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Such codices were the primary written records of Maya civilization, together with the many inscriptions on stone monuments and stelae that survived. Their range of subject matter in all likelihood embraced more topics than those recorded in stone and buildings, and was more like what is found on painted ceramics (the so-called 'ceramic codex').
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).
Commoners were illiterate; scribes were drawn from the elite. It is not known if all members of the aristocracy could read and write, although at least some women could, since there are representations of female scribes in Maya art. [300] Maya scribes were called aj tzʼib, meaning "one who writes or paints". [301]
The history of Maya civilization is divided into three principal periods: the Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods; [1] these were preceded by the Archaic Period, which saw the first settled villages and early developments in agriculture. [2]
Laborers were sent 60 at a time to coffee plantations to work in 15–30 day increments. Many different laws were passed at the benefit of the plantation owners to help them to control the indigenous laborers and increase their landholdings and profits. These laws saw a deepened divide between the Maya and Landino communities. [3]
The Maya believed when children were born, they were vulnerable and thus needed to be protected from soul loss and evil winds. [11] The soul was encased within the head, and therefore these newly souled infants needed to be guarded; cranium modification was one of the ways to protect the soul from being snatched from the newborn. [ 11 ]
Satellite view of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Maya civilization occupied the Maya Region, a wide territory that included southeastern Mexico and northern Central America; this area included the entire Yucatán Peninsula, and all of the territory now incorporated into the modern countries of Guatemala and Belize, as well as the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. [4]
The League of Mayapan (Yucatec: Luub Mayapan Maya glyphs: ) was a confederation of Maya states in the Postclassic period of Mesoamerica on the Yucatan Peninsula. The main members of the league were the Itza, the Tutul-Xiu, Mayapan, and Uxmal. Mayapan means flag of the Maya. [citation needed]