The 5 most important MAYAN CODEXES

One of the most used sources to collect information about a culture are books, being written sources essential for historians to be able to know in depth data of great relevance of a culture or civilization. One of the most important books in this aspect are the mayan codices, which allow us to know in depth many of the main aspects of the Mayan civilization, therefore in this lesson from a PROFESSOR we must talk about the most important Mayan codices.

Index

1. What are the Mayan codices?
2. Dresden Codex, one of the most important Mayan codices
3. Madrid Codex, the most extensive Mayan codex
4. Paris Codex
5. Codex Grolier
6. Codex Pérez

The mayan codices They're a series of books written by the Mayan civilization before the arrival of the European colonizers, many of them being destroyed by the conquest but others maintained to better understand the culture of the region.

At present, the known codices are divided depending on the area where they are found, all of them being therefore denominated by the name of a city that does not have to be Mexican, there are some with European city names such as Madrid or Paris.

The codices are considered to be the best existing source of the Mayans, being just as important as the monuments or stelae that have survived to our time.

What happened to most of the Mayan codices?

We must bear in mind, yes, that the vast majority of codices were destroyed by the conquerors or by missionaries who, in their quest to evangelize, destroyed numerous texts.

Image: Free Press

Considered as the most complete Mayan codex of all. This codex is located in the German city of Dresden, which is why it is called the Dresden codex.

The Dresden Codex has a Mayan calendar in which each day is assigned to a god who is said to be the greatest power he has on that particular day. Thanks to the calendar we have known both the Mayan calendar and the numeric system of this civilization serving to understand many elements based on the number of the Mayan culture.

We do not know for sure the origin of the codex, but we do assume that it was written shortly before the conquest of the Europeans and that, in a strange way, it ended up in the hands of a german bookstore in the city of Dresden.

Image: Free Press

The Madrid codex or Tro-Cortesian codex is a book that is currently in the Museum of America in the Spanish city of Madrid and is considered the most extensive from the codices. The reason for his middle name is because he is Divided in two parts differentiated, the first being the so-called Tro and the second the so-called Cortesiano.

The content of the codex is very varied, but the vast majority of texts are based on horoscopes, astronomical systems and other key elements so that priests can do their work.

We are not totally sure of the origin of this codex and of how it got to Madrid, but most historians consider that it is a great possibility that it was Hernan Cortes who will send this book to King Carlos I of Spain as a sample of pre-Columbian ideas.

Image: Native peoples of America

Located in the National Library of France It is believed that this codex was discovered hidden in a library where it did not attract attention until a French linguist realized how important that kind of text could be.

The Paris Codex it only has eleven pages, of which only 8 can be read since the rest are in too bad condition to be able to extract any type of information from them. What little information we have managed to get out of the book seems to indicate that it serves as guide for mayan priests.

Image: Native peoples of America

The Grolier Codex is another of the most important Mayan codices. This codex made up of eleven pages in very bad condition was not found until 1971 and, since then, the best way to restore it has been sought, although for now there has been no luck in this regard.

The main reason why this codex is known is because it is said that it may be false, since the lateness of its discovery has made people think many that it may be a forgery and not a real work, although the truth is that the book contains information unknown until its discovery.

As for its content we can say thanks to what can be read in the work that it is still a analysis of Venus and how the planet works, making it appear that for the Mayans this planet Venus was evil.

To end this lesson on the most important Mayan codices we must talk about the only one of all the Mayan codices that It is not contemporary with the events that he narrates, rather it is the work of a philologist named Juan Pío Pérez joining numerous fragments to analyze the Mayan culture. Being a work that contains even more mayan glyphs than other smaller and worse restored codices from which we can hardly get any information.

For many historians this type of codex shouldn't count as one of the Mayan books to be part of the list, but the great relevance it has achieved since its creation and the great study de Pérez to form a codex that contains so much information about the Maya makes it necessary to list it. It could be said that only the Madrid and Dresden codices have more information than this codex.

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• GARCÍA-GALLO, A. L. (2000). The scribes of the Madrid Codex: Paleographic Methodology. Spanish Journal of American Anthropology, 30, 27-85.
• Galarza, J. (1996). Mexican codices 1. CONACULTA.
• Coe, M. D. (2012). An ancient reference to the Dresden Codex. Mayan Culture Studies, 3.