When we visited in 1998, Temple V was undergoing major restoration work
When we visited Tikal in 1998, Temple V was undergoing extensive conservation and restoration work sponsored by the Guatemalan Instituto de Anthropología e Historia and the Spanish Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional.
The banner states that 7.2 million quetzales would be spent on this project.
"Temple V, one of the great temples of Tikal, stands looking north, just to the east of the South Acropolis. Radiocarbon tests indicate a constructions date of about A.D. 700."
William R. Coe, Tikal: A Handbook of the Ancient Maya Ruins, p. 92
"Outstanding features include the rounded corners on the temple and its substructure and the raised edges of moldings on the sides of the great stairway.
Excavation revealed no traces of monuments at the base of the stairway."
William R. Coe, Tikal: A Handbook of the Ancient Maya Ruins, p. 92
"Temple V stands close to 190 feet high and is unusual for the tiny single room at the top."
William R. Coe, Tikal: A Handbook of the Ancient Maya Ruins, p. 92
The massive roofcomb completely dominates the tiny room below. Tikal's roofcombs were once decorated with huge stucco figures of painted rulers and gods which were visible from afar, but little remains now except surface irregularities and weathered projections and tenons.
From the Maudslay Collection, British Museum. Used with permission under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 non-commercial license. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.
This enlargement of a portion of a photo taken by Alfred Maudslay when he visited Tikal in 1881/1882, shows the temple as it appeared at that time. Here you can faintly see two giant masks in the frieze running above the doorway, positioned equidistant between the central door and the outer walls, as well as a much more damaged mask over the central doorway. Before Maudslay could photograph the ruins he had to hire work crews to cut back the jungle — this is why there the base of the temple is littered with cut–down trees in his photo.
"This room had a breadth of only 2 1/2 feet, yet the rear wall is about 15 feet thick.
Perhaps never was so much built to provide so little floor space. A large hole dug in the roof before our time provides accidental access to a series of superimposed roof comb chambers."
William R. Coe, Tikal: A Handbook of the Ancient Maya Ruins, p. 92
Paul Gendrop, the great art and architectural historian, writes about this period when Tikal was building its most imposing temples: "In the prehispanic Mesoamerican world, public manifestations of worship were made outdoors, essentially. Situated on top of its pyramidal base, the temple had become, through the centuries, less and less accessible to the common people who, congregated around the pyramid base, had to be content with witnessing from below the ceremonies taking place above, before the door of the sanctuary which, on occasions, was reduced to the condition of a simple tabernacle with accessory functions as a "sacristy" and also, perhaps, as an echo chamber designed to amplify dramatically the voice of the celebrant. In addition—and this is seen particularly at Tikal—as the temple grew in volume and height the interior spaces became narrower.
In order to support the weight of a constantly more impressive roofcomb, the "holy of holies" had been reduced to truly absurd proportions, as in the case of Temple V at Tikal. We might conclude that—at least in regard to some of the gigantic temple–pyramids in the Petén—the ceremonial requirements eventually could get along with just the physical and symbolic presence of the sanctuary whose inner space had become practically useless."
Paul Gendrop, Rio Bec, Chenes, and Puuc Styles in Maya Architecture, p. 35–36
