Editing Palenque (section)

===Temple of the Inscriptions===
{{main|Temple of the Inscriptions}}
[[File:Tumba de pakal, Chiapas.JPG|thumb|left|Temple of the Inscriptions]]
The Temple of the Inscriptions had begun perhaps as early as 675<ref>Schele and Mathews 1998:97–99</ref> as the funerary monument of Hanab-Pakal. The temple superstructure houses the second longest glyphic text known from the Maya world (the longest is the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan). The Temple of the Inscriptions records approximately 180 years of the city's history from the 4th through 12th [[Kʼatun]]. The focal point of the narrative records Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal's Kʼatun period-ending rituals focused on the icons of the city's patron deities prosaically known collectively as the Palenque Triad or individually as GI, GII, and GIII.<ref>Berlin 1963; Schele and Mathews 1998: 106; Carrasco 2005: 433.</ref>

The pyramid measures 60 meters wide, 42.5 meters deep and 27.2 meters high. The summit temple measures 25.5 meters wide, 10.5 meters deep and 11.4 meters high. The largest stones weigh 12 to 15 tons. These were on top of the pyramid. The total volume of pyramid and temple is 32,500 cu. meters.<ref>Scarre 1999</ref>

In 1952 Alberto Ruz Lhuillier removed a stone slab in the floor of the back room of the temple superstructure to reveal a passageway (filled in shortly before the city's abandonment and reopened by archeologists) leading through a long stairway to Pakal's tomb. The tomb itself is remarkable for its large carved sarcophagus, the rich ornaments accompanying Pakal, and for the stucco sculpture decorating the walls of the tomb. Unique to Pakal's tomb is the psychoduct, which leads from the tomb itself, up the stairway and through a hole in the stone covering the entrance to the burial. This psychoduct is perhaps a physical reference to concepts about the departure of the soul at the time of death in Maya eschatology where in the inscriptions the phrase ''ochb'ihaj sak ikʼil'' (the white breath road-entered) is used to refer to the leaving of the soul. A find such as this is greatly important because it demonstrated for the first time the temple usage as being multifaceted. These pyramids were, for the first time, identified as temples and also funerary structures.
 
The much-discussed iconography of the sarcophagus lid depicts Pakal in the guise of one of the manifestations of the [[Maya maize god]] emerging from the maws of the underworld.<ref>The direction of the Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal's movement between realms has been the subject of debate in recent years. Initially, Linda Schele, David Freidel, and others saw Pakal as descending into the underworld (Schele and Mathews 1998: 115). More recently, David Stuart and Freidel have suggested the opposite based on glyphic texts accompanying similar scenes. In these images the birth glyph (often spelled SIH-ya-ja) describes the depicted event.</ref>

The temple also has a duct structure that still is not completely understood by archaeologists. It has been suggested that the duct aligns with the winter solstice and that the sun shines down on Pakal's tomb.