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THE CAPTOR OF A PALENQUE KING

By Joel Skidmore

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Go to page: Maybe it's just me, but it seems like people who have fallen in love with Palenque tend to think of the ancient inhabitants of Toniná as a rival football team.
Go to page: After all, those evil Toninás captured "our" king, K'inich K'an Joy Chitam II, trussed him up with ropes and carved his humiliation in stone.
Go to page: But my perceptions changed dramatically when I finally went "over the hill" to visit Toniná and its wonderful new site museum.
Go to page: For starters, the site itself is awesome, rising up from the plain of the Ocosingo Valley against the forested slopes of the Chiapas highlands.
Go to page: Any superior feelings I might have harbored about Palenque's stucco work quickly melted away when I realized that vast surfaces of Toniná had once been covered with sculptured stucco.
Go to page: And it is sculptured stucco of the highest quality.
Go to page: Much of it has only recently been revealed by the painstaking archaeological work of Juan Yadeún Angulo, the site's director for the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Go to page: True, there seems to be a preoccupation with the warlike...
Go to page: ...and the macabre.
Go to page: You probably recognize this sculpture from Maya Cosmos by David Freidel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker. It shows a turtle-footed, skeletal way, or spirit companion, with the severed head of a warrior.
Go to page: And there are indeed quite a number of captive monuments at Toniná.
Go to page: Palenque's K'an Joy Chitam was by no means the only unfortunate to get his captive portrait carved in stone.
Go to page: The theme may be bellicose, but the artistry is exquisite.
Go to page: Many of these prisoner sculptures are associated with the larger of the two ballcourts at Toniná.
Go to page: Officially designated Ballcourt 1, this is also known as the Sunken Ballcourt. It was probably built by the Toniná ruler K'inich B'aaknal Chaak.
Go to page: Sculptures of prisoners with their arms tied behind their backs were tenoned out from the sides of the ballcourt.
Go to page: Underneath each prisoner was a carved stone shield with a feather border and glyphs identifying the captive.
Go to page: Here we see the remains of one of these sculptures in the Toniná site museum. The projecting prisoner has broken off, leaving only the tenon that once supported him, but the inscribed shield remains.
Go to page: Here's a closer look at the inscription. The glyphs say that the prisoner was the vassal of a Palenque lord called "The Ballplayer". This is probably a reference to the son of Pakal the Great, K'inich Kan B'ahlam II.
Go to page: The Toniná ruler K'inich B'aaknal Chaak had good cause to be antagonistic towards Palenque. According to the inscription of this carved stone monument from Palenque's Temple XVII, Kan B'ahlam of Palenque captured B'aaknal Chaak's predecessor (possibly his father). The Palencanos may have killed their captive. He is never heard from again in the inscriptional record, and B'aaknal Chaak accedes at Toniná within the year.
Go to page: Clearly there was warfare back and forth between Palenque and its neighbor to the south. This seems to have transpired outside the context of the great Classic Period rivalry between Tikal and Calakmul and the allies and subordinates of these powerful states. Yet any temporary power vacuum along the Usumacinta River created by the realignments of this rivalry might well have brought Palenque and Toniná into conflict as they vied to fill the void.
Go to page: Based on the available evidence, it seemed a reasonable inference that it was K'inich B'aaknal Chaak who avenged the capture of his predecessor by Palenque. Clearly someone from Toniná had made their way via the Tulija Valley and penetrated into the very center of Palenque to capture K'inich Kan Joy Chitam in AD 711. Although we don't have a death date for K'inich B'aaknal Chaak, there was good reason to believe that he was still ruler of Toniná at this date.
Go to page: But then hieroglyphics expert Simon Martin visited the newly opened Toniná site museum and discovered an inscription bearing the date on which K'inich B'aaknal Chaak's successor became king. This was in AD 708, three years before the capture of K'inich Kan Joy Chitam of Palenque. In this photograph we are looking at the name of the captor,which begins with K'inich ("Great Sun") and ends with K'ahk' ("Fire"). Since the second glyph has not been deciphered, he is known as Ruler 4.
Go to page: The age at which Ruler 4 became king is still unclear. He was either just over two years old or fifty-five. Lending support to the younger age is this glyph from the same monument in the Toniná museum. The right half is a title sometimes born by kings, B'akab', which may refer metaphorically to the deities who support the earth and sky. The left half reads ch'ok, which means "young" or "emergent". It is quite possible that the king of Toniná was all of five years old when he (or his military chiefs) captured the ruler of Palenque.