Itzamnaaj Bahlam III

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube's dynastic chronicle of the Classic Maya places Itzamnaaj Bahlam III's birth in 647 CE and his accession to the Yaxchilan throne in October 681 CE, following his father, a previous ruler of the same city sometimes called Bird Jaguar III in the same numbering scheme. His reign, lasting past sixty years until his death in 742 CE, coincided with an extensive building and monument program at Yaxchilan, including Structure 23, associated with his wife Lady Xoc, and the lintels commemorating the bloodletting and vision rites the royal couple performed together in 709 CE. Michael Coe and Stephen Houston's survey of Maya civilization situates his reign within the broader Late Classic pattern of Usumacinta river kingdoms competing through monumental construction and captive taking, both of which Yaxchilan's inscriptions record extensively for this period. Itzamnaaj Bahlam III did not live to see the throne pass smoothly to an obvious heir, several years separate his death from his son Bird Jaguar IV's own accession, an interval Martin and Grube's chronicle reads as evidence of a contested succession, since Bird Jaguar IV was the son of a lower ranked wife rather than of Lady Xoc, whose own monuments give no indication that she bore a surviving son who might have inherited the throne directly.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Itzamnaaj Bahlam III is recorded in the earlier decipherment literature under the English epithet Shield Jaguar, a translation of his name glyph that combines a shield motif with the head of a jaguar, and both names continue to appear side by side in scholarship written for general and specialist readers respectively. The ordinal, III, follows the numbering scheme set out by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube for the sequence of Yaxchilan rulers sharing this name across the city's dynastic history, distinguishing him from his own predecessor and from a later successor who took the same name generations afterward. His reign is documented almost entirely through Yaxchilan's own monumental inscriptions rather than through outside textual sources, in keeping with the general pattern for Classic Maya political history, which is reconstructed from royal monuments commissioned by the rulers themselves rather than from independent chronicles. This atlas follows Martin and Grube's chronicle for his regnal dates and identifies him primarily by his epigraphic name, with Shield Jaguar recorded as the alternate name under which he is still widely known in the popular and older art historical literature on Yaxchilan.