AUTHOR: UNKNOWN
DATE: C. FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The Madrid Codex is one of just four surviving codices – or ancient books – dating from pre-Columbine times written in the hieroglyph script of the ancient Maya civilization. It is also the most extensive. One of the earliest writing systems known to humanity, the Maya script was virtually wiped out by the Conquistadors who overran large parts of central and south America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Maya equivalent of the Rosetta Stone (pivotal in deciphering Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), the Madrid Codex has allowed for the unlocking of the lost language in recent decades. Bringing back to life one of the most significant advances in human history, the book also serves as a trenchant antidote to one of humankind’s worst acts of cultural vandalism.
The Codex was found in Spain in the 1860s in two distinct parts, and it was only after some time that it was understood that they formed a unified work. It seems likely that the book found its way to Spain as a souvenir of one of the original Conquistadors. There has been much debate as to its date of production. Some have claimed it was not written until after the Spanish arrived but the consensus is now that it dates to the period before their arrival, possibly originating in Yucatán. Many Maya scholars ascribe a date of the fifteenth century, although others have suggested it might date as far back as the thirteenth. The early suspicion that it was post-Columbine was in part because a papal bull was affixed to the manuscript, although this may have been a much later effort by a Maya priest to have the document blessed.
The Codex is made from Amate, a paper derived from tree bark in a process practised in the Maya’s sphere of influence for millennia. Some fifty-six sheets were folded up in concertina form and covered with a fine plaster-like substance onto which the hieroglyphs were painted. The subject matter is varied and includes details of religious rituals, horoscopes and astronomical tables. There are even illustrations of human sacrifice. There appear to have been multiple authors, probably from the priestly class.
The Maya had emerged as a major civilization by at least 2000 BC and, at its peak, tens of millions of Maya inhabited a large swathe of the Americas, covering modern-day Belize and Guatemala and parts of Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador. Lesser known than their contemporaneous neighbours, the Aztecs, the Maya created an extraordinary cultural legacy based around their own highly idiosyncratic belief system. They were brilliant mathematicians, for example, and were among the first civilizations to explicitly adapt the notion of ‘zero’ into their counting system, no later than the mid-fourth century AD – more than eight hundred years before Europe caught up with the idea. They were brilliant architects too, building awe-inspiring cities deep in the jungle.
But their greatest intellectual achievement was the development of a complex written language using glyphs, some representing whole words and other sounds that can be combined to form words (and in some cases, glyphs that had both roles). Theirs was among perhaps the first four or five writing systems that the world had ever known, putting them alongside the likes of the Egyptians, Sumerians and Chinese. In the Americas, such a jump of imaginative thinking was entirely without precedent.
But the arrival of the Conquistadors proved devastating. Figures like Diego de Landa, the Spanish-born Roman Catholic Bishop of Yucatán, literally sought to erase their cultural heritage. Driven by an insatiable missionary zeal to convert the Maya away from their traditional beliefs, Landa and his like roamed the country looking for souls to ‘save’ and ungodly objects to destroy. To him, the Maya were pagans and, most devastatingly, practitioners of human sacrifice. He felt it his God-given duty to make them see the error of their ways. On 12 July 1562, for example, in the town of Mani on the Yucatán peninsula, de Landa ordered a conflagration, its flames fuelled by over five thousand religious and cultural artefacts, including a unique library of books written in the Maya language. In de Landa’s mind, this was an auto-de-fe, an ‘act of faith’. ‘We found a large number of books in these characters,’ he would later write, ‘and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.’ The efficiency of the destruction that he and others like him oversaw was daunting, but somehow a handful of Maya texts found their way to safety.
THE CODICES
Apart from the Madrid Codex, the three other authenticated Maya codices are:
•The Dresden Codex, identified as of Maya origin in the 1820s and dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth century
•The Paris Codex, discovered in 1859 and dating to no later than 1450
•The Grolier Codex, discovered in the 1960s and dating to the eleventh or twelfth centuries. This later document was only authenticated in 2018, in recognition of which it was renamed by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico as the Códice Maya de México
From the late sixteenth century, the Maya language was virtually lost to the world. It lived on in a meaningful way only in archaeological finds, especially in inscriptions on buildings and monuments. Gradually academics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made some headway in reading these inscriptions but because they could decipher little other than the dates, the Maya earned a reputation for being obsessed by matters of the calendar. It was only in the 1950s that real progress in relearning the language began, in large part thanks to intensive study of the Madrid Codex and the other extant codices. It began to be understood that the Maya glyphs were not only emblematic but represented phonetic sounds. It was a gruelling process but the 1980s and 1990s were something of a golden age of Maya decoding, so that today scholars can read something approaching 90 per cent of extant Maya writing.
The Madrid Codex, kept at the Museo de las Américas in Madrid, has been crucial in that process. A fascinating text in its own right, shedding light on the customs, beliefs and practices of an ancient civilization, it is also integral to one of the greatest cultural renaissances ever seen. There remains a community of several million self-identifying Maya across the globe, and large numbers are now relearning their lost language. Five hundred years after it was apparently extinguished, the Maya language – one of ancient civilization’s greatest achievements – is coming back to life.