A Little About the Maya:

The Maya prospered in an area ranging from southern Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. They first came to the area around 2600 B.C., and at the peak of their civilization were spread across an area of about 311,000 square kilometers (120,000 square miles). They lived in city-states, which were like tiny countries made up of a city and the land around it.

 

Skilled in the arts and sciences, the Maya flourished in the jungles of their homeland. They built roads to connect their cities. They were master architects, and their buildings are still considered amazing achievements. They were also astronomers who studied the cycles of the moon, earth, and other planets.

 

At the height of their culture, from the third century A.D. to the ninth century A.D., called the Classical Period, the Maya built large stone temples covered with stucco and colorfully decorated. Some of these impressive buildings remain today. If you climb the steep stairway to the top of the Temple of the Magician in Uxmal in the Yucatán, you’ll get a bird’s-eye view of the ancient city. From this point, you’ll be struck by the way the Maya built in harmony with their surroundings.

 

In the third century, when Europe was in its infancy, the city of Palenque, on the Isthmus of Teuantepec, had a population of more than 100,000 people. This thoroughly modern city had its own drainage system and observatories, and buildings that towered 110 feet above the jungle floor.

 

In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadores invaded the Mayan cities. In their attempt to bring their version of civilization and religion to the Maya, the Spanish systematically destroyed Mayan books and documents that contained, according to the first bishop of Yucatán, “lies of the devil.” As a result, little written information from the Maya survives.

 

The Mayan writings that still exist were carved on stone monuments or painted on pages of books that Western scholars call codices (singular, codex). Codices were made from pounded fig-tree bark treated with lime and covered with a thin layer of plaster. Their pages were painted in bright colors, folded accordion-style, and bound between pieces of wood. Of the few surviving Mayan codices, most are housed in European museums today.

 

From the rare documents we have, scholars have learned a lot about Mayan writing. The Maya had a number of different languages and a writing system of glyphs—symbolic pictures—that represented both words and syllables. Since Mayan glyphs can stand for both sounds and ideas, however, it’s hard to know how to read each one. For example, a number could be written either with the number’s symbol or with a picture of the god associated with that number—or both.

 

As scholars learned to read Mayan glyphs, they discovered that the Maya wrote about their lives and beliefs and kept extensive records of their possessions, important dates, and astronomical observations, many of which have proved to be valid today. When Europeans still believed that the world was only a few thousand years old, Mayan records alluded to life existing for millions of years.

 

The document you’ll be looking at in this chapter is called the Dresden Codex because it found its way to the German city of Dresden. The stains along one edge were caused by water damage during the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. Fortunately, the codex was saved.