Publisher's Synopsis
The regional capital of the western quadrant of the Late Classic Maya world, Palenque reached sculptural and architectural heights never attained by any other Maya center, and Merle Green Robertson's series of volumes on Palenque, with its hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs and line drawings, provides us with the most complete record of the art, as well as the color, of any Maya site. Much of the color shown is no longer visible at the site itself, because of vandalism, acid rain, or the ravages of the tropical jungle environment. This fourth volume covers the reign of Lord Chan-Bahlum, a powerful ruler of the metropolis who succeeded his father, the Great Pacal, who built the Temple of the Inscriptions described in Volume I of Robertson's monumental work. This book describes Chan-Bahlum as a brilliant statesman, architect, epigrapher, and historian, whose great achievement was the building of the Cross Group temples, which divulged Maya history on stone tablets in a way not done in any Maya city before or since. Chan-Bahlum was seeking to legitimize the royal line by recording in inscriptions and in public art and sculpture a genealogy linking his and his mother's birth to the Mother Goddess, who was said to have ruled the world long before humans appeared on it. He traced what he felt to be his ancestral rights to those of this Mother Goddess and to her children Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh, who later became the Sun and the Moon.
