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Maya codices (sg.: codex) are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods .
The covers consist of hide or wood attached to each end. The Maya codices, in contrast, are composed of a long strip of bark paper, or Amate, folded in the same accordion-like, screen-fold way as the Codex Borgia group. The most important codices were likely adorned with jaguar fur covers, although there is only documentational evidence of this.
During the 19th century, the word 'codex' became popular to designate any pictorial manuscript in the Mesoamerican tradition. In reality, pre-Columbian manuscripts are, strictly speaking, not codices, since the strict librarian usage of the word denotes manuscript books made of vellum, papyrus and other materials besides paper, that have been sewn on one side. [1]
The Codex was first displayed at the Grolier Club in New York, hence its name. The first Mexican owner, Josué Saenz, claimed that the manuscript had been recovered from a cave in the Mexican state of Chiapas in the 1960s, along with a mosaic mask, a wooden box, a knife handle, as well as a child's sandal and a piece of rope, along with some blank pages of amate (pre-Columbian fig-bark paper).
The codex also contains astronomical tables, although fewer than those in the other three surviving Maya codices. [9] Some of the content is likely to have been copied from older Maya books. [10] Included in the codex is a description of the New Year ceremony. [11]
The Dresden Codex is one of four hieroglyphic Maya codices that survived the Spanish Inquisition in the New World. [9] Three, the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices, are named after the city where they were ultimately rediscovered. [9] [10] The fourth is the Grolier Codex, located at the Grolier Club in New York City. [11]
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See also Mayan codices and Aztec codices for fuller descriptions of a number of codices. Most codices date from the colonial era, with only a few surviving from the prehispanic era (the Conquistador invaders burned many original texts). A number of Precolumbian codices written on amate paper with gesso coating remain today. Historical narratives