Funerary Mask of Pakal the Great
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A face made of more than two hundred pieces of green jade, with eyes of white shell and pupils of black obsidian, looks back at you from its case in the Maya hall. The pieces are fitted like a mosaic over a modelled base, and the expression is calm, slightly open mouthed, with a sloping forehead that the Maya considered beautiful. This mask was laid over the face of K'inich Janaab' Pakal, ruler of Palenque, when he was buried in the year six hundred and eighty three at the age of eighty, after a reign of sixty eight years.
Jade was the most precious material in the Maya world, worth far more than gold, because its colour was the colour of maize shoots and of water, the substances of life. Look at how the mask maker chose different shades of green to model the cheeks and the brow, and at the T shaped filed teeth, an aristocratic fashion. The mask was accompanied by jade ear spools, a necklace, rings on every finger and a jade cube and sphere held in each hand, all displayed nearby, along with a reconstruction of the enormous carved sarcophagus lid that showed the king falling into the underworld along the axis of the world tree.
The tomb was discovered in nineteen fifty two by the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, who spent four seasons clearing a rubble filled stairway inside the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque before he reached the burial chamber. It was the first royal tomb found inside a Maya pyramid and changed the idea that Maya pyramids were only temples. The mask was stolen from the museum in nineteen eighty five together with more than a hundred other objects, and recovered four years later.
Did You Know? The mask was among more than one hundred treasures stolen from the museum on Christmas Eve nineteen eighty five and was recovered in nineteen eighty nine.
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