Tikal

Tikal is the ruin of one of the greatest cities of the Maya civilisation, standing in the rainforest of the Petén region in northern Guatemala. Its inscriptions call it Yax Mutal, "First Mutal"; the name Tikal was adopted only after the site's rediscovery in the nineteenth century. Monumental building began there in the fourth century BCE, and in the Classic period, roughly 200 to 900 CE, it was the capital of one of the most powerful Maya kingdoms before it was abandoned to the forest.

Farming at the site goes back to about 1000 BCE, and major pyramids and platforms were going up by 400–300 BCE, although Tikal was then overshadowed by larger cities to the north such as El Mirador. As those centres declined, Tikal flourished; rich burials appear in the first century CE, and later inscriptions name Yax Ehb Xook, perhaps of that time, as founder of its royal dynasty. The city eventually covered more than 16 square kilometres with some 3,000 structures, linked by causeways across swampy ground and supplied with rainwater stored in reservoirs. Estimates of its population range widely, from 10,000 to 90,000 in the city itself and far more in its hinterland, though some archaeologists consider the higher figures much too high.

Tikal had links with distant Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico from as early as 200 CE. In January 378, inscriptions record, the Tikal king Chak Tok Ich'aak died on the same day that a figure called Siyaj K'ak' arrived from the west. The records strongly suggest a conquest led by a general serving Spearthrower Owl, who may have been Teotihuacan's ruler. Within a year Spearthrower Owl's son was installed as king. The new dynasty was soon absorbed into Maya culture, and Tikal went on to dominate much of the northern and eastern Petén, extending its influence as far as Copán in the south.

From the sixth century Tikal was locked in a long struggle with Calakmul, each heading a network of allies; the kings of both took the title kaloomte', roughly "high king". In 562 Tikal suffered a crushing defeat by Calakmul's ally Caracol, probably followed by the sacrifice of its king. There followed the "Tikal hiatus", more than a century in which hardly any monuments were raised and public sculpture was deliberately damaged. Archaeologists use its start to divide the Early from the Late Classic.

In 682 Jasaw Chan K'awiil I set up the first dated monument in 120 years, and in 695 he defeated Calakmul, which never fully recovered. He and his son Yik'in Chan K'awiil built much of what is visible today, including Temple I, the 47-metre funerary pyramid where Jasaw was buried in 734, and Temple IV, about 70 metres high, whose lintels carry a date equivalent to 741.

During the Classic Maya collapse of the ninth century, Tikal's power ebbed. Temple 3, the last major pyramid, was built early in the century; after 830 there was a long silence as former dependencies began to use the Mutal emblem for themselves. The final known monument was raised in 869. Deforestation, soil loss and the contamination of reservoirs, possibly made worse by drought, are among the explanations offered, with overpopulation and the failure of agriculture often seen as the most likely causes. By about 950 the city was nearly empty; squatters lived in the palaces and looted royal tombs, and even they had left by the tenth or eleventh century.

In 1525 Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, passed just a few kilometres from the ruins without mentioning them, and a lost Spanish friar described what may have been Tikal in 1696. Local people never forgot the site, but the first official expedition, led by the Petén officials Modesto Méndez and Ambrosio Tut, came only in 1848. Alfred Maudslay photographed it in 1881–82.

An airstrip built in 1951 ended the days-long journey through the jungle, and Tikal National Park, Guatemala's first protected area, was created on 26 May 1955, covering some 570 square kilometres of forest and wetland. The University of Pennsylvania mapped and excavated the city from 1956 to 1970 and restored many buildings, and the Guatemalan government ran a further project from 1979 to 1984. UNESCO listed the park as a mixed cultural and natural World Heritage site in 1979, and it lies within the wider Maya Biosphere Reserve.