Four Santa Elena monuments from Balancan museum, Tabasco, Mexico

The relevance of the research topic is due to the fact that the corpus of hieroglyphic inscriptions of Santa Elena, located in the municipality of Balancan in the territory of the modern state of Tabasco, is not large, and most of the references to its rulers are taken from the texts of other monuments. The inscriptions analyzed in the study have not previously been fully introduced into scientific circulation. The aim of this study is to analyze the Santa Elena epigraphic inscriptions from the Balancan Museum and to place them in the general context of the political history of the Wa...aˀ kingdom (also known as Wa-”Bird”) during the Classic period. The new documentation of these monuments made by Bruce Love in 2019 (nighttime photography) and Sergei Vepretskii in 2024 (photogrammetric models) has revealed previously unknown data on the political history of Santa Elena. We managed to prove that these inscriptions report on a war against Palenque (probably in 611), and on possible connections between Santa Elena and Kanuˀl at the turn of the 6th and 7th centuries. Considering the new information in the context of data obtained from other hieroglyphic inscriptions, we offer a preliminary reconstruction of the dynastic sequence of Santa Elena in the 6th and 7th centuries.