Pakal took Palenque's throne at 12 after an enemy sacked the city and the king died, and his son cut three rulers out of the official king list

K'inich Janaab Pakal was born on 23 March 603. Palenque's House C stairway records an attack by the Snake kingdom of Kaan in 599. On 4 April 611, when Pakal was eight, Kaan sacked the city again. King Ajen Yohl Mat died sixteen months later, and a succession crisis followed. The Temple of the Inscriptions marks the next period ending, in 613, with one line: "lost is the divine lady, lost is the lord." The child of Lady Sak K'uk' and K'an Mo' Hix was chosen as heir and took the throne at 12 on 26 July 615. The Oval Palace Tablet shows his mother alone handing him the crown, and the sarcophagus text credits her with a period-ending ceremony of 633, normally the king's act. Pakal ruled 68 years and died in 683. His son K'inich Kan Bahlam II finished the texts and decoration of his funerary pyramid. The Temple of the Inscriptions texts name nine Palenque kings; Kan Bahlam's Temple of the Cross list drops three of them: Lady Yohl Ik'nal, Aj Ne Yohl Mat and Muwaan Mat. On 13 June 1952 Alberto Ruz Lhuillier opened the tomb under the pyramid. The sarcophagus sides show Pakal's ancestors rising from the earth. Stanley Guenter wrote that Pakal "remains in his sarcophagus to this day".