Tikal

Tikal is the ruin of a great Maya city in the forested lowlands of the Petén region of northern Guatemala. It was one of the most powerful cities of the Classic Maya period, roughly AD 250 to 900, when dozens of Maya kingdoms competed across what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras.

The name “Tikal” is modern and is usually explained as a Yucatec Maya phrase meaning “at the waterhole”. The city’s own inscriptions use the names Mutal and Yax Mutal, and its rulers bore the title k’uhul mutal ajaw, conventionally translated “Holy Lord of Mutal”. Such royal titles, known as emblem glyphs, identified kingdoms a little like a coat of arms, although related courts could share one, as Tikal and Dos Pilas did.

What visitors see today is the ceremonial heart of the city: steep temple-pyramids, palaces with many rooms, broad plazas, ball courts and rows of carved stone monuments. But Tikal was much more than a religious centre. Archaeologists have mapped many simple houses, reservoirs, causeways and fields spreading far into the forest, showing that it was a true city.

Tikal is protected as a national park, created in 1955, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, one of the few sites listed under both cultural and natural criteria, for its archaeology and for the forest that surrounds it.

At the centre lies the Great Plaza. On its east side stands Temple I, also called the Temple of the Great Jaguar, about 45–47 metres tall; facing it on the west is Temple II. Temple I was the funerary monument of one of Tikal’s greatest kings, Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, whose tomb lies deep beneath it. The temples face each other across the plaza, so ceremonies there took place between the monuments of a king and, it is often thought, his queen.

North of the plaza is the North Acropolis, a platform built up over many centuries where generations of kings were buried, each new building covering the older ones like layers of a cake. South of the plaza is the Central Acropolis, a maze of palace rooms and courtyards where the royal family and nobles lived and worked.

Further west rises Temple IV, the tallest building at Tikal, about 65–70 metres high in published descriptions. From its top you look out over an ocean of forest from which the roof-combs of other temples emerge. To the south-west is the Mundo Perdido (“Lost World”) complex. Its great pyramid and the long platform facing it form the oldest architectural complex at Tikal, rebuilt again and again from the Middle Preclassic period onwards. This arrangement is known as an “E-Group”, a type of complex associated with public ritual and interpreted in relation to solar and agricultural cycles. It shows that the city was already important long before its famous Classic temples.

Wide raised roads called causeways connected the main groups. Tikal is also known for its “twin-pyramid complexes”, pairs of flat-topped pyramids built to celebrate the end of a k’atun, a period of about twenty years in the Maya calendar. Many of these complexes contain a carved stela and altar recording the king who performed the ceremony, although some monuments were left plain.

Living in the Petén was not easy. Tikal had no permanent lakes or rivers to rely on, and for part of the year there is almost no rain. The people of Tikal solved this by building reservoirs: paved plazas and slopes channelled rainwater into large tanks. The largest reservoirs, near the palaces and temples of the centre, were essential for the city’s survival during the dry season.

Most people were farmers who grew maize, beans and squash, and also used the forest for fruit, game and wood. Recent laser surveys of the region show extensive farming features, roads and other infrastructure, evidence that the Maya changed their landscape on a large scale to feed large populations.

The Maya had a writing system of several hundred signs, some standing for whole words and others for syllables. Scribes painted books on bark paper, and sculptors carved inscriptions on stelae, altars and lintels. They used a precise calendar, the Long Count, to date events to the day. Thanks to decades of decipherment, historians can now read the history of Tikal’s dynasty from the city’s own monuments.

The first settlers arrived in the Tikal area around 800 BC, in the Middle Preclassic period. The oldest monumental complex, in Mundo Perdido, was begun in this period and rebuilt many times, and the University of Pennsylvania’s excavations concluded that Tikal was “a going concern” by 600 BC. In the Late Preclassic period (roughly 300 BC–AD 250) major pyramids and the early North Acropolis developed on a monumental scale.

Later rulers traced their dynasty back to a founder named Yax Ehb Xook, who probably lived in the 1st or 2nd century AD. The dynasty kept careful count of its rulers, and later kings proudly gave their position in this line of succession; the inscriptions record more than thirty rulers. The earliest dated monument at Tikal, Stela 29, was carved in AD 292. During the Early Classic period (about AD 250–550) Tikal grew into one of the leading cities of the lowlands, competing with neighbours such as Uaxactun, only about 20 km to the north.

The early kings built tombs in the North Acropolis and raised stelae showing themselves in rich costume, holding symbols of divine power. Maya kings claimed a special relationship with the gods and ancestors, and much of the city’s ritual life revolved around royal ceremonies, bloodletting offerings and the commemoration of calendar periods.

In mid-January 378 (the Long Count date 8.17.1.4.12), inscriptions at Tikal and nearby Uaxactun record the “arrival” of a man called Siyaj K’ak’ (“Fire Is Born”). Tikal’s Stela 31 says that on the same day the reigning king, Chak Tok Ich’aak I, died. A new king, Yax Nuun Ahiin I, was installed in September 379 (8.17.2.16.17, the date recorded on Stela 4), about twenty months after the arrival. Stela 31 names him as the son of a figure nicknamed “Spearthrower Owl”, whose name glyph includes a spearthrower, a weapon typical of highland Mexico. The epigrapher David Stuart has proposed that Spearthrower Owl was a ruler of Teotihuacan, the great city of central Mexico about 1,000 km away.

After this event, Teotihuacan-style imagery becomes prominent in Tikal’s royal monuments: warriors with central Mexican spearthrowers, rectangular shields and headdresses. Talud-tablero architecture, a central Mexican style, was already present at Tikal before 378, in the Mundo Perdido complex, and became more widespread afterwards. The arrival is also recorded at Uaxactun, and texts at other sites, such as Bejucal, name Siyaj K’ak’ as an overlord, suggesting a wider reorganisation of power in the central Petén.

About seventy years later, Yax Nuun Ahiin’s son Siyaj Chan K’awiil II set up Stela 31, which shows him in Maya royal dress flanked on its sides by his father dressed as a Teotihuacan warrior. The long text on its back is one of the key historical sources for this period. The monument shows how Tikal’s rulers later presented their foreign connection as a source of prestige and legitimacy.

The history of the Classic period is dominated by the rivalry between Tikal and the Kaanul (“Snake”) dynasty, which from at least the 7th century ruled from Calakmul in what is now southern Mexico. Neither city conquered the whole Maya world. Instead each built networks of allied and subordinate kingdoms, and their struggle has been compared to a contest between two superpowers.

In 562 Tikal suffered a devastating defeat, recorded on Altar 21 at Caracol with a glyph that scholars nickname the “star war” verb; its ancient reading is still uncertain. Tikal’s king Wak Chan K’awiil (also known by the scholarly nickname Double Bird) may have been captured and killed, but his precise fate is uncertain. The victor is not securely identified: the damaged text was long read as a victory of Caracol’s own king, but Simon Martin has proposed the Kaanul ruler nicknamed Sky Witness as a possible candidate, while stressing the severe damage to the inscription. There followed more than a century, called the “Tikal hiatus”, in which no dated monuments were raised at Tikal and building on a grand scale fell off sharply.

In the 7th century Calakmul’s king Yuknoom Ch’een II (reigned 636–686) built up a powerful alliance. Dos Pilas, founded by a prince of Tikal’s own dynasty who used the Tikal emblem glyph, switched to Calakmul’s side and fought against Tikal, so that two branches of the same royal family became enemies.

The balance changed in 695, when Tikal’s king Jasaw Chan K’awiil I (reigned 682–734) defeated Calakmul’s ruler Yich’aak K’ahk’ (also called Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’). Tikal recovered its power, and Calakmul’s influence abroad declined after this defeat. Jasaw and his son Yik’in Chan K’awiil launched a great building programme. Temple I, Jasaw’s funerary temple, and Temple IV, generally linked to Yik’in Chan K’awiil and dated to the mid-8th century, belong to this revival.

Tikal had no contact with Eurasia, so its history has to be read on its own terms, from its inscriptions and archaeology: the upheaval of 378, when Siyaj K’ak’ arrived with ties to distant Teotihuacan, and the long rivalry with the Kaanul dynasty. Setting these dates beside other parts of the world is still useful for a different reason—it reminds us that the Maya developed writing, astronomy and monumental cities entirely independently, at the same time as the empires of Rome, Persia and China.

In 562, the year Tikal was defeated, Silla conquered Daegaya and the remaining Gaya polities on the Korean peninsula, and in Constantinople the dome of Hagia Sophia, which had partly collapsed in an earthquake in 558, was restored and the church rededicated.

Tikal’s long hiatus overlapped with the founding of the Tang dynasty in China (618), Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina (622) and the ship burial at Sutton Hoo in England (about 625). When Jasaw Chan K’awiil defeated Calakmul in 695, Silla had consolidated its rule over the southern Korean peninsula after its war with Tang.

Tikal’s last dated monument was carved in 869. The great era of the southern lowland kings was ending, while in the north a longer boom was under way at the great city of Chichen Itza.

In the 8th century Tikal was at its height, but in the 9th century the southern Maya lowlands went through a deep crisis: many royal cities stopped raising dated monuments and large parts of the region lost much of their population. Tikal’s last dated monument, Stela 11, was carved in 869, and by about 900 the royal city had effectively come to an end. Small groups continued to live among the ruins for some time afterwards, robbing tombs and moving old monuments about.

Scholars debate how to describe these changes. “Collapse” can refer to the breakdown of royal institutions and severe regional depopulation without implying that Maya peoples or cultures disappeared. Northern cities such as Chichen Itza flourished, and today about six million people in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras speak around thirty Mayan languages.

Explanations for the end of the southern cities include long periods of drought, environmental stress from intensive land use and deforestation, warfare between kingdoms, a shift of long-distance trade from overland routes to sea routes around the Yucatán peninsula, and the loss of faith in kings who could no longer guarantee prosperity. At Tikal, a 2020 study of sediments from four of the main reservoirs found that two of the largest were contaminated with high levels of mercury, phosphate and toxic blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) in the late Classic period. The mercury probably came from cinnabar, a red mineral the Maya used in paints and rituals, and the polluted water may have become unsafe to drink during dry periods.

Local people knew the ruins before the official expedition of 1848, whose report is the first modern account of Tikal. That year the governor Ambrosio Tut led an advance party to the site, and Modesto Méndez, the corregidor (district governor) of Petén, followed with a larger expedition; the artist Eusebio Lara made the first drawings, and Méndez’s report was published in the Gaceta de Guatemala in April and May 1848. In the following decades explorers photographed the temples and removed some carved wooden lintels to European museums.

In January 1956 the University of Pennsylvania Museum began a thirteen-year project at Tikal, one of the largest archaeological projects of its time in the Americas. It was led first by Edwin Shook, briefly by Robert Dyson and, from 1963, by William R. Coe. The project mapped the central area of the city, excavated the North Acropolis and restored major temples, before handing responsibility to Guatemala’s Institute of Anthropology and History in 1969–70. Guatemalan archaeologists then continued with their own projects, including the excavation and restoration of Mundo Perdido.

In 2018 a team using airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) published in the journal Science a 2016 survey of 2,144 square kilometres of northern Guatemala. The lasers “saw” through the forest canopy: the survey mapped 61,480 ancient structures, many of them previously unrecorded, along with causeways, agricultural terraces and other modified farmland, and defensive earthworks, including around Tikal. The results suggest the lowlands were far more densely populated and more intensively farmed than earlier researchers imagined.

Tikal also has a place in popular culture: its pyramids appeared in the 1977 film Star Wars. Tourism brings important income to the region but also strains the site: UNESCO notes waste, erosion and vandalism among the pressures, and the relationship between the park and surrounding communities is part of how it is managed.

Conquest or alliance in 378? Scholars have long been divided between an “externalist” view, in which Teotihuacan intervened directly and even violently in Maya politics, and an “internalist” view, in which Maya elites adopted prestigious Teotihuacan symbols for their own purposes. Reading the inscriptions, David Stuart argued that Siyaj K’ak’ was a foreigner and may well have led a military force that overthrew Tikal’s dynasty, while cautioning that the texts are seldom explicit. Others think the evidence could also fit an alliance, a marriage link or trade relations. The question remains debated.

Who defeated Tikal in 562? Caracol’s Altar 21 was excavated in 1985, and the archaeologists working at Caracol read it as recording a victory by Caracol’s king Yajaw Te’ K’inich II. After re-examining the badly damaged stone, the epigrapher Simon Martin argued in 2005 that this reading cannot be confirmed and that the Kaanul king Sky Witness, who was in power at the time, is a strong candidate for the victor, although the key glyphs are too damaged to be certain. The difference matters because it changes the picture from a local war to a contest between two regional superpowers.

Why did the southern cities decline? Climate scientists point to lake sediments and cave formations recording severe droughts in the Terminal Classic period. A 2018 study of Lake Chichancanab in the northern Yucatán estimated that annual rainfall fell by 41–54 percent, and by up to 70 percent at the peak of drought, compared with today. Many archaeologists accept drought as a major factor but stress that it struck societies already under environmental, political and economic stress, and that different cities declined at different times. Most scholars now think several causes combined.

Whose history is it? Accounts that speak of a “lost city” found by outsiders in 1848 or of a “vanished” civilisation leave out the Maya people who remained in the region. Tikal belongs to a living Maya heritage. Guatemala’s 1995 Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognised temples and ceremonial centres as part of the cultural, historical and spiritual heritage of the Maya and other indigenous peoples, recognised their right to take part in conserving and administering such places, and called for access rules that guarantee the free practice of indigenous spirituality at ceremonial centres in archaeological areas.

Tikal’s history rests on two kinds of evidence that must be combined carefully. Inscriptions give names, dates and events, but they were commissioned by kings and tell the story from the royal point of view: they record victories and captures, rarely defeats. Archaeology, by contrast, shows houses, food, burials and building phases, the lives of ordinary people as well as of rulers. The “hiatus” after 562, for example, is marked by a gap in dated monuments and by reduced monumental construction; it does not mean that all building and city life stopped.

Decipherment has transformed the field. Until the mid-20th century many scholars believed Maya inscriptions dealt mainly with the calendar and astronomy. In 1960 Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed that the dates on monuments at Piedras Negras followed the lives of rulers, and from the 1970s and 1980s phonetic decipherment made it clear that the script recorded spoken Maya language. Cities such as Tikal gained a political history with named kings, alliances and wars. Chronicles such as Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube’s survey of Maya dynasties bring together these readings, though interpretations of individual passages continue to change.

Estimating population is especially difficult. Britannica gives about 10,000 people in Tikal’s core around AD 700, drawing on some 50,000 more in the surrounding area, while Turner and Sabloff put the populations of Tikal and Calakmul at more than 50,000 each. The figures depend on how the city’s edges are drawn, how many houses were occupied at the same time and how many people lived in each. LiDAR has greatly increased the number of known structures, but archaeologists still need excavation to date them. The LiDAR team estimated that the Late Classic lowlands may have held roughly 7 to 11 million people, a figure that other researchers continue to test.

Finally, archaeologists estimate construction dates from associated inscriptions, pottery styles and radiocarbon evidence, so dates for buildings are often given as ranges. Published heights also vary (for example, about 45 or 47 metres for Temple I and 65 or 70 metres for Temple IV); the approximate ranges given here summarise those differences. Where the evidence is uncertain, a careful account should give ranges rather than exact numbers.