The Maya Codices
A civilisation’s memory, reduced to four survivors.
- EXISTED
- c. 11th – 16th century
- WHERE
- Yucatán Peninsula
- LOST
- 12 July 1562
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Burned as heresy by Bishop Diego de Landa
The Maya wrote thousands of books, screenfold codices of fig-bark paper, painted with astronomy, history, prophecy, medicine and the deeds of kings. They were the written memory of one of the only civilisations on earth to invent writing independently, kept and copied for centuries in the cities of the Yucatán.
On 12 July 1562, at Maní, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa gathered every codex his men could find, declared them superstition and lies of the devil, and burned them in a single auto-da-fé. The Maya, he himself recorded, ‘regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.’ Four codices escaped, four, and from those few painted pages comes most of what we will ever know of Maya books.
Of the thousands burned at Maní on 12 July 1562, four books escaped. Everything else the Maya wrote of themselves became a single afternoon of smoke.