Page 155 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

When they had done so they entered a narrow corbel-vaulted chamber.
Spread out on the floor in front of them were the mouldering skeletons of
five or possibly six young victims of sacrifice. A huge triangular slab of
stone was visible at the far end of the chamber. When it was removed,
Ruz was confronted by a remarkable tomb. He described it as ‘an
enormous room that appeared to be graven in ice, a kind of grotto whose
walls and roof seemed to have been planed in perfect surfaces, or an
abandoned chapel whose cupola was draped with curtains of stalactites,
and from whose floor arose thick stalagmites like the dripping of a
candle.’
3
The room, also roofed with a corbel vault, was 30 feet long and 23 feet
high. Around the walls, in stucco relief, could be seen the striding figures
of the Lords of the Night—the ‘Ennead’ of nine deities who ruled over the
hours of darkness. Centre-stage, and overlooked by these figures, was a
huge monolithic sarcophagus lidded with a five-ton slab of richly carved
stone. Inside the sarcophagus was a tall skeleton draped with a treasure
trove of jade ornaments. A mosaic death mask of 200 fragments of jade
was affixed to the front of the skull. These, supposedly, were the remains
of Pacal, a ruler of Palenque in the seventh century AD. The inscriptions
stated that this monarch had been eighty years old at the time of his
death, but the jade-draped skeleton the archaeologists found in the
sarcophagus appeared to belong to a man half that age.
4
Having reached the bottom of the stairway, some eighty-five feet below
the floor of the temple, I crossed the chamber where the sacrificial
victims had lain and gazed directly into Pacal’s tomb. The air was dank,
full of mildew and damp-rot, and surprisingly cold. The sarcophagus, set
into the floor of the tomb, had a curious shape, flared strikingly at the
feet like an Ancient Egyptian mummy case. These were made of wood
and were equipped with wide bases since they were frequently stood
upright. But Pacal’s coffin was made of solid stone and was
uncompromisingly horizontal. Why, then, had the Mayan artificers gone
to so much trouble to widen its base when they must have known that it
served no useful purpose? Could they have been slavishly copying a
design-feature from some ancient model long after the raison d’être for
the design had been forgotten? Like the beliefs concerning the perils of
5
the afterlife, might Pacal’s sarcophagus not be an expression of a
common legacy linking Ancient Egypt with the ancient cultures of Central
America?
Rectangular in shape, the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus was ten
inches thick, three feet wide and twelve and a half feet long. It, too,
seemed to have been modelled on the same original as the magnificent
engraved blocks the Ancient Egyptians had used for this exact purpose.

Quoted in The Atlas of Mysterious Places, pp. 68-9.
3
4 Ibid. Michael D. Coe, The Maya, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991, pp. 108-9.
5 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. 94-5.

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