Science: The Jeweled Corpse

The secret room in the bowels of the pyramidal “Temple of Inscriptions” at Palenque is probably “the most sumptuous mortuary chamber in the western hemisphere.” The six skeletons which Mexican Archaeologist Alberto Ruz Luhillier found there last summer (TIME, July 7) had almost surely been offered up to an ancient Indian deity. But Dr. Ruz had a hunch that the sacrificial stone, encrusted with Mayan hieroglyphics, might be more than a great altar. Before he could investigate further, money ran out and the rains came.

Last month, the rainy season over, Dr. Ruz got a grant from Mexico’s retiring President Miguel Aleman, and hurried back to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,where he pitched camp in the jungle near Palenque. With Assistant César Saenz he descended the 59 steps to the altar room. Carefully the diggers drilled a hole in the side of the stone block. As Dr. Ruz suspected, it was hollow. Next morning the men came back with truck jacks, wedged them under the protruding edges of the slab that topped the altar. All day and all night they worked at the jacks. By morning they had raised the slab some two feet, only to find another lid fitted flush in the top of the block. With crowbar and ropes, they managed to lift the second lid.

In the red-painted cavity below lay the all but pulverized skeleton of a middle-aged man. His fine cloth raiment was in tatters, but his burial jewelry made as rich a display as it had when he was interred 13 centuries ago. A jade diadem covered his skull, and chunky jade earrings lay where his ears had been. A jade mask with inlaid emerald eyes covered his face. Inside the mouth was a jade bead, and a long jade necklace hung over a beaded breastplate.

At his crumbling collarbone he wore a pearl as large as a walnut. His right hand held a large jade cube, his left a jade sphere. Jade ornaments stood by his feet, and nearby were two jade idols. Popeyed and sporting neat goatees, the idols looked like Mayan sun gods. Dr. Ruz’s hunch had paid off.

The corpse in the crypt had surely once been some exalted leader of Palenque civilization. The hieroglyphics on the stone sarcophagus alone, estimated Dr. Ruz, had been 25 years in the carving. The original owners of the six skeletons outside had been sacrificed to guard the tomb.

For all its similarity to the opulent tombs of the Pharaohs, Dr. Ruz sees no Egyptian influence in his Mayan find. The coincidental resemblance, he says, proves only that wherever man has lived, human culture has followed similar patterns.

In Egypt, meanwhile, diggers at Sakkara uncovered a 4,000-year-old tomb from the Sixth Dynasty. There, only bright, well-preserved wall paintings still proclaim the baggage that the dead king kept to use at his resurrection. Unlike Mayan monarchs, Pharaohs of that age were too poor for jeweled funerals.