Temple I (Temple of the Great Jaguar)

17.2221°N, 89.6233°W.

Temple I, also called the Temple of the Great Jaguar, faces Tikal's Great Plaza in the Petén jungle of Guatemala. Built circa 732 CE as the funerary monument of Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, the ajaw who defeated Calakmul in 695 CE and broke the Snake Kingdom's western expansion, the pyramid rises 47 metres in nine receding terraces of cut limestone. The roofcomb originally bore a carved portrait of the king enthroned. His tomb, recovered in 1962 during the University of Pennsylvania's Tikal Project under William Coe, contained jade ornaments, stingray spines, and incised bones inscribed with a procession of gods. The pyramid faces Temple II across the plaza in a paired configuration repeated nowhere else at this scale in the Maya world. The original wooden lintels of the summit shrine, carved from sapodilla, were removed in the nineteenth century and dispersed to museums in Basel and London.

Temple I is a tomb built so its dead king could watch his wife's monument across the plaza for the rest of recorded time.