During his long rule, Pakal was responsible for the construction or extension of some of Palenque's most notable surviving inscriptions and monumental architecture.

[6] Before his name was securely deciphered from extant Maya inscriptions, Pakal had been known by various nicknames and approximations, including Sun Shield and 8 Ahau.

[9] On 9.9.13.0.7 (March 626), he married Ix Tzʼakbu Ajaw, a descendant of the former ruling Toktahn dynasty from Palenque's satellite settlement of Uxteʼkʼuh; during their long marriage, they had at least two sons—Kan Bahlam (b.

[11] In 647, at the age of 44, Pakal began his first construction project, the temple today called El Olvidado (The Forgotten) in Spanish due to its distance from Lakamhaʼ.

[19] Pakal was buried in a colossal sarcophagus within the largest of Palenque's stepped pyramid structures, the building called Bʼolon Yej Teʼ Naah "House of the Nine Sharpened Spears"[20] in Classic Maya and now known as the Temple of the Inscriptions.

[21] His skeletal remains were still lying in his sarcophagus, wearing a jade mask and bead necklaces, surrounded by sculptures and stucco reliefs depicting the ruler's transition to divinity and figures from Maya mythology.

The skeleton's comparatively minor degree of dental wear suggested the owner's age as some 40 years younger than the age recorded for Pakal in the inscriptional texts, leading some—including the tomb's discoverer Alberto Ruz Lhuillier—to contend that the texts must have referred to two people with the same name or used a non-standard method of recording time.

More recent morphometric analysis of the rest of the skeleton demonstrates that the entombed individual could not have lived less than fifty years and most likely died in their eighth or ninth decade of life, consistent with the textual evidence rather than the younger age estimates of early researchers.

In 2016 an underground water tunnel was discovered under the Temple of Inscriptions; a stucco mask depicting an elderly Pakal was subsequently found in August 2018.

[27][28] The large carved stone sarcophagus lid in the Temple of Inscriptions is a unique piece of Classic Maya art.

Around the edges of the lid is a band with cosmological signs, including those for sun, moon, and star, as well as the heads of six named noblemen of varying rank.

[31] Pakal's tomb has been the subject of ancient astronaut speculations since its appearance in Erich von Däniken's 1968 best-seller Chariots of the Gods?

Von Däniken reproduced a drawing of the sarcophagus lid (though incorrectly labelling it as being from Copán) and compared Pakal's pose to that of Project Mercury astronauts in the 1960s; he interpreted drawings underneath Pakal as rockets, and offered the sarcophagus lid as possible evidence of an extraterrestrial influence on the ancient Maya.

[32][33] Such an interpretation is almost universally denounced by archaeologists, epigraphers, and art historians of the Maya, who point out that von Däniken's claim relies solely upon visual inspection, paying heed neither to the broader archaeological context nor to a wealth of additional research on Classic Maya artistic conventions, symbolism, cosmology, and written history.