The Bonampak Murals

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

Inside a small masonry building at the Maya site of Bonampak in Chiapas, Mexico, known today as Structure 1 or the Temple of the Murals, three interconnected rooms hold one of the most complete visual records of Late Classic Maya courtly and religious life to survive. Painted across the rooms' walls in more than 280 individual human figures, the murals were commissioned by Yajaw Chaan Muwan II, ruler of Bonampak, and art historian Mary Ellen Miller's study of them dates the events they depict, and likely the paintings themselves, to around AD 790 to 792.

The three rooms tell a single connected story rather than three unrelated scenes. Room 1 shows Yajaw Chaan Muwan II publicly acknowledging his son Chooj's right to succeed him, surrounded by 77 figures including musicians, dancers and attendants presenting a tribute of 40,000 cacao beans. Room 2 holds the murals' largest and most violent scene, a battle and its aftermath across 139 figures, in which the victors, shown wearing jaguar costumes, capture and humiliate their defeated enemies. Room 3 closes the sequence with a victory celebration built around ritual bloodletting, in which noble women draw their own blood with stingray spines as an offering, watched by 65 figures in total. Read together, the three rooms present succession, war and sacrifice as one continuous religious argument for the ruler's own legitimacy.

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

No artist signed the Bonampak murals, and no ancient text names who painted them. What survives instead is the work itself, more than 280 figures spread across three rooms in over thirty distinct pigment combinations, including Maya Blue, hematite red, carbon black and lime white, applied directly to lime plastered masonry walls sometime around AD 790 to 792. Art historian Mary Ellen Miller, whose 1986 study The Murals of Bonampak remains the standard scholarly account of the paintings, concluded from the work's scale and technical consistency that its planning and execution required a large team of specialists working together, not the vision of one solitary painter.

The murals were unknown to scholars until 1946, when the photographer and explorer Giles Healey became the first outsider documented to see and record them, even though local Lacandon Maya had continued visiting the site for prayer throughout the centuries in between. Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia has managed the site since, including a 2009 to 2010 conservation project that used cleaning and closer documentation to reveal pictorial elements that had gone unrecorded, adding new detail to a painting whose original makers remain, more than a thousand years later, anonymous.