Yaxchilan had no recorded king for ten years after Shield Jaguar died, and the son of his foreign second wife took the throne

Itzamnaaj Bahlam, called Shield Jaguar, was Yaxchilan's greatest king. His principal wife, Lady K'abal Xook, had three carved lintels set over the doors of her temple, Structure 23. Lintel 24 shows her drawing a thorned rope through her tongue before the king on 28 October 709. He died on 15 June 742; the glyphs say his "white flower breath" ended. No Yaxchilan monument records a king for the next ten years. His son Bird Jaguar IV (Yaxuun Bahlam) was the child of a later, secondary, foreign wife, Lady Eveningstar, believed to come from Calakmul, not of Lady Xook. An inscription at the rival city Piedras Negras names a Yaxchilan ruler, Sak Jukub Yopaat Bahlam, in office in July 749^†. In 2007 the linguist Kathryn Josserand read an inscription on Lady Xook's house as naming a missing heir and argued why he did not take the throne. Bird Jaguar IV acceded on 3 May 752 and raised stelae showing himself with his father. He recorded Lady Xook's death on his own building. In 1882 Alfred Maudslay took Lintel 24 to Britain; his men trimmed and thinned the slab, and the glyph-carved front edge was cut away and lost. It went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1885 and the British Museum in 1893. Lintel 26 is in Mexico City.