Qualla: Palenque https://qualla.com/palenque en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:09 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/9/g/n/e/palenque-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Palenque https://qualla.com/palenque Palenque: Introduction https://qualla.com/palenque/ Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. The jungle took Palenque back slowly. Cedar, mahogany, and sapodilla trees grew over the temples, swallowing a city that had rivaled Tikal in its prime. For centuries, the ancient Maya capital known in the Itza language as Lakamha -- meaning 'big water' -- lay hidden 150 meters above sea level in what is now southern Chiapas, near the Usumacinta River. The ruins that archaeologists have uncovered span roughly a thousand years, from about 226 BC to 799 AD, though only an estimated five percent of the total city has been excavated. What that fraction has revealed is staggering: one of the richest royal tombs in the pre-Columbian Americas, hieroglyphic texts that unlocked the first dynastic history of any Maya city, and architecture so refined that it changed how scholars understood an entire civilization.

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]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/g/n/e/palenque-wp/9gne-palenque-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Palenque: The King Who Rebuilt from Ruin https://qualla.com/palenque/ Photo credit Luis Alberto Figueroa Suarez, CC BY-SA 4.0. Palenque's most famous structures were not born from prosperity but from disaster. In 599 and again in 611, the rival city of Calakmul invaded and sacked the city. The second attack was devastating -- the king of Calakmul entered Palenque in person, and the inscriptions record th...

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Image: Luis Alberto Figueroa Suarez | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/g/n/e/palenque-wp/9gne-palenque-the-king-who-rebuilt-from-ruin.mp3 0:06 2 full Palenque: Buried in Jade https://qualla.com/palenque/ Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Despite two centuries of visits by explorers, nobody suspected that the Temple of the Inscriptions contained a royal tomb until 1952, when Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier lifted a stone slab from the temple floor and found a rubble-filled stairway descending into the ...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/g/n/e/palenque-wp/9gne-palenque-buried-in-jade.mp3 0:06 3 full Palenque: Written in Stone https://qualla.com/palenque/ Photo credit Dennis G. Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0. Palenque's hieroglyphic corpus is among the most extensive in the Maya world, and it was here that the modern decipherment of Maya history began. Heinrich Berlin first identified what he called 'emblem glyphs' at Palenque, and later Linda Schele and Peter Mathews used the site's ...

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Image: Dennis G. Jarvis | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/g/n/e/palenque-wp/9gne-palenque-written-in-stone.mp3 0:06 4 full Palenque: Fossils Beneath the Temples https://qualla.com/palenque/ Photo credit Dennis G. Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0. The limestone from which Palenque's temples were built carries a hidden record far older than the Maya. Paleontologists studying the building stones and the quarries they came from have found remarkably well-preserved fossils of marine fish and invertebrates dating to the Early P...

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Image: Dennis G. Jarvis | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/g/n/e/palenque-wp/9gne-palenque-fossils-beneath-the-temples.mp3 0:06 5 full