Cool Finds

Archaeologists Decipher Crumbling Hieroglyphs to Reveal the Name of a Forgotten Maya Queen Who Ruled 1,400 Years Ago

Ix Ch’ak Ch’een reigned over the city of Cobá in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Historians didn’t know her name before they began translating a series of inscriptions discovered in 2024

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

October 29, 2025

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Archaeologists in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula have decoded Maya hieroglyphs to identify the name of a sixth-century queen: Ix Ch’ak Ch’een.

Ix Ch’ak Ch’een ruled over the city of Cobá, and she likely wielded extensive influence in the region. Once home to 50,000 people, Cobá was known as the “city of choppy water,” and it featured elite homes constructed around four lakes, according to Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove. It also harbored an extensive network of white stone roads, thousands of homes and several pyramids.

Just last year, archaeologists touring Cobá’s ruins discovered hieroglyphs carved beneath a staircase near the Nohoch Mul pyramids, per the Yucatan Times. The 14-by-11-foot limestone “Foundation Rock” was badly eroded, and salt deposits on its surface made the text difficult to read.

Since then, researchers have been carefully preserving the stone and restoring its 123 panels. They’ve been analyzing these panels alongside 23 additional inscriptions found on freestanding stone pillars, known as stelae. The translation work is still ongoing, but experts have already revealed several key passages, dates and names—including Ix Ch’ak Ch’een.

Two scholars—David Stuart, an epigrapher from the University of Texas at Austin, and Octavio Esparza Olguín, an epigrapher from the National Autonomous University of Mexico—found references to Ix Ch’ak Ch’een on one of the panels and two of the stelae. These writings link the queen to various events, including the construction of a ball court on December 8, 573.

The queen’s name is not written the same way in all of these references, according to a statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. However, because the dates linked to each reference are similar, researchers think they’re describing the same person.

Experts were also able to assign a timeline to Ix Ch’ak Ch’een’s rule. Their research revealed that on May 12, 569, Cobá established a powerful position called the kaloomte’, which was “a high-ranking title that can be translated as ‘lord of lords,’ denoting military and political supremacy,” according to La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal.

“[Ix Ch’ak Ch’een] was already in power in 569, probably for a short time,” Stuart tells Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine in an email. “We suspect that her installation was part of a political revival or reset at the kingdom, as Cobá became increasingly involved in the complex geopolitics of the Maya region. She was not the founder of the dynasty, but she definitely helped to establish Cobá as a regional power.”

The researchers also think Ix Ch’ak Ch’een may have been connected in some way to Testigo Cielo, a powerful ruler of the Kaanul dynasty.

“The inference of this relationship is a significant advance, although we do not know the exact nature of this relationship since we lack clear references to that foreign dynasty in other monuments of Cobá,” says Olguín in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde. The team says the analysis is still ongoing.

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.