What Happened to Most of the Maya Books?

In the sixteenth century the Maya of Yucatán and highland Guatemala had a vibrant manuscript tradition, with libraries of bark-paper books (huun) kept in the principal towns and read aloud in the courts and on the public plazas. The most famous of these libraries, the one at Mayapán, was said to have contained thousands of volumes. Within thirty years of the Spanish conquest, almost all of these books were gone. The destruction was deliberate, organized, and sanctioned by the highest ecclesiastical authorities of the new colony. A handful of pre-Columbian codices and a small number of fragments survived, smuggled to Europe or hidden in the possession of indigenous families. The rest was burned in a single act of auto-da-fé at the convent of San Miguel de Maní in July 1562.

The four pre-Columbian books that survive — the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices, together with the early colonial Maya Codex of Mexico — are the subject of the page on the Maya codices and surviving books. The script that the books contain is treated on the page on Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system. The history of the destruction is the subject of this page.

The 1562 auto-da-fé at Maní

The central event in the destruction of the Maya books is the auto-da-fé at the Franciscan convent of San Miguel de Maní, in the Puuc region of Yucatán, in July 1562. The auto-da-fé was organized by the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa, who had been appointed provincial of the order in Yucatán in 1561 and who had spent the previous year touring the principal towns of the province, investigating the survival of indigenous religious practices. Landa, in his own Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (c. 1566), described the event in the following words:

“We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”

Landa’s claim that the books “contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil” is not a careful description. The Maya books contained astronomical tables, divinatory almanacs, ritual prescriptions, mythological narratives, and dynastic histories. The destruction was an act of cultural vandalism of the first order, and Landa, who was already in disgrace with the colonial authorities at the time of the Relación, was to spend the rest of his life defending the act. The event is reviewed in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing, and the broader context is reviewed in the page on the Spanish conquest and colonial era.

A small number of other acts of destruction complemented the Maní auto-da-fé. In 1561, in the town of Valladolid, Yucatán, a similar campaign was conducted, and in the same period a third campaign was conducted at Tizimín. The combined effect of the three campaigns was the destruction of almost all of the surviving books of the Maya of Yucatán. The campaigns are reviewed in detail in the page on how did the Spanish conquest change Maya society.

The smuggled books: how the codices reached Europe

The four pre-Columbian codices that survive all reached Europe through the channels of the colonial book trade. The Dresden Codex was acquired in Vienna in 1739 by the director of the Royal Library at Dresden, Johann Christian Götze, who purchased it from a private collector who had reportedly obtained it from a source in the Spanish Americas. The chain of custody is uncertain, but it is generally thought that the book reached Europe in the early eighteenth century through the channels of the colonial trade in curiosities that flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The Madrid Codex was acquired in the nineteenth century by the Museo de América in Madrid, but the chain of custody is uncertain. The Paris Codex was acquired in 1832 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France as part of the collection of the antiquarian Léon de Rosny. The Grolier Codex was first exhibited to the public in 1971 at the Grolier Club in New York, and the chain of custody has been the subject of intense scrutiny. The Maya Codex of Mexico is a small, single-screenfold book, dated by its iconography to the early sixteenth century, that is now held by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The chain of custody of the books is reviewed in detail in the page on the Maya codices and surviving books.

The codices, with their almanacs, divinatory tables, and astronomical ephemerides, are the principal evidence for the post-Classic survival of Maya scientific practice. The codices are reviewed in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing, and the conventions of the calendar are reviewed in the page on the Maya calendar system.

The Bodleian and other European fragments

A small number of additional codex fragments, mostly held in collections in Europe, are sometimes associated with the four surviving books. The most important of these is the Bodleian fragment, a small piece of bark paper, painted with a series of glyphs, that is held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The fragment is associated with the colonial and post-colonial Books of Chilam Balam, and is generally considered to be a colonial-period document, but it is a useful reminder that the destruction at Maní did not extinguish the entire tradition.

A small number of additional fragments are held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in the Museo de América in Madrid, in the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique in Brussels, and in a small number of other European collections. The fragments are a key piece of evidence for the survival of the script in the colonial period, and the fragments are reviewed in detail in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing.

The Books of Chilam Balam

The Books of Chilam Balam are a series of colonial and post-colonial Maya manuscripts, written in the Latin alphabet but preserving a large amount of pre-Columbian content, including prophecies, ritual prescriptions, calendar texts, and mythological narratives. The books are named for the Chilam Balam, a title meaning “spokesman of the jaguar,” that was held by a series of Maya priests in the town of Maní, the same town where the auto-da-fé took place. The most famous of the books is the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, held by the Princeton University Library.

The Books of Chilam Balam are a hybrid product. They are colonial in form, written in the Latin alphabet with Spanish orthography, but they preserve a large amount of pre-Columbian content, including the k’atun prophecies, the calendar texts, and the ritual prescriptions. The books are reviewed in detail in the page on who first deciphered Maya writing, and the books are an important source for the survival of the Maya scribal tradition.

The Popol Vuh and the Highland Maya

The Popol Vuh is the great creation epic of the K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala. The book was written down in the Latin alphabet, in the K’iche’ language, by a member of the Xajilá lineage in the town of Chichicastenango in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and was discovered by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez in the early eighteenth century. The book is a key source for the cosmology of the K’iche’ and is one of the great works of pre-Columbian literature to survive the Spanish conquest. The Popol Vuh is reviewed in detail on the page on the Popol Vuh and the Maya creation myth.

The highland Maya also preserved a number of other colonial and post-colonial books, including the Title of the Lords of Totonicapán, the Annals of the Kaqchikels, and the Title of the House of Ixquine. The books are a key source for the survival of the Maya scribal tradition in the highland Maya area, and the books are reviewed in detail in the page on the modern Maya identity and survival.

The destruction in the highlands

The destruction was not confined to Yucatán. The highland Maya of Guatemala, who had their own manuscript tradition, suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Dominican and Franciscan friars. The most famous of the highland destructions is the campaign of 1554–1555, in which the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who was later to become famous as the “Apostle of the Indies,” presided over a series of campaigns in the Verapaz and the highlands of Guatemala. The campaigns are reviewed in detail in the page on the Spanish conquest and colonial era.

The destruction was not, however, complete. The highland Maya preserved a number of books through the colonial period, including the Popol Vuh, the Title of the Lords of Totonicapán, the Annals of the Kaqchikels, and the Rabinal Achi, a play that survives in a colonial manuscript and is one of the great works of pre-Columbian drama. The books are a key source for the survival of the Maya scribal tradition in the highlands.

The survival of the script in the colonial period

The script, in some form, survived the destruction of the books. The highland Maya preserved a tradition of glyphic divination into the late twentieth century, and the K’iche’ day-keeper is a living example of the survival of the tradition. The day-keeper consults the 260-day Tzolkin and the 365-day Haab’ to determine the ritual obligations of a given day, and the conventions of the day-keeper are consistent with the conventions of the ancient inscriptions. The tradition is reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today, and the conventions of the day-keeper are reviewed in the page on scribes, literacy, and education in Maya society.

The colonial and post-colonial Maya also preserved a tradition of knotted-string memory devices, in which a length of cotton string is knotted in a particular way to record a particular piece of information. The tradition is preserved in a number of modern Maya communities, including the K’iche’ of highland Guatemala and the Tzotzil of highland Chiapas, and the tradition is reviewed in detail in the page on how do scholars read Maya hieroglyphs today.

The UNESCO Memory of the World inscription

In 2023, the surviving Maya codices — the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices, together with the Maya Codex of Mexico — were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, an event that recognized the importance of the corpus to the cultural heritage of humanity. The inscription was a long-overdue recognition of the importance of the codices to the history of science, religion, and literature, and a recognition of the importance of the codices to the modern descendants of the ancient Maya, who are the principal custodians of the traditions that the books record.

The inscription was also a recognition of the importance of the codices to the field of Maya epigraphy, and a recognition of the importance of the field to the broader study of Mesoamerican civilization. The inscription is reviewed in detail in the page on the Maya codices and surviving books.

What we have lost

It is worth pausing over what we have lost. The Landa auto-da-fé of July 1562 destroyed, by the bishop’s own boast, thousands of books. A similar campaign in 1561 at Valladolid, Yucatán, and a third at Tizimín in the same period, completed the work. The combined effect of the three campaigns was the destruction of almost all of the surviving books of the Maya of Yucatán. The four pre-Columbian codices that survive are a small fraction of what once existed. The books that we have lost included, in all probability, dynastic histories of the major cities, ritual prescriptions for the major ceremonies, mythological narratives that are now known only in fragmentary form from the Books of Chilam Balam, and astronomical and calendrical texts that are now known only in fragmentary form from the surviving codices.

The destruction is one of the great losses of pre-Columbian literature, comparable to the destruction of the library of Alexandria or the burning of the books of the Qin dynasty. The destruction is reviewed in detail in the page on the Spanish conquest and colonial era.

Sources

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Houston, S. D. (2004). The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge University Press. — link
Martin, S. & Grube, N. (2008). Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens (2nd ed.). Thames & Hudson. — link
Boot, E. (2009). The Updated Preliminary Classic Maya–English / English–Classic Maya Vocabulary of Hieroglyphic Readings. Wayeb. — link
Knorozov, Y. V. (1952). Ancient writing of Central America. Sovetskaya Etnografiya, 3. — [link](https://www.worldcat.org/title/sovet skaia-etnografiia/oclc/60638864)
Proskouriakoff, T. (1971). Commoners in Classic Maya sculpture. In Memoirs of the Peabody Museum vol. 6. Peabody Museum, Harvard. — link