Maya books (destruction of)
The destruction of Maya books refers to a significant cultural loss that occurred in the 16th century, particularly exemplified by an event in 1562 when Spanish friar Diego de Landa ordered the burning of twenty-seven Maya codices in Mani, Yucatán. This act was part of a broader campaign by Spanish clergy, motivated by the desire to suppress indigenous religions and convert the Maya to Christianity. Landa and his contemporaries viewed the Maya texts as containing "superstitions and falsehoods," leading to the destruction of many books, idols, and religious artifacts.
The Maya had a rich written tradition, utilizing a complex system of about eight hundred glyphs for various forms of knowledge, including astronomy, history, and ceremonial practices. Despite the widespread destruction, four codices managed to survive into the 20th century, preserved in museums across Europe and Mexico. The suppression of the Maya writing system led to a rapid decline in literacy among the indigenous population, as the Spanish imposed their own alphabet and language.
Today, much of what we know about the Maya's written culture comes from later transcriptions and surviving artifacts, with ongoing efforts in the study and decoding of their glyphs revealing insights into their sophisticated understanding of their world. The destruction of these books represents not only a loss of historical documents but also a profound erasure of cultural identity and knowledge.
Subject Terms
Maya books (destruction of)
Date: 1562
Place: Mani, Yucatán, Mexico
Significance: The Spanish burning of Maya books in public bonfires destroyed most of the writings of the only indigenous Americans with a true writing system
In 1562, at the town of Mani in the Yucatán peninsula, the Spanish friar Diego de Landa burned twenty-seven Maya books in a public bonfire. The auto-da-fé, or show of faith, was a persecution by clergy who represented the Spanish Inquisition. De Landa judged the books to contain “superstitions and falsehoods of the devil”; he also burned corpses and five thousand statues. This auto-da-fé was one incident in a conversion effort that included whippings, water torture, enslavement, amputations, hangings, and suppression of Mayan religious practices. De Landa’s bonfire encouraged other Spanish clergy to destroy most of the remaining books, along with “idols” and any vestiges of the Mayan religion. Only four glyphic books are known to have survived into the twentieth century; they are held in museums of Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Mexico City. Others were sent to Europe during Spanish colonial times, but their fragile bark paper did not last.
De Landa was censured and sent back to Spain in 1563, but he was cleared and returned to the Yucatán as bishop from 1573 to 1579. Meanwhile, he wrote a book, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, that described Mayan culture and bark books.
The pre-contact Maya of Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador had a fully developed written language, with about eight hundred glyphs used to represent phonetic syllables and whole words. Their bark books, or codices, contained works on astronomy, prophecies, narratives, and histories. Readings from these books were central to some ceremonies. At the celebration Pocam, or the Washing, for example, Mayan priests purified a book with water and then read its predictions for the coming year. The books were made from lengths of beaten fig-bark paper, folded continuously like accordions. Bark was prepared with a white glaze background, and then scribes painted illustrations and text with red and black paint. Covers were made of jaguar skin.
The Spanish suppressed the Maya writing system because its glyphic elements embodied Mayan gods. Illustrations and glyphs in bark books connoted complex religious concepts, correlated with the calendar, the stars and planets, and mathematics. Numerals corresponded to gods as well as abstractions such as zero. The sacred nature of the glyphs resembles the original roman alphabet, whose letter A, inverted, once represented the horned bull god of the Phoenicians.
Because only the Mayan upper classes were literate, knowledge of glyphs was lost quickly. Spanish clergy taught the Christianized Maya the European alphabet for Maya dialects. A number of seventeenth century manuscripts appear to be transcriptions of glyphic texts. Among these are the creation account, the Popol Vuh, and town chronicles from the Yucatán called The Sacred Books of Chilam Balam.
The Maya written language also survives in stone monuments, vase paintings, and cave paintings. In the late twentieth century epigraphers decoded most of the Mayan glyphs, though they have not yet determined the exact sounds.