Where Is The Death Mask Of Pacal The Great?
For 1000 years the city of Palenque lay abandoned in the jungles of the Yucatan, steadily and inexorably weathering under the hot tropical sun and torrential rains of it's latitude. Through century after century, with animals the only inhabitants, and visited infrequently by the occasional groups of Maya in the area who may or may not have known the history of what they saw and what their ancestors had accomplished there.
In the thousand years before the jungle began to take back what was left to it, Palenque was a thriving society, where feats of engineering were accomplished without benefit of the wheel, amazing calculations of the stars and planets happened every day and spans of time much greater than the 2000 year story of Palenque were considered with a clarity that is little understood today.
It was into this civilization that K'inich Janaab' Pakal - Pakal the Great was born in 603 AD, and a short twelve years later in 615 AD he would assume the throne from his mother and rule for the next 68 years.
During his long reign he constructed some of the greatest architecture of the Mayan world, and beneath the best of what he had made, the "Temple of Inscriptions", he was laid to rest to begin the long wait for Senor Ruz Lhuillier.
It wasn't until 1773, after the Spanish had been in the Americas so long that surely some of their own early settlements were being overtaken by jungle and beginning to resemble ruins themselves that word of a great city in the forest made it to a Spanish priest through Maya that had been to the site.
It would be almost another 60 years before the city was explored and documented by Europeans, including a Count who entered the jungle as he was nearing 70(He lived to a hundred and ten and died only after being run over by a wagon!)) and spent a few years living atop one of the structures on the site that bears his name today.The Count was at the time, the most interesting man in the world and before leaving the Yucatan he met a woman, fathered children, and spent the remainder of his time making elaborate sketches of the ruins that helped to advance modern knowledge of the Mayan history, despite his sometimes fanciful interpretations and tendency towards exaggeration.
He was after all an artist and adventurer; not a scientist.
On Christmas Eve 1985 the priceless jade death mask that covered the face of Pacal the Great in his burial chamber under the Temple of Inscriptions, in the ancient city of Palenque, was stolen from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and to this day its whereabouts remain a mystery.
Laid to rest with arguably the greatest king the Mayans had known, the mask was part of a large cache of artifacts stolen from the museum that night, and of all the loot the thieves made away with, it is without a doubt the most valuable. Not only from a financial standpoint but from what it represents in the chronicle of a people and way of life that doesn't exist anymore the loss of the mask is incalculable.
The worst that could have happened is that the mask was for whatever reason broken apart and the individual pieces of jade are scattered to who knows where or even buried in a landfill. Hopefully the object was kept intact and at this moment is in the possession of someone with an appreciation of history and art and though they are depriving the rest of the world from the pleasure of seeing the mask in person it is being well taken care of wherever it is.
The mask, as always, has time on it's side and maybe one day it will be rediscovered.Until then the answer to the question, where is the death mask of Pacal the Great? Remains a mystery.
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