Thread by @culturaltutor

In 1994 an archaeologist working in the ancient Maya city of Palenque accidentally discovered a hidden tomb.

Inside was a 1,300 year old skeleton painted bright red.

This is the story of the lost city of Palenque and its mysterious Red Queen...

Palenque, called Lakamhaʼ in the Itza language, is in Chiapas State in southern Mexico.

It lies in heavily forested highlands not far from the Usumacinta River, overlooking the Tabasco Plain.

Other Maya cities in the region include Yaxchilan, Bonampak, and Chinkultic.

Although it seems to have been inhabited since about 500 BC, most of the remains date from between 200 and 800 AD.

That was during the Classic Era, when Maya cities, trade, and culture flourished all over Mesoamerica.

These are the ruins of Palenque, surrounded by rainforest.

It was under Pakal the Great, who ruled from 615 until 683 (the fifth-longest reign of any monarch in history!) that Palenque reached its zenith.

It is a city filled with palaces, temples, tombs, shrines, towers, and thousands of inscriptions, carvings, and statues.

From the extensive palace, a labyrinth of corridors and chambers, steam rooms and towers, and even a sewage system...

...to the so-called Temple of the Foliated Cross, high on one of the stepped pyramids for which the Maya are now so famous, and with which Palenque is filled.

The ruins go on and on — all in a remarkable state of preservation. This was, at its height under Pakal, one of the wealthiest and most powerful city states in the region.

The sheer monumentality of its architecture and the complexity of its art is testament to that.

Because not only have the buildings been preserved but reliefs and carvings, too, including this rather striking skull, which has given its name to the Temple of the Skull.

Plus countless more artefacts, whether made from limestone, jade, pearl, or stucco.

Along with extensive hieroglyphic inscriptions recording the names and deeds of the kings of Palenque, which have allowed archaeologists to create a detailed timeline of the city's history.

But around the year 800 AD everything changed.

This Golden Age was followed by a collapse, not only in Palenque but in several more once great Maya city states.

A combination of overpopulation, overfarming, and other socio-economic factors caused a precipitous decline...

Whatever the exact causes of this collapse, we know that construction in Palenque ceased, written records ended, and the city was abandoned.

And once the people left, the jungle crept in — and Palenque was lost to time...

Until 1787, when rumours of a lost city in the jungles of Chiapas prompted Colonel Antonio del Rio to lead an expedition, accompanied by the architect Antonio Bernasconi.

They found the city and partially excavated it, while Bernasconi made a map and drawings of what he saw.

Several more expeditions were made to Palenque over the next century, and in the 1890s the British explorer and photographer Alfred Maudslay visited.

He oversaw more deforestation and excavation, and photographed the site and its artefacts for further study.

But it was in the 20th century, under the leadership of the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, that the city was properly excavated and stably preserved, and that more detailed study began.

And it was Alberto Ruz Lhuillier who stumbled across the tomb of Pakal the Great in 1948; by 1952 his team had fully excavated it, discovering in the process the huge limestone lid of Pakal's sarcophagus.

It is an astonishingly rich and complex piece of Maya art.

What about the Red Queen?

In 1994 the archaeologist Fanny López Jiménez was doing standard maintenance on a staircase in Temple 13, right next to the Temple of Inscriptions — where Pakal was buried.

And during her work she noticed a chink in the masonry...

She peered in and saw a corridor filled with rubble — a previously unknown part of the temple.

The team excavated this tunnel, which led to another one, and then to several rooms and burial chambers, including one that was walled off, within which lay a perfectly preserved tomb.

Inside was a sarcophagus flanked by two skeletons, and in the sarcophagus the skeleton of a woman surrounded by ornaments, jewelry, and a disintegrated burial mask.

Everything had been coloured brightly red with pigment made from the mineral cinnabar.

It is believed that the entire city of Palenque was once coloured with cinnabar, as in these digital reconstructions by Anxo Miján Maroño.

The temples and palaces were once covered with stucco and painted red, vermilion, and scarlet; it must have been quite a sight to behold.

That this woman was important in Palenque was obvious.

But the first suggestion — that she was Pakal's mother — has been disproven by DNA testing, and so in the absence of conclusive evidence this Red Queen is believed to be Lady Ix Tzʼakbu, the wife of Pakal the Great.

Palenque is a magnificent and enchanting place, but only about 50 of its estimated 1,500 buildings have been properly excavated and documented.

The rest of these ancient structures remain shrouded in the jungle. Which makes one wonder... what else has yet to be discovered?