ABSTRACT
In 1952, the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz opened a passage in the center room of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, Mexico. In the early 1970s, Linda Schele and other archaeologists made linguistic breakthroughs and managed to decipher ancient Maya hieroglyphs. They have proven that the Maya Classic period had a fully phonetic writing system—not just picture-writing, as formerly believed—and thus that the Mayas wrote their own history, mostly on buildings, one thousand years before the arrival of Europeans. The Temple of the Inscriptions contains the longest continuous Pre-Columbian Maya text. It recounts the history of Palenque and glorifies the roles that Hanab-Pakal and his ancestors had in it. In the background are various emblems, such as the shields with feathers hanging down, which all represent the life force. Hanab-Pakal rests on a sacrificial plate, with an emblem of death in its center, and he is enclosed in the open jaws of a snake.
