Two Names for One King

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Itzamnaaj Bahlam III is recorded in the earlier decipherment literature under the English epithet Shield Jaguar, a translation of his name glyph that combines a shield motif with the head of a jaguar, and both names continue to appear side by side in scholarship written for general and specialist readers respectively. The ordinal, III, follows the numbering scheme set out by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube for the sequence of Yaxchilan rulers sharing this name across the city's dynastic history, distinguishing him from his own predecessor and from a later successor who took the same name generations afterward. His reign is documented almost entirely through Yaxchilan's own monumental inscriptions rather than through outside textual sources, in keeping with the general pattern for Classic Maya political history, which is reconstructed from royal monuments commissioned by the rulers themselves rather than from independent chronicles. This atlas follows Martin and Grube's chronicle for his regnal dates and identifies him primarily by his epigraphic name, with Shield Jaguar recorded as the alternate name under which he is still widely known in the popular and older art historical literature on Yaxchilan.