Hieroglyphic Stairway Temple

14.8378°N, 89.1419°W.

The Hieroglyphic Stairway Temple at Copán in western Honduras carries the longest extant Maya inscription — 2,200 glyphs incised into the risers of a 64-step stairway ascending the western face of Structure 26. The stairway was completed in 755 CE under K'ahk' Yipyaj Chan K'awiil to recount the dynastic history of his sixteen predecessors, beginning with the founder K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'. The text was disturbed and partially reset during nineteenth-century clearing by Alfred Maudslay and Sylvanus Morley, leaving glyph-block sequences out of order. Modern epigraphic teams under David Stuart and Barbara Fash have spent decades reconstructing the original sequence. Five life-sized seated portraits of Copán rulers punctuate the stairway at regular intervals along its rise. The structure is now sheltered beneath a permanent canvas roof installed by the Honduran government to protect the inscribed risers from further weathering. The pyramid behind the stairway, Structure 26, was the funerary temple of Smoke Imix, the twelfth Copán ruler.

The Hieroglyphic Stairway is a building whose steps are a written history of the family that built them, in the order they ruled.