Kabah: Entrance to the site with view of the palace, Structure 2C2
Highway 261 bisects the site of Kabah. This photo and the following one were taken from the parking lot across the highway using a zoom lense. At this time of year in the Yucatan, hundreds of African Flame Trees are in bloom. Some can be seen in the midground of this photo.
"We may also note that, although infrequent in the late phases [of the fully developed Puuc style], the roofcomb, when it exists, is generally found above range-type buildings, and rarely on raised sanctuaries, showing the same quality of execution as the rest of the building and helping to accentuate its horizontal appearance. This lengthy superstructure is distinguished, as at Kabáh, by its large, generally geometric openwork..."
Paul Gendrop, Rio Bec, Chenes, and Puuc Styles in Maya Architecture, p. 176
Tatiana Proskouriakoff preferred the simplicity of the Palace to the "baroque ostentation" of the Codz Poop. She writes: "Certainly in its present form it [Codz Poop] fails to score against the rhythmic simplicity of the classic Puuc tradition expressed in Structure 2, the two-story palace seen in the background, which is more severe, more restful, and more consistent in design."
Tatiana Proskouriakoff, An Album of Maya Architecture, p.68
The palace is framed with plain structures on each side
Paul Gendrop regards the Palace as a transition example between the relatively plain early Puuc and the fully developed late Puuc styles. The Palace is a wonderful study in the use of columns and "colonnettes" decorated with "spools" which appear in the various levels of the building.
Starting at the lowest level, the base molding running along the foundation and underneath the doorways is composed of rows of short plain colonnettes. On the next level, the first floor exterior walls are decorated with interspersed pairs of full-length colonnettes decorated with spools at the bottom, middle and top.
The second floor facade is plain, relieved only by an occasional true column and the rhythm of the doorways. Above that, the medial molding [the area between the top of the doorframes and the horizontal elements which define the roofline] is composed of triplets of banded columns which imitate on a smaller scale the colonnettes decorating the first floor facade. Finally, the middle member of the cornice [roofline] molding is again decorated with rows of short plain colonnettes placed over the triplets on the medial molding.
Paul Gendrop, Rio Bec, Chenes, and Puuc Styles in Maya Architecture
"It is also during this Early Puuc phase when there is widespread employment, in the whole Puuc area and some sites farther south, of an element that perhaps began at Edzná: the vaulted passages under a staircase, which shows a greater flexibility in the use of the traditional Maya vault.
But even more spectacular along this line is the appearance (toward the end of this phase?) of the first monumental free-standing portal vaults, or archways, such as those at Kabáh, Uxmal, and Xculoc, built on a platform separate from the other buildings at the end of a wide sacbé or "white road," which, in the case of Kabáh and Uxmal, connected both cities through Nohpat and Sacbey."
Paul Gendrop, Rio Bec, Chenes, and Puuc Styles in Maya Architecture, p. 152
From the palace, a grand ceremonial courtyard with its central platform and "column altar" extends to the base of the Codz Poop. Several chultuns (underground cisterns to catch and store water) are also found in this area.
John Lloyd Stephens visited Kabah in 1842. He describes the courtyard as one hundred and seventy feet long, one hundred and ten broad, and elevated ten feet from the ground. At the time of his visit, the courtyard had been cleared and was planted with corn. Within the courtyard, Stephens describes a "picote, or great stone found thrown down"; subsequently, Pollack, who describes the stone as a "column altar", found it broken in two when he visited during the 1950s. It has since been reassembled and erected in the central platform.
John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843
Massive retaining walls were used to raise the platforms upon which the Palace and the Codz Poop rest.
From the courtyard of the Palace, the Great Teocalis appears in the distance. The small square building in the midground is the caretaker's house at the entrance to the site.
"An important architectural assemblage located at the northern end of a system of north-south oriented causeways that approximately bisect the city. Structure 1B2, the great pyramid temple that dominates the group and is the principal structure of that type at the site, faces south to a smaller pyramid temple, Structure 3B1, and its architectural assemblage at the southern end of the causeway...There is undoubtedly a natural eminence here that was leveled by artificial fill and terracing."
H.E.D. Pollock, The Puuc: An Architectural Survey of the Hill Country of Yucatan and Northern Campeche, Mexico, p. 158