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The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. [11] With their destruction, access to the history of the Maya and opportunity for insight into some key areas of Maya life was greatly diminished.
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 Dresden Codex is a Maya book, which was believed to be the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating to the 11th or 12th century. [1] However, in September 2018 it was proven that the Maya Codex of Mexico , previously known as the Grolier Codex, is, in fact, older by about a century. [ 2 ]
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]
During the ceremony on July 12, 1562, a disputed number of Maya codices (according to Landa, 27 books) and approximately 5,000 Maya cult images were burned. Only three pre-Columbian books of Maya hieroglyphics (also known as a codex) and fragments of a fourth [4] [5] [6] are known to have survived. Collectively, the works are known as the Maya ...
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.
The codex depicts hieroglyphs and numerals and figures, and contains ritual and divination calendars, calculations of the phases of Venus, eclipses of the sun and moon, instructions relating to new-year ceremonies, and descriptions of the locations of the Rain God, which culminate in a full-page miniature showing a great deluge.
Kingsborough, Edward; King, Viscount (1830–1848).Antiquities of Mexico: comprising fac-similes of ancient Mexican paintings and hieroglyphics, preserved in the royal libraries of Paris, Berlin and Dresden, in the Imperial library of Vienna, in the Vatican library; in the Borgian museum at Rome; in the library of the Institute at Bologna; and in the Bodleian library at Oxford.