Palenque - The Ruins

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From my experience, Palenque being the only one, Mexican ruins are far more excavated and restored than those in Guatemala. This, I am assuming, can be attributed to the fact that Mexico is a lot richer (Mexico being, I believe, what is defined as a second tier developing country as opposed to Guatemala’s third world status - having only recently emerged from 30 years of civil war) and thus capable and inclined to further advance that wealth by improving the attractiveness of its tourism. For this reason (wealth) Palenque offered something (to my minimal experience) that was truly awe-inspiring. With many of the structures returned to a state, close to their original grandeur, it was not too much of a strain, when walking through and up its towering edifices, to imagine what it might have been like to have been there in its hey day. Its Museum, in addition, I was surprised to find, provides ancient delights, excavated from the Palenque’s ruins, which expanded my concept of the ancient Mayan world beautifully, taking me from the minutia of daily life in to this vast, complex, temporal… thingy - that would sound very pretentious were I to attempt to describe it.

Unfortunately, it is hard to write about ruins without getting weighed down by heavy description.

We climbed large pyramids, all of which were very similar in design and structure - tiered with protruding stairs and chambers at their summits, some containing glyphs of astounding beauty, others not - which viewed up close had us marvelling at specific details and which viewed as a whole, from elevated vantage points, were very impressive to look at indeed.

A few things bear further mention however.

The first structure to greet our gaze upon entering the ruin compound from the main gate was the Temple De Las Inscriptiones. It is the tallest of Palenques buildings, a pyramid with 8 terraces, standing 25 metres high. We were disappointed to find, however, that we had arrived on a day in which access to this Temple was barred. It was up its stair and inside its elevated chamber that we had hoped to see the lid of the sarcophagus of Pakal (ruler from 615A.D. for a 68 year period – during which Palenque was transformed into a great city). The slab, it is said, is quite remarkably carved with glyphs recounting, no doubt with a creative interpretation of the facts, the significant events and attributes of Pakal’s life and rule.

To its right, bearing a name that was not revealed to me in any of the paraphernalia I was handed, is a temple with an entrance half way up its stair, containing a tunnel leading in to the structures cool inner core. After 10 metres the tunnel branches off to the left and right, with both branches soon and abruptly coming to dead ends. A gist of what life in doors would have consisted is acquired as you walk down the stone tunnels: cool refreshing air; pitch blackness broken occasionally by the dancing illumination of torches in diagonal holsters; conversations in whispered tones and perhaps (though most probably not in the temples) a few socially unacceptable sexual liaisons in dark corners. There is a sarcophagus with interesting glyphs that can be seen through a small hole in the wall down the left hall. Other than that, there is little to experience but respite from the excessive heat – a factor no doubt significant to the Mayans.

We saw one of the infamous ball courts, at which, in the cities heyday, games of cosmic significants were played, either:

1. By slaves from enemy cities or civilisations who were promptly sacrificed to the gods in the aftermath of the game. No one seems to be sure it if was the winner, the losers or both.

2. By professional players, with the captain of the loosing or winning team (again no one is really certain) being beheaded at the games conclusions.

It seems also possible that the person beheaded could merely have been a prisoner of war who just happened to be handy at the games aftermath - having had no involvement in the game what so ever.

With this degree of uncertainty among the experts, one begins to suspect that the only thing they are expert at is creative thinking – unless of course the Mayans simply loved a good beheading and, ‘Too be damned which one of the down trodden masses it happens to be’. There are a few things the experts seem to agree upon however. One of these is that the movement of the ball reproduced the movement of the stars. Another is that the two teams are representative of opposing forces, either night and day or the gods of the underworld and those of the sky. All this was deemed to provide predictive power, to those in the know, as to what the coming year was to entail – a predictive power no doubt manipulated for political advantage by the more Machiavellian and politically astute of the politically integrated priesthood.

The whole thing, to my (at times admittedly uncouth) mind, seems kind of like getting drunk, or consuming some other mind altering substance, starting a game of pool, say with a gothic or just generally ‘interesting’ friend, assuming a state denial (of certain things you know while applying greater significance to other things you know or think you know) while visualising the velvet green as a 2 dimensional representation of the vast tapestry of the 3 dimensional universe, and assuming the roles of Gods (or the puppets of gods) banging those balls - planets, stars galaxies - around the table, sending them into black holes and the like, all the while recording it all on surveillance cameras so that later (when the game is complete and you have consumed your ritual kebab with meat sacrificed – possibly even beheaded - for this very purpose at a relatively close and sanctified slaughter house), you can return home to apply some ‘kookie’ interpretive astrological software to the whole thing and through doing so predict the quantity and distribution of the coming years global coffee harvest and thus the likely effect on stocks of Nescafe.

Then again, maybe not.

All that said, the actual court itself wasn’t particularly impressive and seemed awfully small – consisting of two small pyramid structures (apparently the facing sides of the structures were included in the games action), with flat upper plateau’s, so close together that the area between them, in which the primary action is alleged to have taken place, seemed more fit for a congested tea party… or perhaps the arthropod Olympics? (No Hollywood gladiatorial prospects there - unless of course the infamous pride of Russel Crowe were to lower itself to provide the vocal backing for a computer animated, necessarily nomadic, and gladiatorial Brazilian Killer Bee). I have since viewed larger courts in pictures from ruins in other parts of Central America, equipped with side hoops and auditoriums, which makes me think (being a creative thinker myself) that maybe these smaller courts were just for training.

The Palace is impressive. It was here that the Governors, Nobles, leading warriors and Artisans formed what I imagine to have been the heated and interesting dynamic of the court. As an experience today it consists of a multiplicity of underground tunnels (which again were incredibly cool – a great escape from what seemed like 35 degree heat), an astrological tower, from which the movement of the stars were meticulously calculated (and may be responsibly for the Mayans belief that the world will end in the year 2012) some amazing 9 foot reliefs of some of those interesting court folks, a few colonnades and a variety of other less interesting structures. The whole compound, if you could call it that, is set atop stairs on each side that form a structure like a pyramid of cheese on a Wallace and Grommit moon that’s been sliced on a horizontal plane (perhaps by that cheese lover himself), creating a perfect elevated plane for the activities of the powerful.

Upon leaving the primary site of the ruins, we descended down the mountain through tropical forest past an amazing, curvaceous, limestone waterfall, then on to the main road. It was from there that we entered the Palenque Museum. We were amazed to find it to be of a very high standard. Not only were the exhibits, all excavated from the Palenque ruins, of a phenomenal quality, but the museum itself was so professionally put together I felt like I was in Europe. Every relief, every stucco-sculpture, every jade jewel was illuminated by a variety of lights of different shapes and sizes and placed on and in elegant stands and cases.

What really impressed me though was the quality of the stucco sculpting. The faces of the powerful leaders of Palenque were so detailed I could easily imagine conversing with slightly more-fleshy versions. The glyphs also are very well preserved. It’s great to see all these faces with features of varying shapes and sizes all signifying, well… what ever your creative thinking seems inclined to believe. I was particularly fond of a big nosed, wise eyed Gandalfian glyph that in the context of the other glyphs would have to have, signified profound wisdom or something to that effect. Also, to my delight, there was a model of the Palace, giving a better idea of the nature of the structure prior to the dilapidations of time, and allowing me to take a model photo from the same perspective as the one I took of the real thing.