Many centuries ago, there were vibrant civilizations in the Western Hemisphere. When Europeans arrived, they destroyed the cultures — both purposefully and as a result of the new diseases they brought, which the indigenous people had no resistance to. Nowadays those civilizations are not as well remembered as ancient European and Asian cultures, partly because there was hardly anybody left to keep the traditions (or even the languages) alive, partly because many of the cities and artifacts were remote and not rediscovered for a long time, and partly because it seemed like nobody really cared.
More recently, some of the civilizations, including the Olmec, the Zapotec, and the Maya are being researched and revealed, and that’s how we come to recognize that today is the day Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk, a Maya king, was born in the year (by our calendar) 649. He ruled the Kaan kingdom from its capital city Calakmul, which is in southern Mexico near Guatemala. The king took the throne when he was 36, but had probably been effectively ruling the kingdom for some time before that, because his predecessor Yuknoom the Great was quite old and may have been incapacitated for years.
The English translation of Yuknoom’s name is “Jaguar Paw Smoke,” which may have been symbolic in some way. Regardless, he was a military commander as well as king, and won quite a number of conflicts. In 695 he might have been killed or captured in a battle, according to a damaged stucco scene. But a more recent discovery in La Coronoa suggests that he survived and visited that very town in 696. Another theory is that he died in 698 and was buried in a tomb that’s been found in Calakmul. If you ever visit, it’s Tomb 4 within Structure 2 of the city. His son, Yuknoom Took/ K’awiil, inherited the Kaan throne and ruled for 35 years, during which there was an ambitious building program where loads of memorial stelae were erected. The inscriptions on artifacts like those are the main source of information about those people and their time, but in the 1960s many of them were destroyed by looters, who sawed off the nice-looking parts and sold them to yet more Europeans who, really, didn’t care.
