Maya Warrior Queens of the Yucatan

Rendering of Queen Lady K'abel in ceremonial headdress on 9-foot Stela 34, Cleveland Museum of Art

by Jeanine Kitchel
reprinted, with permission, from her Blogspot Maya Musings

Maya warrior queens. Yes, they existed.

Maya queens rose to power, according to a Discovery article, after a seismic geopolitical shift occurred in the Maya world around 623 AD when power repositioned into the vast forests of the Yucatán's central lowlands.

How did the archeological world first discover that Maya women rulers also played a part in deciding their city-state's future? For three months in 2004, archeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor (Associate Professor of Archeology, University of Calgary), along with an international research team, studied Naachtun in Northern Guatemala, one of the most remote sites of the Maya world. At the height of the Maya civilization, this city sat between the Maya's two superpowers—Tikal and Calakmul.

Reese-Taylor's team mapped Naachtun's architecture and recorded ancient texts inscribed on altars and stela (large limestone blocks positioned prominently in front of pyramids). Stela 18 depicts a fierce Naachtun queen with a battle shield strapped to her arm, standing on the back of an enemy captive, a lord of Calakmul.

This was the aha moment, thanks to Reese-Taylor's digging, for the archeological conversation that would now include women warriors, a concept that a decade earlier would have been dismissed. Until then, Maya royal women were pawns in marriage and/or consorts, mothers of kings. Nada mas. But her team's discovery changed all that, anchoring a position in archeology that accepted both women and men as powerful rulers in the Maya world.

Maya artists usually portrayed their kings trampling over cowering prisoners, but from Reese-Taylor's finds in Naachtun, the stela in question depicts both king and queen as conquerors. She continued to search for more documentation as proof, combing through hundreds of published inscriptions and royal portraits in university libraries in both the US and Canadian archives.

Lady K'Abel, first female supreme warrior, on stela in El Peru-Waka, Guatemala, 692 AD

BY THE CLOTHES THEY WEAR

Through collaboration with archeologist Peter Mathews (University of Calgary), whose research specialized in the site at Naachtun and decoded subtleties of ancient Maya costumes, Reese-Taylor learned women warriors wore full loose calf-length skirts and men's clothing was tighter, more form fitting. She used that as a benchmark, uncovering clothing differences in images of queens from several Maya cities beyond Naachtun. Her discoveries gave way to fact: the lowland Maya had many warrior queens, specifically in four Maya city-states: Coba, Naranjo, Calakmul and Naachtun.

With Reese-Taylor's on-site excavations sifting through more and more hieroglyphs, she determined that the northern Maya dynasties prized their female ancestors. A northern royal family known as the Kaan, or Snake Dynasty, moved into mid-Peninsula Yucatán rain forests in the early 600s, claiming the throne from mighty Calakmul and rising to great power and influence. After 623 AD, Kaan princesses married into many local ruling houses in the lowlands, carrying these new ideas with them.

There was a "real expansion of the role women played in politics," said Reese-Taylor. "As I began researching, I noticed the existing literature suggested there were only a few isolated examples of these warrior queens in Maya society."

Kathryn Reese-Taylor at Naachtun, from Discovery

"I started to realize that was bogus," Reese-Taylor continued. "There were, in fact, many examples of noble warrior women. Woman's role was not in the background. It was up front and center."

MANY WARRIOR QUEENS

This series will dive into the positions of four major Maya warrior queens. The first royal queen to hold a title was Lady Yohl Ik'nal, first woman recorded as ruler in the Maya kingdom and one of the few women who held this office. Her role was unusual because she held power for 21 years, from December 583 AD to November 604 AD and was known as a queen regnant, or official ruler of the city-state Baak/Baakal where Palenque was located as a city within it. This much is known because she had the title Divine Lord of Palenque and its first woman ruler. Along with this distinction she was known to have supervised an "accession" for Lord K'an Tok. Historians believe this took place between 587 AD and 604 AD, her year of death.

Archeologist Merle Green Roberston thought her tomb was at Palenque in Temple XX. It's believed the queen was memorably known and referred to because of Pakal's famous sarcophagus, discovered by archeologist Alberto Ruz in the 1950s, untouched. Maya artists depict prominent family members on tombs, and Lady Yohl Ik'nal was drawn twice, on the west side and east side, standing reborn by a zapote tree and also coming out of an avocado tree, reborn.

Merle Green Roberton's reconstruction painting of Pakal crypt in Temple of Inscriptions

PALENQUE'S ROLE IN MAYA WOMEN RULERS

She was related to K'uk' Balam who began his rule at Palenque in 431 AD and came to found a line of rulers, even though his reign lasted only until his death in 435 AD, a mere four years.

In Maya culture, women normally held temporary power through sons if they were too young to rule. The fact that Lady Yohl Ik'nal held power for more than two decades is impressive. She remained in power longer than her contemporaries in the region, withstanding two major attacks early on in her reign, the first in 599 AD from powerful Calakmul. In spite of this defeat and another invasion at an unknown later date from Bonampak, she retained her position and was treated with veneration throughout her reign.

Her name translates to Lady Heart of the Wind Place. Because her exact birth date is unknown, scholars believe she was either the daughter or sister of Palenque's Janaab Pakal, the previous ruler. As Maya rule usually descends through male lineage, historians have no doubt Palenque was going through a troubled time. There may have been unrecorded warfare that eliminated male candidates; this may have been the reason Lady Yohl Ik'nal ascended to the throne becoming queen.

PAKAL AND HIS LEGACY

Though much remains unclarified, it's believed that her descendant K'inich Janaab Pakal—either grandson or great-grandson—became the greatest and most venerated of all Maya rulers, ruling for 68 years. Pakal's tomb was discovered in 1952 in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque.

Temple of Inscriptions where Pakal's tomb was found

Though Lady Yohl Ik'nal was the first to be discovered of Maya warrior queens, she was not the last.

Stay tuned for Part 2: Lady K'Abel or Holy Snake Lady, from El Peru-Waka in Northern Guatemala.

Jeanine Kitchel writes about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán.

If you enjoyed this blog, check out her memoir Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales about ex-pat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Subscribe to her bi-monthly blog posts above, or check out her website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in her Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown are available also on Amazon.