Mayan Calendar

20 21 surviving manusCripTs the vanity of Spanish bonfires The Mesoamericans recorded information via stone inscriptions and books with painted glyphs and images. On arrival, the Spanish declared all local writings to be works of the devil and made huge bonfires of any books they found. Today, just fifty preColumbian manuscripts survive, and only four of these are Maya codices. The surviving four codices shown opposite all date to the Post Classic period, and are probably from the Yucatan peninsula. The Dresden Codex is the best preserved and most important of the four. Bought for Dresden library in 1739 from a private collector, it suffered some water damage in World War II when Dresden was bombed, but was recovered. Its 39 leaves are a treatise on divination and astronomy, with Sun, Moon, and Venus tables. Dated to the early 13th century, it is probably partially copied from earlier books. The Paris Codex was rediscovered in the Paris library in 1859, and is in very poor conditiononly the central glyphs and pictures on its 11 leaves have survived. It contains a katun sequence a series of thirteen 20year cycles, with associated deities and ceremonies and a partial depiction of a thirteensign Maya zodiac, with scorpion, turtle, rattlesnake, and bat all remaining visible. The Madrid Codex was found in two parts in Spain in the 1860s, and consists of 56 leaves. Full of horoscopes and almanacs, it contains fewer astronomical tables than the Dresden Codex. The yearbearers are shifted forward one day from the ones shown in the other codices, indicating a possible origin in West Yucatan. Discovered in Mexico in 1965, the 11page barkpaper Grolier Codex is a simple Venus almanac. It may well be a clever forgery. The Dresden Codex with Mars beasts hanging from skybands The Madrid Codex an astronomer observes a star via a zenith tube The Grolier Codex a Venus table The Paris Codex with zodiac signs