Royal Bloodletting Rites Are Carved into the Yaxchilan Lintels

What happened

At Yaxchilan, a city on the Usumacinta River in what is now Chiapas, king Itzamnaaj Bahlam III (known as Shield Jaguar) commissioned three carved limestone lintels for the doorways of Structure 23, commemorating his wife Lady K'abal Xook. Lintel 24, now in the British Museum, depicts a bloodletting ritual dated by its glyphs to 9.13.17.15.12, 5 Eb 15 Mac in the Maya calendar, equivalent to 28 October 709 CE, though the lintel itself was carved between 723 and 726 CE when the building was formally dedicated. Lady K'abal Xook kneels before Shield Jaguar, who holds a great torch the accompanying text calls a 'burning spear,' while she pulls a thorned rope, likely studded with obsidian blades, through a hole pierced in her tongue; blood falls onto paper in a bowl on the floor below. Kings and queens performed bloodletting at major political events, building dedications, and accessions, a ritual the Maya connected to their own creation story in which the gods let their own blood to create the human race.

How we know

The lintel survives as a physical object with its own carved hieroglyphic captions recording the date and participants, now held and documented by the British Museum, supported by broader academic study of Maya bloodletting iconography including Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller's 'The Blood of Kings.'

Sources

• The British Museum, collection object Am1923,Maud.4. Lintel (Yaxchilan Lintel 24) · Primary source (author-declared)britishmuseum.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
• Google Arts & Culture, in partnership with the British Museum. Yaxchilan Lintel 24 · Unclassified sourceartsandculture.google.com · Cited as a "website" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)