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What armies, the prophecies of the Maya calendar, and superior weapons could
not do, smallpox, influenza, measles, and the Spanish liquoraguardiente did.
The diseases alone wiped out ninety percent of the native population within a
century of the Europeans arrival.
But the principal agent of European culture was the church. The Spaniards
brought with them their rituals, their images, and of course, their priests.
The Franciscans were given an exclusive in the territory: they were the only
order allowed into the Yucatan.
Knowing the power of a language, both written and spoken, many of these
friars strove systematically to wipe out any traces of it. To do that they
made the performance of Maya rituals and the ownership of Maya books
punishable by torture and death. Maya children, when they were educated at
all, were educated in Spanish and Latin only.
Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who later became bishop of Yucatan, was
one of the worst. In the 1560s in Mani, a site near Uxmal, one of the most
beautiful Maya cities, Landa held a full-blown auto-da-fe. Huge bonfires were
built, onto which all the books Landa could find were thrown. Thousands of
Maya were tortured, hundreds died.
To add insult to injury, one of the few eyewitness accounts we have of Maya
life at the time is Landa s ownRelacion de las cosas de Yucatan of 1566. The
book, which loosely translates as a report on things of the Yucatan, was
written to the King of Spain in the defense of the friar s outrageous
behavior. It is a second-rate account, and basically chronicles a lifestyle he
tried desperately to stamp out.
But the Maya are a resilient people. Denied their language and their books,
they wrote down their history in secret, using the only alphabet they knew by
that time, the alphabet of their conquerors. Without that stubborn tradition,
the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya and the books of Chilam Balam of the
Yucatecan Maya would not exist, and the ancient culture would be virtually
lost in the mists of time.
What was lost for centuries, in fact until very recently, was glyphic
literacy, the ability to read the old hieroglyphic language and many of the
stories and history that went with it.
It was an unbelievable tragedy. The Maya were not as technically advanced as
some civilizations. They did not use the wheel, for example, nor did they work
with metals. They were no more or less warlike than their neighbors, no
greater custodians of the environment.
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Instead, their great achievements were those of the intellect. They invented
zero and place-system numerals, something the cultures of ancient Greece and
Rome never did. They had an intricate way of measuring and recording the
passage of time. They measured the visible cycles of the heavens and had the
ability to understand them mathematically.
But perhaps their greatest achievement was their literacy. The Inca of Peru,
despite their artistic and architectural achievements, had no written
language. There were other written languages in Mesoamerica certainly and the
Maya were not the first to develop a writing system.
What the Maya had that many other groups did not was a fully functional
written language that represented the spoken word and could be used to convey
complex ideas, something that made them the most literate of all Mesoamerican
civilizations.
Scribes were valued and honored members of the society, and their work
recognized through glyphs that named them. Writing, whether in the folded
bark-paper books now called codices, or in stone on monuments, was treasured.
And while it is highly unlikely that everyone in classic Maya times could read
and write, there is evidence to suggest that the elite could.
All that is left of this language, which the Maya themselves nurtured and
preserved for centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, are fragments
from ruined cities, and four codices, each one a tattered window into the
past.
The question for me was, was it possible there were five? And if so, where
would the fifth be?
The question of whether or not there could be another was a pretty basic one.
While, as Alex had told me, one codex, the Grolier, had surfaced in 1971,
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