Death Book: The 2012 Prophecies - The Lost Maya Codex - What is a Codex?A codex (plural "codices"), is a bark paper folding book written by scholarly scribes. Experts believe that the learned shamans (priest-scientists of the time) produced thousands of them in the classic era of the Maya royalty, between about 300 and 900 A.D.Few apparently survived the Spanish Conquest. Bishop Diego de Landa burned those he found in the Mexican Yucatán in the 1560s. Three surviving texts are the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices named for where they ended up. A more recent discovery, the Grolier codex, was found in Mexico in the 1960s. But those four codices likely date from the late Post-Classic period, around 1200-1500 A.D., long after the decline of the Classic sites at Copán, Tikal, Palenque, and Caracol. Glyphs for Death and Book

Death Book: The 2012 Prophecies of
the Lost Maya Codex
Now Available!

author

Anthony J. Beninati

anthonybeninati@deathbook2012.com

What is a Codex?

A codex (plural "codices"), is a bark paper folding book written by scholarly scribes. Experts believe that the learned shamans (priest-scientists of the time) produced thousands of them in the classic era of the Maya royalty, between about 300 and 900 A.D.

Few apparently survived the Spanish Conquest. Bishop Diego de Landa burned those he found in the Mexican Yucatán in the 1560s.

Three surviving texts are the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices named for where they ended up. A more recent discovery, the Grolier codex, was found in Mexico in the 1960s.

But those four codices likely date from the late Post-Classic period, around 1200-1500 A.D., long after the decline of the Classic sites at Copán, Tikal, Palenque, and Caracol.

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Did no other sacred texts survive outside the Yucatán?

In the early 1700s, the Spanish church assigned Dominican Friar Francisco Ximenez to propagate the faith among the Maya of Santo Tomás Chuilá. Chichicastenango is what we now call that town in the Guatemalan highlands. There he heard about a book written shortly after the Conquest in the 1500s, in the native Quiché Mayan language but with the western alphabet. He acquired the screen-fold book from trusting natives and carefully studied it. After years of work, he produced a parallel column translation in Spanish along with the written Mayan. That manuscript is today in the Newberry Library of Chicago – the book we call the Popol Vuh.

With all that the Popol Vuh tells us about Maya beliefs and origins, it’s a book that came from the post-conquest period, not the Maya Classic era.

Were any older texts hidden or lost elsewhere?

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anthonybeninati@deathbook2012.com