know the reading between the lines I think maybe she had to kind of pass away before he really became comfortable as king and and really decided to take off so to speak the other thing to keep in mind is that you know Palenque had suffered quite a bit politically around the year 599 600 when it was conquered by the great city of Calakmul and so when Pacal was born I think Palenque was really in a very problematic period of its history so it took many decades I think for for Palenque and Pacal as a great King to reassert Palenque as as a important royal court this is one reason why he is so important he was really venerated by later Kings as his you know his descendants as a great historical figure that really brought Palenque back from the brink and here he is we can recognize him simply by his face Palenque art is so realistic and portraiture is so sensitive that when a sculpture a relief such as this is found we can that we know exactly who this is even if we didn't have his name glyph but what we do in this case this is PUC Hall as a older man probably later in his life as opposed to that early portrait we just saw and the temple of the inscriptions where ruse was excavating is really pakal's temple that is why it's near the palace and that's why it's really loo mning over literally the space the center of the site the upper temple here is decorated still on the exterior with these plaster decorations and they're a bit hard to see these days but you can see the steps here leading into the central doorway and you can see there are these standing figures portrayed on the outer piers these were actually drawn in some of those early architectural renderings these are I believe the father and the mother of Paco and also two of his ancestors on the outer doorways so as you walk into the temple inscriptions into his funerary building you're you're greeted by you know these ancestral these predecessors of Paco who are there to greet you and so you're walking into this inner sanctum which is really all about his place in the history of Palenque his importance and as you walk in in between those pillars you see the beautiful preservation of the temple this is really not restored this is as it as it looked to the first explorers and as it looks today and it's really interesting to read what they're talking about in these inscriptions this is the back panel a modern drawing this is Linda she leads drawing of the glyphs there's a lot of this it's really opaque and really hard for us to understand but we get a sense of you know this long narrative about Pacal and his long reign and all of the things he did venerating the gods and keeping the cosmos going but they're characterizing this beginning um point of his reign where you know he is building the palace and he's reconquering lands that Palenque had lost previously but there couching this history and very esoteric religious terminology and I want to share a little bit of this with you there's one passage here where they're talking about the eleventh cartoon right this is in in the mid 7th century and not many my inscriptions are you know translated in books for you to go read and and and ponder you know this is really esoteric stuff but I'm I made a stab at actually translating this passage for you to see if you can sort of get a sense of what they're saying and this is more or less I think what they're what they're talking about and I'll explain what this means 12:08 cake that's the date is the 11th the cartoon that's pretty easy he rules the shiny sky maze that's the god of the number 12 because it's 12 how and on that on that day or in this time period this 20 year period they're characterizing this chunk of time in a sense the shiny jewel tree sprouts and some other cosmic tree sprouts it's the heavenly load it's the earthly load that means a load of riches like Jade Jade collars Jade ear ornaments are bestowed upon the nine sky supports of the Sun the sixteen supports of the Sun the dynastic Lords what in the world is this all about what they're saying is that in in this when pop Hall is really powerful when putt when Palenque is receiving tribute from from its vanquished subordinates when Jade literally is pouring into the court into the palace through tribute that the the tree of jade is sprouting right riches are are just pouring all over Palenque and the gods are pleased the cosmos is pleased and the dynastic lords are being you know dressed and adorned with all of this finery so it's it's a very specific kind of language which really just describing the good times of polenka as opposed to earlier times that are characterized very differently in this narrative so Paco's reign is all about richness it's all about really economic boom times and this is what Roose saw in 1952 right now this is a sarcophagus and the symbolism of it is really quite extraordinary you know I'll spend a bit of time I could go on for hours but I want and the sides of the sarcophagus were carved in these extraordinary images of ancestors of the royal house of Palenque all of Paco's predecessors but they're not just portraits they're they're kind of strange in a way because they're plant people the ancestors of Paco including here his mother and his father are shown as fruiting trees that burst up out of the ground lady white cuts all his mother on the left is shown as a cacao tree you see the cacao pods his father is shown is another kind of it looks like grapes there but it's not some other kind of fruiting tree and the ancestors all around the sarcophagus are shown with different kinds of food plants in this idea of sustenance and and the continuity of life and an ancestral rebirth these are all themes that are extremely important in this tomb this is an early photograph of Paco himself in his tomb after the inner slab was lifted this is one piece of stone all carved carved out it's certainly well preserved in some ways but you know his skull was very badly damaged we'll see a good example a good photograph of that soon but he was covered in Jade as a good Maya King would be Jade collar Jade bracelets and an extraordinary mask as well here is Paco this photograph taken in 1952 by the physical anthropologist who was working with the skeleton they've only recently only some of them have recently been published but most of them remain unpublished extraordinary photographs what you're seeing here of course is some of the Jade and the mask you see how it's slumped over to one side off of his skull but you can see part of it still articulated right in fact the eye is right here and some of the mosaic work is still together well this was reconstructed and actually just recently reanalyzed Andrey put back together by Laura feel oi in Mexico City and this is the Jade mask unbelievable it it's a life mask again of him you can recognize him not only in the 2d portraits but in the three-dimensional portraits as well the ear ornaments that were slumped you know next to him there were not on him they were on the Jade mask this is a it's a mask of life right Jade the color green that that it precious material it's the the the color of fresh corn you know all of these symbols were very important to the Maya in the mouth you see that kind of t-shaped piece of jade which one might say as well that maybe is the filed tooth of the king but if you look at his teeth they don't look like that that's actually the symbol of breath of the spirit of life that's emerging out of his mouth it's almost like a hieroglyph throne in three shown in three dimensions and of course the very famous lid I think we all have seen images of this right the extraordinary carving on the very top which has been debated and talked about ad nauseam but there actually are there's a lot of new stuff we can say about it it used to be thought that this was an image of puck Hall and sure enough he's recognizable there right falling into the underworld well that's absolutely wrong he's not falling into the underworld he is rising in the East as the newborn son as the newborn Mays God and you're seeing him in this really strange pose right here as an infant kind of reclining on his back and out of the jaws of the underworld emerges the Eastern Sun and he's kind of riding along with it and behind him is a tree covered in Jade this is the sprouting tree right the sprouting jeweled tree that's talked about in the tablet up above here he is again that face it's so recognizable his son ki Nichkhun Balaam came to power when he died when Owen puck all died at 80 and became a very important King himself we can again recognized him by his portrait he always has that kind of big lower lip and con Balaam is the one who in 690 dedicates the temple inscriptions he finishes the architectural program that Puck Hall began and dedicates the temple to his father and then very quickly decides to leave his own mark I think con Baha must have been a bit chagrined in a sense I don't know if he was you know maybe feel like he had to live up to this reputation of his father I mean how do you outdo Pacal well he almost did maybe he in fact he did or did something parallel to Puck Hall by creating a set of temples nearby across the river the group of the cross it was Puckle son who designed these again for a great cartoon ending nine 13000 in the Maya calendar and these were amazing buildings there's no other set of pyramids that are quite like these all dedicated to the three members of the the patron gods the set of gods of Palenque this will called Palenque triad and they all have cosmic meaning the buildings here are all oriented towards the sacred spring of the column River which gushes out of the a mountainside very sacred spot here these Springs and so here are the three temples of the group of the cross the grandsons dedicate a temple and the hump in the same area of the group of the cross and here they are this is kini Giacomo knob and his younger brother over here and when they dedicate the temple what do they show who do they show in the center of the composition Pacal because he is the greatest king in the history of this court he is the one person who they can harken back to to really establish their pedigree and their position in the court of Palenque and he is the active central figure in this composition years and years after he's dead Pacal is still at the center of everything and and this is why I think Palenque what we most of what we see of Palenque in that central area is pothole city it always was even to the Kings who came much later okay you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 462,570

Rating: 4.6987376 out of 5

Keywords: National Geographic Live, George, David Stuart, Palenque, Ancient Maya World, archaeology, civilization, culture, National Geographic, speaker, lecture, national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, documentary

Id: BCs86ZrxX9k

Length: 40min 26sec (2426 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2011